October 07, 2024

On October 7, A Few Thoughts On "Islamophobia"

October 07, 2024/ Francis Menton

Today is the first anniversary of the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on Israel. One year ago today, about 1200 hundred people were killed in the surprise attack, and about 250 taken hostage. Almost all of those killed or taken hostage were civilians, and the large majority were either women, children, or the elderly. About 100 remain as hostages today.
This sad occasion gets me to thinking about the term “Islamophobia.” I don’t even remember this term existing in my youth. This piece in The New Republic in 2011 traces the origin of the term to the 1970s. But from those relatively recent origins, the term “Islamophobia” has risen fast in the ranks of the epithets generally used to condemn non-conformists to the progressive project as evil people. Other such terms include racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and trans-phobia.
Why is the term “Islamophobia”?

April 18, 2024

Ever More Audacious Efforts To Suppress Mainstream Conservative Speech

April 18, 2024/ Francis Menton

You are undoubtedly familiar with many efforts of the fascist left to use its control of government offices, bureaucracies, and other institutions to delegitimize and silence mainstream conservative speech:
things like the Censorship Industrial Complex, otherwise known as pressure by government functionaries to induce social media platforms to shut down wrongthink on topics ranging from Covid to climate change to Trump; de-monetization of perfectly reasonable sites like PJ Media or Watts Up With That; the political prosecutions of presumptive Republican nominee Trump, including locking him in a courtroom to prevent him from campaigning; and many more such.
This week along comes a new and quite extreme instance that you may have missed.

December 11, 2023

December 11, 2023/ Francis Menton

Six days ago, on December 5, the Presidents of three elite universities — Harvard, Penn and MIT — appeared at a Congressional hearing to testify about their responses to pro-Hamas and anti-semitic demonstrations and advocacy on their campuses.
In the most widely-viewed exchange at the hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik asked each of the Presidents whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated their codes of conduct. The three answered by emphasizing the importance of freedom of speech on their campuses, and by saying that they could not give a definitive answer as to whether calling for genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct, because the answer was “context-dependent.”

Over the intervening days, the responses of the three Presidents have generated widespread backlash, including harsh criticism from even some mainstream press sources, and even pushback from some major donors. The Presidents’ responses appeared to be, and were, tone deaf and highly legalistic. But were they wrong?
This may surprise you, but I’m going to stand up for the three Presidents on this particular point.

November 03, 2023

November 03, 2023/ Francis Menton

In the Progressive utopia championed by Woodrow Wilson and his successors, government will iron out the imperfections in human affairs through the use of regulatory agencies run by non-political experts. Such people, being experts and completely non-political, would pose no reason for concern about abuse of power, because of course they would never seek go outside their proper regulatory portfolio to use their authority to stamp out the freedoms and speech of their political opponents on important topics of the day.

In the real world government regulators since the creation of their agencies have inevitably used their powers to disadvantage and silence political opposition. The last few years have seen this phenomenon taken to new levels of blatancy and aggressiveness.
Today comes news that another case raising similar issues has just been accepted by the Supreme Court.

September 10, 2023

September 10, 2023/ Francis Menton

Does the federal government do anything noticeable these days other than use its vast taxpayer-supplied resources to grind down and persecute its political enemies?
You already know more that you want to about things like: unprecedented criminal prosecutions against the former President; a Censorship Industrial Complex to bully social media platforms into silencing opponents; and wildly disproportionate prosecutions of J6 protesters.
Here are a couple of examples for today that you may have paid less attention to:

August 27, 2023

August 27, 2023/ Francis Menton

Free speech today is under assault from the Left everywhere and all the time.
You already know about the federal government’s pervasive Censorship Industrial Complex, pressuring all the big social media companies to suppress what they deem “misinformation” about any subject important to the current dominant political narrative (Covid-19, climate change, etc.).
And you already know about ex-President Trump getting indicted by both federal and Georgia prosecutors for saying the same things about the 2020 election that Al Gore said about the 2000 election and Hillary Clinton said about the 2016 election and Stacey Abrams said about the 2018 election.
But how about the Left using its widespread control of social institutions to silence dissent. Today, this is literally everywhere. Here are a couple of notable examples for today — both, as it happens, from outside the U.S.: