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This Canadian high school is removing books published before 2008 in effort to be more "inclusive"

Yes, this school really dumped all of the books published before 2008 from their library…

In the name of inclusion.

A Canadian public high school has sparked outrage for removing all books published before 2008 in a so-called push to make its library more inclusive for students.

Erindale Secondary School in Mississauga, Ontario culled roughly 50% of its library books — including the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series — under a new "equity-based book weeding" directive implemented by the Peel District School Board earlier this year, CBC News reported…

The school's controversial move was made after the Minister of Education issued a wider directive to school boards earlier this year in a bid to ensure library books were more inclusive.

"Equity-based book burning" would be more like it. And here I thought conservatives were supposed to be the ones "burning books" these days with their removal of pornography from school bookshelves.

Meet Ukrainian Military's American Spokesman

Transgendered Sarah Ashton-Cirillo advocates free speech and killing journalists.

As our world gets weirder by the second, it has become ever harder to know if what we are presented with is real. Every time someone sends a report or video that is purportedly a representation of factual reality, I try to evaluate if it’s indeed real or if it’s propaganda, black propaganda, satire, or the creation of a mentally ill person.

This morning I saw a story about an American transgendered woman named Sarah Ashton-Cirillo who claims to be a soldier and an official spokesman of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces. She is in the news because of a publicized spat she is having with Senator JD Vance of Ohio who has made an inquiry to determine is Sarah Ashton-Cirillo really is an official English language spokesman for the Ukrainian TDF. Spoiler Alert: She really is.

Vance became aware of Ashton-Cirillo after he saw a video of the spokesman announcing that journalists who disseminate Russian propaganda will be hunted down and killed. ...

In response to Senator Vance’s query, Ashton-Cirillo posted yet another video in which she proclaims her support of the First Amendment, but hastens to add that reporting Russian propaganda is not protected by the First Amendment.

Who adjudicates what is Russian propaganda and what is merely critical reporting of the Ukrainian government and its U.S. government supporters?

The question touches on something I have frequently written about on this Substack—namely, the strange rise of ORTHODOXY in recent years. There are, we are told, certain major issues in which the ORTHODOX—that is, official U.S. government and MSM representations—cannot be questioned or criticized. Those who do question these orthodoxies will be censored, censured, or—if Ashton-Cirillo has her way—hunted down and killed.

The top four orthodoxies are what I call the Holy Quadripartitus of Piffle. They are:

1). COVID-19 vaccines are saving mankind. Anyone who questions the safety and efficacy of the vaccines is guilty of heresy.

2). The U.S. proxy war in Ukraine is a sacred mission and no negotiated settlement with Russia shall be countenanced. Anyone who criticizes the Ukrainian and U.S. governments, and any attempt to understand the war from the Russian point of view, is guilty of heresy.

3). Human induced climate change will soon destroy the earth if trillions aren’t spent to overhaul our entire energy policy. Anyone who questions this proposition is guilty of heresy.

4). The concept of biological sex is a mere “construct.” Skilled surgeons and endocrinologists can transform a boy into a girl or vice versa. Anyone who questions this assertion is guilty of heresy.

I reject the Holy Quadripartitus of Piffle as fanatical, obscurantist, mentally ill nonsense.

Thomas P Seager, PhD
@seagertp

The distinction between silencing the speaker or deafening the listener is irrelevant.

It's still censorship.

Twitter’s WEF-Linked CEO Boasts of ‘Successfully’ Censoring ‘Lawful but Awful’ Speech

Linda Yaccarino, the new CEO of Elon Musk’s Twitter/X, has boasted during a new interview that she has overseen measures to censor the American people on the platform.

Yaccarino, who has long-held links to the globalist World Economic Forum (WEF), told the Financial Times that the social media platform is now “successfully” censoring “lawful but awful” speech.

According to Yaccarino, X is censoring the conditionally protected speech of Americans if their words fall into the vague category of “awful.”

During her interview with the outlet, Yaccarino appears to flip-flop on her positions regarding the First Amendment.

At some points, she echoes Musk’s championing of free speech.

Other times, however, she would suggest that censoring people is a positive thing if it fits a certain agenda.

When the subject of free speech was brought up, she would also often try to divert the conversation away by promoting other aspects of Twitter’s business plans.

Straight to jail! NBC News ran an eye-popping headline yesterday: “Swiss LGBTQ groups praise jail sentence for commentator who called journalist a 'fat lesbian’.” It was personal. The way I talk here on C&C, you better believe when I saw that headline, I immediately whipped out my pocket Constitution and gave that baby a kiss.




Say what you like about body positivity and the virtuousness of eschewing unflattering commentary on others’ physical appearance. Alain Soral did, and before he knew what was happening, on Monday he got sixty days in the slammer for the egregious crimes of “defamation, discrimination and incitement to hatred.”

The target of Alain’s curt, vituperative insult was another Swiss journalist, Catherine Macherel. To be specific, and I hope I don’t offend anyone, I’m just reporting the facts, in addition to calling her a fat lesbian, Alain also uncharitably called Catherine an "unhinged queer activist.” He did it two years ago. In a YouTube interview.

You know me, I had to check and see for myself. There aren’t many pictures of Catherine available online, but I finally found one:




So. I don’t think he should’ve got jail time, but Alain could have been a little more circumspect. He could’ve just said Catherine was an “obese” lesbian, a “plump” lesbian, or a “lesbian shaped like the Pillsbury Dough Boy.” Or even, “a whole lot of lesbian to love.”

Here in the U.S., thanks to the First Amendment, defamation is not a crime. Defamation is also not actionable if the insult is true. But if you do injure somebody with a false statement — injure them in terms of dollars and cents — you can then sue them in civil court for restitution. Hurt feelings don’t support a defamation claim. Generally speaking, you can’t get any money for your hurt feelings, and you sure can’t lock people up.

If it could talk, the Constitution might say, toughen up and insult them back. Remember “sticks and stones” from when you were a kid? Or that old chestnut, “I’m rubber and you’re glue?” There’re lots of ways.

And who knows what the crimes of “incitement to hatred” or “discrimination” might be. It all sounds pretty Orwellian. Thought crimes, and so forth.

Instead, Switzerland’s out-of-control LGBTQ++ crowd has pulled the levers of power in that unfortunate country so hard such that just insulting a gay person can get you thrown in prison. And that’s right where we’d be in this country, you’d better believe it, absent the First Amendment. Just look at what they’re doing to Trump. He didn’t even call a lesbian “fat.”

By Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, MD, Board Certified in ENT and Sleep Medicine

I had many patients confide in me their reluctance to abide by the mandates, voicing concerns about the safety of these new modified mRNA shots. Because my clinic was doing a lot of testing, I saw the breakthrough cases and even reached out to an administrator at Houston Methodist, asking him if he was seeing what I was seeing. My concerns were dismissed.

Ignored by Methodist, I started speaking out on Twitter, daring to tweet “Vaccine mandates are wrong.” In retaliation, Houston Methodist suspended my privileges and defamed me online, demonstrating to other physicians the dire consequences of challenging their dogma.

Hamas snuff videos seem to be able to circulate freely online while the voices of those who all opposed Covid mandates & all war in Ukraine, remain heavily shadow banned across all social media platforms.

https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1711642164478746640

Hamas snuff videos seem to be able to circulate freely online while the voices of those who all opposed Covid mandates & all war in Ukraine, remain heavily shadow banned across all social media platforms.

@MikeBenzCyber
My response to the Washington Post.

This is a 40-minute lecture, Part 1 in what I'd like to be an ongoing series, Censorship Industry Decoded.

This first video cut through the tricks & traps in WaPo's verbage. These tricks are stock for the industry & essential to understand.

Europe is going full censorship now.

https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1711642164478746640

Hamas snuff videos seem to be able to circulate freely online while the voices of those who all opposed Covid mandates & all war in Ukraine, remain heavily shadow banned across all social media platforms.

