Free Speech

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A culture war divided against itself.

Action is in response to the president's many proclamations that the press is the 'enemy of the people.'

Plus, Philip Van Cleave's suspect defense.

The noted public intellectual stumbles in an interview.

Celebrating viewpoint diversity.

Sometimes the First Amendment isn’t enough.

The Justice Department has won a small but significant victory in the campus free-speech case of Young America’s Foundation and Berkeley College Republicans v. Napolitano. Justice didn’t have to get involved in the case, but it did so and has helped the cause of free speech. Justice’s work in the…

It is a fact of history that we Americans believe all kinds of dumbass things. Different Americans believe different dumbass things at different times, but each of us must sooner or later fall for an urban myth, a lunatic philosophy, an obvious exaggeration, a prophecy of doom, or some other…

At oral arguments Tuesday for the case NIFLA v. Becerra, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court seemed skeptical about the constitutionality of a California law that requires pro-life crisis pregnancy centers to advertise for "free or low-cost" government-funded abortions.

Update, 2/15/18: On Wednesday evening the Bruin Republicans announced on their Facebook page that they had decided that internal disagreement among their board was too great to continue hosting the Yiannopoulos event. That the university respects free speech rights and that it was the club’s…

“Anthropology 212: Cultural Freedoms: Hate Speech, Blasphemy, and Pornography,” a course on freedom of expression at Princeton University has been “reluctantly” cancelled, Professor Lawrence Rosen informed his students in an email obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Rosen’s email, sent at 2:07 p.m. on…

Imagine being repudiated by Stephen Bannon, the most repudiated man since Rasputin. Any ordinary person would feel obliged to slink off to the remotest mountains of Madagascar, never to be heard from again. But Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart News blogger whom Bannon disowned as a colleague 15…

For the packed house at the American Enterprise Institute on the evening of January 8, Charles Murray needed no introduction. We were there to celebrate the 75th birthday of the author of Losing Ground, The Bell Curve, and Coming Apart and to mark his transition to emeritus status at the…

C is for Crazy Children's Books. There's a new book project being hawked on Kickstarter called C is for Consent: "a board book for babies, toddlers, and thoughtful parents." Consent is important, but is this really an appropriate concept for babies and toddlers? Especially given that the term…

Yesterday evening, “President Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.” sent Steve Bannon a cease and desist letter threatening him with civil prosecution for “defamation by libel and slander, and breach of his written confidentiality and non-disparagement agreement.” Can they really…

The end of free speech? Katherine Mangu-Ward at Reason has an excellent cover story about how "the left eats its own and the right shows its true colors." Here's my favorite part:

Who said there’s a free speech crisis on college campuses? As everyone knows, that’s just a figment of the right-wing imagination.

There is nothing natural about tolerating the views of others. If someone stands, as today’s righteous say, on “the wrong side of history,” why refrain from shutting him up? Yes, Justice Holmes warned against “attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught…

The New York Times has a report about an internal struggle at the ACLU. The organization helped sue to for the right of assembly for the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in August that resulted in the death of a young woman, after a car driven by one of the white supremacists plowed into…

“The American university was once the center of academic freedom,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions in his speech at the Georgetown Law Center this week. It was “a place of robust debate, a forum for the competition of ideas.” But over the years it has become “an echo chamber of political…

Comes this week from the Brookings Institution a new survey by John Villasenor demonstrating that undergraduate students at four-year colleges and universities have no idea what the First Amendment means.

As white supremacists go, Joey Gibson makes for a lousy one. For starters, he’s half Japanese. “I don’t feel like I’m Caucasian at all,” he says. Not to be a stickler for the rules, but this kind of talk could get you sent to Master Race remedial school.

As the summer of 2016 wound down, the University of Chicago’s dean of students sent a letter to the school’s incoming cohort of freshmen telling them not to expect the sort of coddling that had become worryingly commonplace at elite American colleges. His welcome to the class of 2020 aimed to…

Most people think that the 1st Amendment guarantees free speech. But the philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that free speech requires more than just the absence of legal strictures. The “tyranny of opinion” of the majority has the same effect as censorship enforced by law. When everyone lives…

Boston, Mass.

