February 7, 2024

In the News

National Review: Why Can’t University Officials Tolerate Criticism?

By George Leef

.....More and more, we find the leaders of our educational institutions seeking to silence people who disagree with their policies. A revealing case is that of University of Texas professor Richard Lowery.

Lowery, who teaches finance at UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business, has been critical of the way the university is being run, which is to say, along very progressive lines. His superiors are unhappy over that. Do they argue back? Do they just ignore him? No — they want him to shut up.

Quoting from the Institute for Free Speech’s summary:

The Courts

USA Today: Ex-'Mandalorian' star Gina Carano sues Lucasfilm, Disney for wrongful termination

By Andrew Dalton, Associated Press

.....Actor Gina Carano on Tuesday sued Lucasfilm and its parent The Walt Disney Co. over her 2021 firing from “The Mandalorian,” saying she was let go for expressing right-wing views on social media.

The lawsuit Carano filed with help from X, formerly Twitter, in federal court in California alleges her wrongful termination from the “Star Wars” galaxy Disney+ streaming series after two seasons over a post likening the treatment of American conservatives to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany.

“A short time ago in a galaxy not so far away, Defendants made it clear that only one orthodoxy in thought, speech, or action was acceptable in their empire, and that those who dared to question or failed to fully comply would not be tolerated,” the lawsuit opens. “Carano was terminated from her role as swiftly as her character’s peaceful home planet of Alderaan had been destroyed by the Death Star.”

The lawsuit alleges she was fired because she “dared voice her own opinions” against an “online bully mob who demanded her compliance with their extreme progressive ideology.”

Biden Administration

Jonathan Turley: Why Burn Books When You Can Bury Them? The White House Pressured Amazon to Target Dissenting Books

.....The House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Monday revealed yet another facet of the Biden Administration’s sprawling censorship system that targeted dissenting books. It appears that, as with social media companies, it succeeded in getting the company not to promote disfavored books.

Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan revealed on X that the White House was directly involved in the censorship campaign. That includes a 2021 email from one Biden official asking to discuss “the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation of [sic] Amazon?”

Amazon in turn appears to ask only how high the Biden White House wants it to jump on censorship: “[i]s the [Biden] Admin asking us to remove books, or are they more concerned about search results/order (or both)?”

After the meeting, Amazon confirmed in an email that it was actively doing what the government demanded in suppressing sales by not promoting disfavored books: “As a reminder, we did enable Do Not Promote for anti-vax books whose primary purpose is to persuade readers vaccines are unsafe or ineffective on 3/9, and will review additional handling options for these books with you.”

Washington Post: US rolls out visa restriction policy on people who abuse spyware to target journalists, activists

By Aamer Madhani and Frank Bajak, Associated Press

.....The Biden administration announced Monday it is rolling out a new policy that will allow it to impose visa restrictions on foreign individuals involved in the misuse of commercial spyware.

The administration’s policy will apply to people who’ve been involved in the misuse of commercial spyware to target individuals including journalists, activists, perceived dissidents, members of marginalized communities, or the family members of those who are targeted. The visa restrictions could also apply to people who facilitate or get financial benefit from the misuse of commercial spyware, officials said.

“The United States remains concerned with the growing misuse of commercial spyware around the world to facilitate repression, restrict the free flow of information, and enable human rights abuses,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement announcing the new policy. “The misuse of commercial spyware threatens privacy and freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly, and association. Such targeting has been linked to arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings in the most egregious of cases.”

Fox News: State AGs warn Biden AI order could centralize control over tech, be used for ‘political ends’

By Adam Shaw

.....A coalition of state attorneys general is warning that an executive order signed by President Biden last year on artificial intelligence could be used by the federal government to "centralize" government control over the emerging technology and that that control could be used for political purposes -- including censoring alleged "disinformation."

