Censorship addicts: Democrats seek to squelch speech on banks.
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“you can’t say that!”
Concerned about your money after recent bank failures? You might want to keep those thoughts to yourself.
While some rushed to get their money after the collapses, at least one leading Democrat is pushing for censorship of those who do not have faith in the banking industry.
The Democratic Party for more than a decade has alienated many of us in the party with its embrace of censorship and speech controls.
Democratic leaders actively promote censorship on social media and vehemently defend government efforts to target citizens or groups.
… Subjects from climate change to gender identity to COVID to elections have been gradually added to the list of prohibited thoughts.
Now Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) has put bank solvency on the list.
It is only the latest example of censorship’s slippery slope.
Kelly shows how censorship is addictive; it not only builds an increasing tolerance for speech limits but a decreasing tolerance for opposing views.
The immediate inclination becomes to silence those who challenge you or refuse to accept your “truth” on any given subject.
In a Zoom call this week with a couple hundred participants, Kelly asked representatives from the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation about censoring social media to remove those raising doubts over bank solvency in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank crises.
… As in past censorship calls, Kelly reportedly cited the danger of “foreign actors” using social media — to undermine banks. It’s those pesky Russians again.
He noted it’s hard to define the problem of “misleading information,” but tech companies had to impose a sweeping system to combat the “harm” of misinformation.
… Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), however, was not happy. He was upset not by the promised censorship but that it wasn’t broad enough.
“The pandemic and misinformation about COVID-19, manipulated media also cause harm,” Coons said. “But I’d urge you to reconsider” putting in place a “standalone climate change misinformation policy” because “helping to disseminate climate denialism, in my view, further facilitates and accelerates one of the greatest existential threats to our world.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) also warned he and his colleagues would not tolerate any “backsliding or retrenching” by firms “failing to take action against dangerous disinformation.”
He demanded companies keep using “the same kind of robust content modification” — the new Orwellian term for censorship — they did in the 2020 election.
History has shown censorship becomes an insatiable appetite. Once you silence opposing views in one area, opposing views in other areas become increasingly intolerable.
… Ex-Twitter executive Anika Collier Navaroli explained at a House hearing last month that Twitter tried not to just “balance free speech and safety.”
Rather, it asked “free expression for whom and public safety for whom. So whose free expression are we protecting at the expense of whose safety, and whose safety are we willing to allow to go the wind so that people can speak freely?”
Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) responded: “Exactly right.”
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
Over at Legal Insurrection, Cornell Professor William Jacobson, not stranger to being attacked by students and Cornell’s administration for his conservative beliefs, comments on Stanford University law students’ ANTIFA-like (including back masks) outrage at their dean apologizing to a federal judge for allowing those same thugs to disrupt and cancel his speech:
The Stanford Law School Culture, Not The Diversity Dean, Is The Problem (but I repeat myself)
The wheel continues to turn on the shout-down of 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan at Stanford Law School. That disruption is an outgrowth of open hostility and incitement against conservative Supreme Court Justices that has now spilled over into academia even when a conservative appeals court judge appears.
… The Stanford Law chapter of the far-left National Lawyers Guild not only defended the shout-down, it promised to do the same to future conservative speakers …
The members of the NLG board declared their “firm support and admiration for every single person involved in planning or enacting the protest,” which “represented Stanford Law School at its best: as a place of care for vulnerable people, and a place to challenge oppression and bigotry in all their forms, including on the federal bench.”
… The Free Beacon reports that approximately one-third of the law school student body dressed in black in protest of the Law School Dean Jenny Martinez apologizing to Judge Duncan, making her walk a hallway gauntlet after they plastered her classroom with legally illiterate claims that shouting down a speaker is just their own free speech.
Hundreds [100, actually] of Stanford student activists on Monday lined the hallways to protest the law school’s dean, Jenny Martinez, for apologizing to Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan, whom the activists shouted down last week.
The embattled dean arrived to the classroom where she teaches constitutional law to find a whiteboard covered inch to inch in fliers attacking Duncan and defending those who disrupted him, according to photos of the room and multiple eyewitness accounts. The fliers parroted the argument, made by student activists, that the heckler’s veto is a form of free speech.
“We, the students in your constitutional law class, are sorry for exercising our 1st Amendment rights,” some fliers read. As a private law school, Stanford is not bound by the First Amendment, though California state law does apply some First Amendment protections to private universities….
When Martinez’s class adjourned on Monday, the protesters, dressed in black and wearing face masks that read “counter-speech is free speech,” stared silently at Martinez as she exited her first-year constitutional law class at 11:00 a.m., according to five students who witnessed the episode. The student protesters, who formed a human corridor from Martinez’s classroom to the building’s exit, comprised nearly a third of the law school, the students told the Washington Free Beacon.
The majority of Martinez’s class—approximately 50 students out of the 60 enrolled—participated in the protest themselves, two students in the class said. The few who didn’t join the protesters received the same stare down as their professor as they hurried through the makeshift walk of shame.
“They gave us weird looks if we didn’t wear black” and join the crowd, said Luke Schumacher, a first-year law student in Martinez’s class who declined to participate in the protest. “It didn’t feel like the inclusive, belonging atmosphere that the DEI office claims to be creating.”
Another student in the class, who likewise declined to protest, said the spectacle was a surreal experience. “It was eerie,” said the student, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. “The protesters were silent, staring from behind their masks at everyone who chose not to protest, including the dean.”
…. These students thinking that it is protected “free speech” to prevent someone else from speaking reflects how uneducated these law students are. Ken White, clearly no fan of Judge Duncan, writes about the students’ position:
However, shouting down is not protected by the First Amendment. Neither is pulling the fire alarm, setting off an airhorn, or making bomb threats to stop the speech from happening. You couldn’t pass a law that said “no shouting down conservative speakers” or “no shouting down political speakers,” because those wouldn’t be content-neutral, but you can absolutely prohibit disrupting someone else’s exercise of free speech so long as you do so in a content-neutral way.
Professor Jacobson: “Firing the Diversity Dean is a distraction and deflection. Let’s keep her front and center, let her be the face of Stanford Law School for all the world to see. Because she reflects the culture there.
Something is wrong with the culture at Stanford Law School, and many (most) law schools. Let’s address that issue.”
Despite Judge Duncan’s assertion that these Stanford students are unfit to practice law: “If enough of these kids get into the legal profession,” Judge Duncan remarked, “the rule of law will descend into barbarism.”, I predict that they will suffer no consequences, and, because Stanford is a prestigious law school, many of its graduates will go on to become political staffer, professors, and even hold office as judges and elected politicians. The senators quoted in the first story are merely the vanguard of what’s coming.