The generally agreed upon postulate is that truth can stand on its own—it wouldn’t need to be aggressively protected against any attack that might chip away its facade like cheap plaster if it was self-evident. Anything that requires militant censorship and intricate linguistic snares to wrap it in a protective bubble of obscurantism is likely not related to the truth, but its opposite.

... the establishment structures its relations with the public in such a way as to circumvent direct questioning at all times; a built-in, artificial arms-length distancing. Politicians are brisked from one enclosed compound to the next by armed guards; press conferences are meticulously curated and stage-managed, with only pre-allowed questions from pre-approved and sympathetic press services acting as PR outfits. ...

Creating carapaces of artificial boundaries fashioned out of linguistic tricks meant to funnel us into ideological traps is how the System Controllers prevent us from changing things or overthrowing them. If we limit ourselves to the staid and structured political language, the accepted rote of ‘polite society’, we enslave ourselves into that constricted box hammered out for that very purpose.

Yup, the Elites have issued the marching orders...

Dismantle The Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Westminster Declaration

We write as journalists, artists, authors, activists, technologists, and academics to warn of increasing international censorship that threatens to erode centuries-old democratic norms.

Coming from the left, right, and centre, we are united by our commitment to universal human rights and freedom of speech, and we are all deeply concerned about attempts to label protected speech as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and other ill-defined terms.

This abuse of these terms has resulted in the censorship of ordinary people, journalists, and dissidents in countries all over the world.

Such interference with the right to free speech suppresses valid discussion about matters of urgent public interest, and undermines the foundational principles of representative democracy.

Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities, and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices. These large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.’

This complex often operates through direct government policies. Authorities in India[1] and Turkey[2] have seized the power to remove political content from social media. The legislature in Germany[3] and the Supreme Court in Brazil[4] are criminalising political speech. In other countries, measures such as Ireland’s ‘Hate Speech’ Bill[5], Scotland’s Hate Crime Act[6], the UK’s Online Safety Bill[7], and Australia’s ‘Misinformation’ Bill[8] threaten to severely restrict expression and create a chilling effect.

But the Censorship Industrial Complex operates through more subtle methods. These include visibility filtering, labelling, and manipulation of search engine results. Through deplatforming and flagging, social media censors have already silenced lawful opinions on topics of national and geopolitical importance. They have done so with the full support of ‘disinformation experts’ and ‘fact-checkers’ in the mainstream media, who have abandoned the journalistic values of debate and intellectual inquiry.

As the Twitter Files revealed, tech companies often perform censorial ‘content moderation’ in coordination with government agencies and civil society. Soon, the European Union’s Digital Services Act will formalise this relationship by giving platform data to ‘vetted researchers’ from NGOs and academia, relegating our speech rights to the discretion of these unelected and unaccountable entities.

Some politicians and NGOs[9] are even aiming to target end-to-end encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram.[10] If end-to-end encryption is broken, we will have no remaining avenues for authentic private conversations in the digital sphere.

Although foreign disinformation between states is a real issue, agencies designed to combat these threats, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the United States, are increasingly being turned inward against the public. Under the guise of preventing harm and protecting truth, speech is being treated as a permitted activity rather than an inalienable right.

We recognize that words can sometimes cause offence, but we reject the idea that hurt feelings and discomfort, even if acute, are grounds for censorship. Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society, and is essential for holding governments accountable, empowering vulnerable groups, and reducing the risk of tyranny.

Speech protections are not just for views we agree with; we must strenuously protect speech for the views that we most strongly oppose. Only in the public square can these views be heard and properly challenged.

What's more, time and time again, unpopular opinions and ideas have eventually become conventional wisdom. By labelling certain political or scientific positions as 'misinformation' or 'malinformation,' our societies risk getting stuck in false paradigms that will rob humanity of hard-earned knowledge and obliterate the possibility of gaining new knowledge. Free speech is our best defence against disinformation.

The attack on speech is not just about distorted rules and regulations – it is a crisis of humanity itself. Every equality and justice campaign in history has relied on an open forum to voice dissent. In countless examples, including the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement, social progress has depended on freedom of expression.

