Another day, another free speech showdown. This time, it’s in the U.S., where the noted free-speech advocate, blogger and founder of the Journal of Free Speech Law Prof. Eugene Volokh is suing New York’s Attorney General Letitia James over a law intended to crack down on “hateful conduct” online. The law would make a large class of website owners responsible for handling and directly responding to claims of “hateful conduct” about material on their website (e.g. in the comments section), and require them to publish a document setting out their policy on the matter. Failure to comply would carry a penalty of $1,000 per day, per infraction. Showing the intention behind this law, the Attorney General declared in October that: “Online platforms should be held accountable for allowing hateful and dangerous content to spread on their platforms.”
This law goes into effect on Saturday Dec 3rd and will affect any website that allows users to share content (a typically vague definition) and which is accessible to New Yorkers – including the Daily Sceptic. Fortunately for the U.S., they have what is the envy of all free-speech advocates around the world: the First Amendment, and the robust case law surrounding it. New York’s law is blatantly unconstitutional (and also contravenes s.230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996), so it stands zero chance of surviving legal challenge.
But then why has New York passed this law – by “Oceania-sized margins” – and why did the Governor gleefully sign it? Stupidity and squalid political posturing would be my answer. After all, this is a legislature that recently banned the sale of bulletproof vests, and the Attorney General has been spending all her time since being elected in going after political enemies, notably Trump and the NRA. But regardless of whether and when this new law gets struck down, they’ll be able to tell their voters that they’re the good guys, because who wants “hateful conduct”, right?
The Democratic Party – which runs New York – would like nothing better than to scrap the First Amendment. Indeed, they tried to do something like that in the U.S. Senate back in 2014, in a move which Forbes rightly described as “terrifying”. This stemmed from Hillary Clinton being upset about the 2008 film Hillary: The Movie, and because the Supreme Court later upheld the film company’s rights in a landmark First Amendment case (Citizens United v. FEC). Had it passed, the amendment would conveniently have prevented the release of the film Clinton Cash next time Mrs Clinton made a bid for the White House in 2016. But it certainly wasn’t just Clinton – Obama and the entire Democractic Party went along with it.
Fortunately, this was just a stunt, because constitutional amendments are extremely difficult to pass: the normal procedure requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and the approval of three-quarters of all the state legislatures (i.e., 38 out of 50). There was never any prospect of that, so the terrifying aspect of the Senate vote in 2014 was really the fact that the Democratic Party thought it was a good idea, and was in lockstep behind it. This New York law is just another example of where the majority of threats to free speech are coming from these days: the “socially progressive”.
Unfortunately, it’s not just the socially progressive. Recently, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) had to go to federal court to successfully challenge the Republican Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis’s Stop WOKE Act, which would have limited freedom of expression on campus in a totally misjudged “socially conservative” way. DeSantis is – I am credibly informed – a very smart guy, and as a graduate of Harvard Law School he presumably understood the Stop WOKE Act was always going to be struck down by the first federal judge who so much as glanced at it, which makes me think that – as in New York – it was “performative legislation”, designed mainly to appeal to the grassroots of the party. This is a destructive and time-wasting attitude – but I rather wish the U.K. Conservative Party took more of that kind of view when it comes to freedom of speech!
And even while we at the Daily Sceptic may detest wokeness in all its forms, we have to thank the redoubtable FIRE for their stand for free speech in the Florida case. (Like the Free Speech Union, FIRE has been non-partisan from the beginning – indeed, like Ira Glasser, Harvey Silverglate is on the left.) And it’s FIRE, once again, who are representing Eugene Volokh in the New York case. Other parties to the suit are Rumble (the Canada-based hosts of Trump’s Truth Social) and Locals (co-founded by Dave Rubin), meaning that for the defendant, Attorney General Letitia James, it’s another opportunity to take a glorious (but doomed) stand against Trump and the alt-right – or something.
As for Eugene Volokh, one of the great stalwarts of the free speech movement in the U.S., I wish him every success in this case, and will watch with interest and (I hope) some amusement. However, I have to mark him down for the fact that his legal free speech filing isn’t nearly up to the standard we’ve come to expect in 2022, which would be the standard set by the magnificent Supreme Court brief in Novak v. City of Parma submitted by The Onion, and which has fairly been described as “the greatest brief ever filed”.
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Thanks for this – interesting.
Seems like governments were responsible for a lot of it, directly and indirectly. So much for the government being pushed into action by the public clamour.
I think the biggest reason the press followed government policy on covid is money. Always follow the money. At the beginning of lock down most corporate advertising plummeted, at the same time money from government advertising for covid measures rocketed, along with money from “vaccine” manufacturers. No journalist was allowed to bite the hand that feeds.
Spot on. They were paid. Who are the biggest financiers of the fake news? Government and Pharma. UK Guv spent some £500 million on the BBC et al to spread the propaganda?
Funny how the ‘money’ never makes into these useless whitewashing Covidiot inquiries.
Medical Nazism. TPTB learnt that the sheeple love to follow and will happily kill themselves ‘if it saves one life’.
Which shows they were and are in the wrong job.
They could have parroted the official line perhaps with a quizzical look to imply their hands were tied. Algorhythms are not so clever as to pick up body language.
No – I firmly believe the vast majority of journos were as stupid and credulous as my neighbours and swallowed the lies whole.
Honourable exceptions exist but they had to speak via podcast or substack- I’m thinking Planet Normal and the many people of integrity on substance.