"The Executive Order seeks—without Congressional authorization—to centralize governmental control over an emerging technology being developed by the private sector. In doing so, the Executive Order opens the door to using the federal government’s control over AI for political ends, such as censoring responses in the name of combatting ‘disinformation,’" the coalition of 20 attorneys general, led by Utah AG Sean Reyes, said in a letter to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

Congress

The Eternally Radical Idea: A Tale of Two Congressional Hearings (and several AI poems)

By Greg Lukianoff

.....Earlier today, I served as a witness at the House Judiciary Committee’s Special Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which discussed (among other things) whether it’s a good idea for the government to regulate artificial intelligence and LLMs. For my part, I was determined to warn everyone not only about the threat AI poses to free speech, but also the threats regulatory capture and a government oligopoly on AI pose to the creation of knowledge itself.

I was joined on the panel by investigative journalist Lee Fang, reporter Katelynn Richardson, and former U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic Norman Eisen. Richardson testified about her reporting on government funding the development of tools to combat “misinformation” through a National Science Foundation grant program. As FIRE’s Director of Public Advocacy Aaron Terr noted, such technology could be misused in anti-speech ways.

Free Expression

The Popehat Report: Columbia Law Student Senate Censors To Prevent Censorship

By Ken White

.....At Columbia Law School, students who want their organization officially recognized must be approved by the Student Senate, and you spotted the problem already, didn’t you? In the last year one group out of nine applicants has been denied — Law Students Against Antisemitism. By an anonymous vote, the Columbia Law Student Senate rejected them. They’re controversial because they subscribe to a definition of antisemitism offered by the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. This, student senators thought, was unfair and potentially suppressive of anti-Zionist speech:

The States

Washington Post: New Hampshire opens criminal probe into AI calls impersonating Biden

By Cat Zakrzewski and Pranshu Verma

.....New Hampshire’s attorney general Tuesday announced a criminal investigation into a Texas-based company that was allegedly behind thousands of AI-generated calls impersonating President Biden in the run-up to the state’s primary election.

Attorney General John Formella (R) said in a news conference that his office also had sent the telecom company, Life Corp., a cease-and-desist letter ordering it to immediately stop violating the state’s laws against voter suppression in elections.

A multistate task force is also preparing for potential civil litigation against the company, and the Federal Communications Commission ordered Lingo Telecom to stop permitting illegal robocall traffic, after an industry consortium found that the Texas-based company carried the calls on its network.

WEAR News 3: Florida antisemitism bill moves forward after addressing First Amendment concerns

By Amber Raub

.....Legislation aimed at fighting anti-Jewish hate is making its way through the legislature, but the idea to clearly define criminal antisemitism has been running into some roadblocks.

HB 187 sailed through the House with only three no votes and is currently going through the process in the Senate with a similar bill called SB 148.

But those three representatives who voted against it aren’t pro-hate, they’re worried about First Amendment concerns within the language of the bill.

Honolulu Civil Beat: Opposition Surfaces Early To Full Public Campaign Financing — And That’s A Good Thing

By Richard Wiens

.....The [publicly financed campaigns] proposal is back this session and again wildly popular with good government organizations as Senate Bill 2381 heads for its first hearing Tuesday.

But this time a high-profile Democratic legislator has publicly announced her opposition. Nadine Nakamura, the House majority leader, even fessed up to a partisan reason for her stand: She contends it will help Republicans more than Democrats…

Nakamura explained her opposition during a Civil Beat legislative preview at the Capitol. She cited the 2022 governor and lieutenant governor races as examples of how the leading Democratic candidates raised far more money than their Republican counterparts.

If all those candidates had qualified for — and agreed to accept — the full public funding as proposed, they would have had equal amounts to spend on their campaigns.

“Why would we want to do that?” Nakamura asked. “I have some concerns about that and I believe taxpayers once they look at this data would raise similar concerns.”

She later added, “I think we would be giving an unfair amount — taxpayer dollars — to a Republican who would not on their own have the support from the community to raise these funds.”