Conservative journalist and speaker Ben Shapiro outlined for Congress on Tuesday the steps liberal opponents of free speech take to silence those with whom they disagree: “The first step is they say the validity or invalidity of an argument can be judged solely by the ethnic, sexual, racial or…

Bill C-16, which recently received Royal Assent and will soon become law, is the most recent bill to threaten free speech and to mandate that individuals adopt a social constructionist philosophy of gender. Those who refuse to use gender neutral pronouns such as “they” or “zi” and “zir,” or who…

Weeks after Germany’s Cabinet announced a plan to fine social media companies over their users “hate speech” and amid efforts to push similar restrictions across the European Union, authorities are cracking down on individuals whom they have deemed to have crossed a line. The New York Times…

Free speech may have become a vanishingly rare thing on university campuses, but it turns out that at least one variety of free speech is still protected: T-shirt marijuana advocacy.

The impulse to do something after a horrific event is universal, and perhaps even more pronounced in politicians than typical civilians. And so, in the wake of the horrific murder of two commuters on a Portland, Oregon, light rail over the weekend, it's not entirely surprising to see that city's…

Protesting political commencement speakers—presidents past and present, former or current Cabinet members who wax platitudinous on graduation day—is not a new phenomenon. SoVice President Mike Pence knew what he was walking into at Notre Dame last weekend. He came prepared. And while he condemned…

That liberals run American universities is never going to be a man-bites-dog news headline, but the urgent question ought to be: When are university liberals going to stand up and defend liberalism?

On April 20 I posted about what I called a "simmering, occasionally boiling cauldron of ethnic self-pity, social-justice terrorism, whines about homework, and calls for the abolition of free speech" at the five ultra-elite Claremont Colleges in Southern California. I focused on news accounts about…

To restore free expression and the unfettered exchange of ideas to censorious college campuses, the nation's liberal thought leaders will have to admit we have a problem on our hands. Events of this week presented some encouraging signs that they're getting closer. While restless campuses erupted…

Today in the New York Times our own Matt Labash joins Gail Collins in a chat about presidential pets, government shutdowns, and fake news.

The recent campus rioting against unpopular or conservative political views is awful, but I have discovered the solution—by accident.

Today in the Daily Standard podcast, editor-at-large Bill Kristol says Berkeley's free-speech failures are giving liberalism a bad name, while Donald Trump's foreign policy is putting many traditional Republicans in a good mood. Kristol also recounts his Coulter-esque ​​experience of getting "pied"…

The five undergraduate Claremont Colleges, located about 35 miles east of Los Angeles, are famous for their elite U.S. News rankings, their exclusive admissions policies, their sky-high tuition sticker prices, and their gorgeous campuses in the bucolic college town of Claremont adjacent to Southern…

Three weeks after a coalition of professors publicly defended their right to censor Title IX naysayer and feminist intellectual Laura Kipnis, a Wellesley News editorial has caught viral flak from civil libertarians, conservatives, copy editors, and other sensible sorts for its clumsy defense of…

Activists who advocate for the destruction of Israel will gather at George Mason University this weekend to strategize about expanding their presence on campuses across America.

Students at George Mason University awoke Monday morning to a three-paragraph message warning them that they will not be coddled on campus.

As the safe space-trigger warning-microagression movement possesses universities across the country, a number of educators remain hopeful that students still long for a challenging education at an institution that allows them to freely exchange ideas.

Free speech requires the Socratic "recognition that you almost certainly don't know everything," says Greg Lukianoff. Lukianoff, the founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), diagnoses a humility deficiency in the new documentary Can We Take A Joke?

The erosion of America’s public square continues at an alarming rate. This week brings news that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is seriously entertaining a claim that a man wearing a hat with the image of a Gadsden flag on it—that's the famous coiled snake emblazoned with the…

In an interview with free speech advocacy group FIRE, George Carlin's daughter Kelly Carlin, Richard Pryor's daughter Rain, and Lenny Bruce's daughter Kitty confirm their dads would have a few choice words on today's "thought police."

National Police Week, centered on Peace Officers Memorial Day, has come around every mid-May since President Kennedy dedicated the yearly remembrance "in honor of those peace officers who, through their courageous deeds, have lost their lives or have become disabled in the performance of duty."