“We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since.”
Lines from the preamble to “Journal of the Plague Year”, Daniel Defoe’s forensic reconstruction in the year 1722 of London’s Great Plague of 1665.
Meaning British media has been going for over three hundred years. Over the last thirty years, the silicon chip has taken invention to a whole new level. Witness the pandemic that never was and the climate heist.
The madness of crowds has a lot to answer for. Keep those critical faculties primed.
In my mind there is no question it was ordered at a global level, which applies to the whole ‘pandemic’ narrative – and not only the latter: where is the media questioning of Net Zero, of the gender narrative, of the billions and billions senselessly spent on Ukraine?
Unlimited immigration is only now being questioned – after how many years? – because so many populations are becoming sick and tired of the various atrocities performed by our invited guests.
Richard Nixon warned in 1983 in this short video against the power of the media – perhaps hardly surprising – but his comments were very intelligent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEX6ONLvJg0.
The world’s media are currently owned by a surprisingly small number of individuals. The questions is, who are they taking their orders from?
Thanks for that Richard Nixon link. Can’t find link to cassette recordings, but Nixon tapes from inside Oval Office make for interesting hearing:
https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/white-house-tapes
Very interesting, thank you. Does every ex-President have such a library? That would make a lot of fascinating reading.
The saddest thing is that the mass psychosis and hysteria of the Covid crisis is nothing unusual. Which, unfortunately, implies it can happen again.
In Adolph’s Germany most of the population believed in and supported the great leader.
Likewise Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, all totalitarian systems were capable of whipping up mass hysteria.
We laugh at the medieval witch hunts – human nature hasn’t changed that much.
It is happening again right now – Climate hysteria!
I never understood why journalists were afraid to do their job. But it’s clear they were psychologically nudged by government groupthink and captured regulatory agencies in cahoots with big pharma to peddle a false narrative. David Southwell’s article is an honest and articulate exposé of what went wrong during the pseudo pandemic. Well done.
Money – they have mortgages to pay and families to feed like everyone else…
The BBC was probably one of the worst. I recall a highly plausible story of a BBC reporter sent to cover an anti-lockdown protest, with the sole purpose of capturing any violations of social distancing rules. The reporter admitted this when asked.
“..is fed to us by governments, authorities and experts even in, or especially during, ’emergencies’.”
Like so many well meaning articles what is missing is what really matters. Nothing about the paymasters of all those listed. The Big Pharma. Strange omission for an experienced journalist.
6. Unlimited taxpayer funded government advertising in MSM, printed and broadcast.
No excuses.
The only questions were asked by Mark Steyn, who was sacked, is now wheelchair bound, bankrupted by the establishment.
Every ‘journalist’ who submitted copy to either justify or disregard the greatest crime in British history should resign.
Now.
Articles such as these tend to discount the enthusiasm with which ordinary citizens were torch-carriers for extreme Covid policies. Determining whether media was responding to that, or driving that, is chicken and egg.
Julia Hartley Brewer of Talk Radio appeared to be a lone voice of sanity. The BBC a government mouthpiece, as it is with the Climate lie
I always found it strange we were shown videos of Chinese people collapsing in the street with covid but never saw any such thing in the West. Was it a Chinese invention Psy Ops to break Western economies.
They are still not doing their job now. They should be calling out the climate nonsense all those dangerous clowns in Davos, questioning Nut Zero and basically anything that comes out of a politician’s or scientist’s mouth. There are some brave ones Neill Oliver, Mark Steyn, Bev Turner and of course all those at TDS to name a few but the rest are just abject cowards.
Indeed, and look at what happens to them; quietly sent into the dusty attic, if they keep their jobs at all.
What this article fails to mention is the role played by the mainstream media (and the BBC in particular) in bullying the Johnson government into adopting such over-the-top and excessive policies in the first place. If you remember, Boris Johnson was initially favouring a ‘herd immunity’ approach, one which might well have seen the UK following a similar path to Sweden during the pandemic, a country whose population suffered far less economic and societal dislocation and whose excess deaths ended up the lowest in Europe. The general media ‘pile-on’ during that period in March 2020 when scare stories from Italy and elsewhere were circulating daily proved far too much for Boris and his ministers to withstand. So the path we eventually chose reflected possibly a lack of moral fibre amongst Conservative ministers and the change that seems to have taken place during the last 30 years in which governments, lamentably, often change course and have their policies shaped by the hue and cry emitting from a generally shallow, left-leaning and holier-than-thou media.
If journalism has a public policy role beyond mere description or stenography, it should be to relentlessly question what governments, authorities and, yes, even ‘experts’ are saying and doing.
I would suggest from that paragraph – especially experts!
So-called Experts got us into that mess (and others – Climate, Ukraine). In the case of “Covid” only a small subset of credentialed experts were listened to, other critical experts were shunned, shamed and silenced, and that is why the whole horrific debacle was as bad as it was!
Neil Fergus – Good
Sunetra Gupta – Bad
Jay Bhattacharya – Bad
Martin Kulldorf – Bad
Anthony Fauci – Good
Bill Gates (!!!!!) – Good
“This is Why the Media Failed During Covid”
And failed over immigration, rape gangs, climate change, the 70 year long failure of the NHS, anti-white racism, “transgender” crap, wokery, debanking, EEC/EU and Brexit… it’s a long list.
Is there a pattern I wonder?