We do not want our children to grow up in a world where they live in fear of speaking their minds. We want them to grow up in a world where their ideas can be expressed, explored and debated openly – a world that the founders of our democracies envisioned when they enshrined free speech into our laws and constitutions.

The US First Amendment is a strong example of how the right to freedom of speech, of the press, and of conscience can be firmly protected under the law. One need not agree with the U.S. on every issue to acknowledge that this is a vital 'first liberty' from which all other liberties follow. It is only through free speech that we can denounce violations of our rights and fight for new freedoms.

There also exists a clear and robust international protection for free speech. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)[11] was drafted in 1948 in response to atrocities committed during World War II. Article 19 of the UDHR states, 'Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.' While there may be a need for governments to regulate some aspects of social media, such as age limits, these regulations should never infringe on the human right to freedom of expression.

As is made clear by Article 19, the corollary of the right to free speech is the right to information. In a democracy, no one has a monopoly over what is considered to be true. Rather, truth must be discovered through dialogue and debate – and we cannot discover truth without allowing for the possibility of error.

Censorship in the name of 'preserving democracy' inverts what should be a bottom-up system of representation into a top-down system of ideological control. This censorship is ultimately counter-productive: it sows mistrust, encourages radicalization, and de-legitimizes the democratic process.

In the course of human history, attacks on free speech have been a precursor to attacks on all other liberties. Regimes that eroded free speech have always inevitably weakened and damaged other core democratic structures. In the same fashion, the elites that push for censorship today are also undermining democracy. What has changed though, is the broad scale and technological tools through which censorship can be enacted.

We believe that free speech is essential for ensuring our safety from state abuses of power – abuses that have historically posed a far greater threat than the words of lone individuals or even organised groups. For the sake of human welfare and flourishing, we make the following 3 calls to action.

We call on governments and international organisations to fulfill their responsibilities to the people and to uphold Article 19 of the UDHR.

We call on tech corporations to undertake to protect the digital public square as defined in Article 19 of the UDHR and refrain from politically motivated censorship, the censorship of dissenting voices, and censorship of political opinion.

And finally, we call on the general public to join us in the fight to preserve the people's democratic rights. Legislative changes are not enough. We must also build an atmosphere of free speech from the ground up by rejecting the climate of intolerance that encourages self-censorship and that creates unnecessary personal strife for many. Instead of fear and dogmatism, we must embrace inquiry and debate.

We stand for your right to ask questions. Heated arguments, even those that may cause distress, are far better than no arguments at all.

Censorship robs us of the richness of life itself. Free speech is the foundation for creating a life of meaning and a thriving humanity - through art, poetry, drama, story, philosophy, song, and more.

This declaration was the result of an initial meeting of free speech champions from around the world who met in Westminster, London, at the end of June 2023. As signatories of this statement, we have fundamental political and ideological disagreements. However, it is only by coming together that we will defeat the encroaching forces of censorship so that we can maintain our ability to openly debate and challenge one another. It is in the spirit of difference and debate that we sign the Westminster Declaration.

https://westminsterdeclaration.org/

Nearly all the countries that have sought to institute online censorship regimes have something in common: they’ve seen recent rises of “populist” movements, at times followed by shocks at the ballot. The phenomenon pre-dated Donald Trump, and includes parties as different as SYRIZA in Greece and Fidesz in Hungary, Brexit but also the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, along with Catalan Independence, the Gilets Jaunes, and others. New censorship laws are clearly designed, at least partly, as authoritarian responses to these movements, and often confuse real threats to public safety with legitimate political challenges.
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We are happy to note that The New York Post, The Telegraph of London, The Times of London, Die Welt, France-Soir, La Veritá, and other newspapers have written about or will soon publish articles about the Declaration. As such, it will become increasingly difficult for mainstream news media to maintain the charade that there is no Censorship Industrial Complex and that it’s perfectly normal for governments, NGOs, and Big Tech to create special agencies, committees, and boards of individual people to decide what can and cannot be said on the Internet.

It’s not normal, it’s not right, and it needs to stop. Now.