TWS senior writer Mark Hemingway recently delivered a lecture entitled "Silence Is Death: The Demise of Free Speech" at Hillsdale College.

Free speech and the tax code are two topics not generally associated with each other. When it comes to university speech codes, however, the two are more related than one might think. That's why the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee held its first 2016 hearing on…

On November 28th, Tyson Fury did the unexpected—he beat Wladimir Klitschko, the Ukrainian pugilist who had gone eleven years without a loss. More importantly, in beating Klitschko, Fury, a 27-year-old Mancunian and the son of Irish Travelers, dethroned one of boxing's last true titans and captured…

Over the past few weeks, students at universities across America have been throwing temper tantrums at the prospect of free speech and open dialogue. On Tuesday, John Kerry justified the Charlie Hebdo slaughter and differentiated it from the Paris attacks, by saying there was "a rationale that you…

Amherst Uprising—"a collective of students on campus who came together as a result of the sit-In organized in Frost Library on 11/12/15"—has delivered demands to their university president. Number five on their list is pretty illustrative how far off the deep end these student protesters are…

The president of Purdue University has sent a campus-wide email reminding students and faculty of the school's commitment to its "shared values" of being a "welcoming, inclusive, and discrimination-free community" while also remaining "steadfast in preserving academic freedom and individual…

According to U.S. News rankings, Yale is the third best university in America. Tuition nears $48,000 per year—a high price, but one many believe is worth paying to become a great young thinker, whose ideas will move the world forward. But following two separate, childish student outbursts at Yale,…

A big part of liberal media bias is the insatiable need to create drama about any intra-party Republican disagreements, while downplaying or ignoring Democratic divisions. Even the most liberal media outlets agreed that last week's CNBC debate was a flaming dirigible, but when the Republican party…

Writing in the Washington Post, Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic Senator from Rhode Island, offered a curious suggestion for dealing with global warming skeptics:

This week, I've been reading Kirsten Powers' new book The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech. And it's fantastic.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with editor William Kristol on the week that was in Washington, London, and around the world.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has a smart op-ed about the Garland attack by former federal prosecutor George Parry. He points out the left’s agonized reaction to Garland—We’re for free speech! But these people using free speech are horrible and hateful!

Early this week, PEN American Center named six new table hosts for its annual dinner on Tuesday, substituting for the six who opted out to protest the organization’s decision to present its “freedom of expression courage award” to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Nonetheless, an…

On Friday, I wrote a short blog post about cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who in the process of receiving a George Polk journalism award, said the murdered cartoonists at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo "wandered into the realm of hate speech" and that "free speech...... becomes its own kind of…

On Friday, I wrote a short blog post about cartoonist Gary Trudeau, who in the process of receiving a George Polk journalism award, said the murdered cartoonists at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo "wandered into the realm of hate speech" and that "free speech...... becomes its own kind of…

On Friday, I wrote a short blog post about cartoonist Gary Trudeau, who in the process of receiving a George Polk journalism award, said the murdered cartoonists at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo "wandered into the realm of hate speech" and that "free speech...... becomes its own kind of…

It was a story perfectly designed for the new journalism model of “outrage clicks.”

If you harbor any doubts that “conservative” is an all-purpose epithet in the press, then Simon Denyer, the Washington Post’s China bureau chief, will happily erase those doubts. Writing last week about threats to freedom of speech and scholarly inquiry in the former British colony of Hong Kong…

France’s momentary appearance on the world stage as a champion of free expression, after the execution of the beloved Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, made for a break in her relentless culture of repression of free speech, which she shares with most of Europe. Aside from a handful of…

After the recent massacre by Islamic terrorists at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, people around the world took to social media to declare “Je suis Charlie,” or “I am Charlie.” Solidarity is a nice sentiment, and journalists in particular are fond of uttering self-soothing words about…

The jihadists responsible for the most successful terrorist attack in France in decades hunted down cartoonists. They did not target a significant historical landmark, such as the Eiffel Tower, or any well-known French politicians. They did not seek to maximize civilian casualties in a suicide…

In the wake of today's massacre in Paris, there has already been a lot of preening about journalistic bravery. Much of it has come from people who, it can be shown, don't have the guts to work in Charlie Hebdo's newsroom. Preening about free speech may be reassuring at times like this, but what we…

Floyd Abrams writing in the Wall Street Journal:

The Factual Feminist warns that a “little army of junior assistant deans and harassment apparatchiks are quietly repealing the free speech protections of the First Amendment.”

The other day a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that a First Amendment challenge to an Ohio law should be heard in the lower courts. While the decision may have seemed a minor one, it represents an important advance for freedom of speech.

Last week, George Will wrote a column about how progressive politics have fomented "rape culture" on college campuses. The column was not well received by some, or even, as a great many of the histrionic responses would indicate, well understood. I received the following press release yesterday,…

Looking for issues to push in this year’s congressional elections, Senate Democrats are proposing a constitutional amendment that would enable government at the federal and state levels alike to heavily regulate campaign contributions and expenditures. The effort is driven by the Democrats’ intense…

Last week in these pages (“Unfree Speech”), editorializing on the shamefully canceled commencement addresses of Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Philip Terzian noted, “Both are identifiably conservative, and therefore, so far as the left is concerned, persona non grata. .  .  . But as it…

THE WEEKLY STANDARD Podcast with literary editor Philip Terzian on his recent editorial "Unfree Speech" and the on campus assault on free speech.

Yesterday, THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported on the New York City human rights commission's dubious case against seven business owners in the Hasidic community Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The commission alleged that these Jewish stores were guilty of religious and sexual discrimination for posting dress…

Ted Cruz has sparked a Republican civil war. He has done the bidding of the GOP fringe, in a self-aggrandizing crusade. And while he has enhanced his own position in the conservative fantasyland he seeks to rule, the practical effect of his quixotic campaign to defund Obamacare has been to elevate…

President Barack Obama responding to a heckler at a national speech earlier today:

The Johns Hopkins University office of institutional equity has determined that pro-life students who want to conduct sidewalk counseling outside of a Baltimore abortion clinic are not engaging in harassment under university policies.

Muslim Americans in Michigan, including a local newspaper editor, will be rallying Friday in Dearborn to protest the YouTube film, "Innocence of Muslims" and advocate for blasphemy laws. Here's an image of a poster advertising the rally:

"I think it's not good enough to say it's free speech, it should be allowed. I think if this does provoke action against American citizens or Americans anywhere else in the world then maybe we do need to think how much freedom is OK." So says Pakistan’s foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar. 

It was bad enough, two years ago, that Defense Secretary Robert Gates called fringe Florida pastor Terry Jones to ask him not to burn copies of the Koran, or last week, that chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey took his turn to call Jones to ask him to stop publicizing a YouTube video,…

Jonathan Martin of Politico reports that aides to Vice President Joe Biden have taken the unusual step of wrangling the press for edits to pool reports: 

The case of Hamza Kashgari, the 23-year-old ex-columnist for the Saudi Arabian daily newspaper Al-Bilad (The Land), has exposed the convoluted internal situation in the desert kingdom. The controversy began on the birthday of Muhammad, when Kashgari wrote an imaginary dialogue with the Muslim…

The left has not been happy with the Obama administration’s handling of the war on terror for some time now. In addition to leaving Guantánamo open, the administration has maintained Bush-era practices such as open-ended detention for terrorist suspects, reaffirming the “state secrets” privilege,…

John Merline: "The Richest 1% Get $10 Billion A Year From Uncle Sam"

"Obama is rude and unresponsive to sister of 9/11 victim"

Across the Great White North, "Human Rights Comissions" are running amok and making a mockery of the Canadian Charter of Rights, which guarantees "freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication."

Not a parody: "NFL players need Obama's support"

The Supreme Court heard arguments in McComish v. Bennett today, which the SCOTUSBlog describes as a case determining "whether the First Amendment prohibits a state from giving additional money to a candidate who accepts state funding for her campaign whenever: (a) an independent group spends more…

"No Country Leans on Upper-Income Households as Much as U.S."

"The Arab League wanted our help. Until they got it."

Hmm. A big Rory Reid (as in son of Harry) campaign scandal.