Supreme Court Temporarily Green-Lights Biden Admin Conspiring With Big Tech Censors

Washington Post ran an encouraging story yesterday headlined, “Trump files new challenges to federal election-obstruction case in D.C..”

Trump’s newest motion to dismiss the DC Election Integrity case was filed late last night, right before the midnight deadline, which is a completely typical and totally unremarkable legal practice that for some reason seemed to delight the drooling morons at the Washington Post.

This new motion joins the previous motion to dismiss the case. The earlier motion argued Trump’s presidential immunity covers official actions taken while he was in office. Last night’s new motion added three more arguments: First Amendment free speech, double jeopardy since Trump was already acquitted for the same conduct by the Senate during his second impeachment trial, and lack of fair notice that his complaining about democrat cheating would be considered criminal conduct.

I thought you’d enjoy, as I did, the way Trump’s lawyers began their new motion. Here’s my lightly-edited version (only edited for brevity):

The prosecution opens its indictment by stating that President Trump “had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election,” including his deeply held view that there had been fraud and other irregularities “during the election and that he had won.” These points are not in dispute. Nonetheless, in an astonishing display of doublethink, the prosecution simultaneously claims that President Trump—simply by speaking his mind and petitioning for a redress of grievances—also somehow conspired to “defraud the United States,” “oppress rights,” and “obstruct an official proceeding.” Attempting to explain this obvious contradiction, the prosecution argues that there was no “outcome-determinative fraud in the election” (whatever that means), and that President Trump supposedly knew this because some government officials “notified” him “that his claims were untrue.”
If there is any constant in our democratic system of governance, it is that the marketplace of ideas—not the mandates of government functionaries or partisan prosecutors—determines the scope of public debate. Countless millions believe, as President Trump consistently has and currently does, that fraud and irregularities pervaded the 2020 Presidential Election. As the indictment itself alleges, President Trump gave voice to these concerns and demanded that politicians in a position to restore integrity to our elections not just talk about the problem, but investigate and resolve it.
The first section begins with the First Amendment, and appropriately starts by citing the Supreme Court referencing George Orwell: “Our constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need Oceania’s Ministry of Truth.” The 9-0 decision, which is significant far beyond Trump’s case, also explained, “The mere potential for the exercise of (a broad government censorial) power casts a chill, a chill the First Amendment cannot permit if free speech, thought, and discourse are likely to remain a foundation of our freedom.”

Indeed. They could have been arguing the Missouri v. Biden case. It’s a fascinating confluence of issues.

Despite the WaPo’s snide commentary, it’s a terrific motion, and in a fair court it should be an easy winner. Here’s the link to the whole thing, which I found very entertaining and think is quite accessible for non-lawyers. LINK: President Trump’s Motion To Dismiss The Indictment Based On Constitutional Grounds (31 pages).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/b3ddbfc4-455a-4eae-8332-e0c3948ea53e.pdf

The Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments over the Fifth Circuit’s grant of a preliminary injunction in Missouri v. Biden. As I mentioned in previous posts, the injunction would bar officials from the White House, CDC, FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Surgeon General’s office from coercing or significantly encouraging social media platforms to censor constitutionally protected speech. My fellow plaintiffs and I welcome this opportunity to defend the First Amendment rights of all Americans in the U.S. Supreme Court. We expect to hear from the Court soon regarding the hearing dates—it could be in February or March.

The Fifth Circuit panel of judges last month upheld the key components of U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty’s July 4 preliminary injunction order, prohibiting named federal officials from coercing or significantly encouraging social media companies to suppress legal speech. That decision vindicated our claims that we—and countless other Americans—were blacklisted, shadow-banned, de-boosted, throttled, and suspended on social media as part of the government’s years-long censorship campaign orchestrated by the federal government.

The Biden Administration’s censorship regime has successfully suppressed perspectives contradicting government-approved views on hotly disputed topics such as whether natural immunity to covid exists, the safety and efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, the virus’s origins, and mask mandate efficacy. Beyond covid, the documents we’ve obtained on discovery demonstrate that the government was also censoring critiques of its foreign policy, monetary policy, election infrastructure, and lighting rod social issues from abortion to gender ideology.