SelwynDuke.com

When the Feds Quash Free Speech with Legal Tyranny

By Selwyn Duke

Imagine you run a website and are ordered by the federal government to divulge personal information on article commenters. Now imagine that the feds also issue a gag order preventing you from revealing what they’re up to.

This is precisely what happened with award-winning libertarian website Reason.com

Site editor Nick Gillespie related his travails just today at the Daily Beast, and it’s a story many will find chilling. His problems began after he blogged about the life sentence handed down to Ross Ulbricht, founder of Dark Web website Silk Road, by a judge named Katherine Forrest. Not surprisingly, agitated Ulbricht defenders took to his piece’s comments section and, par for the Internet course, savaged Forrest. As Gillespie writes, they suggested “that, among other things, she should burn in hell, ‘be taken out back and shot,’ and, in a well-worn Internet homage to the Coen Brothers movie Fargo, be fed ‘feet first’ into a woodchipper. The comments betrayed a naive belief in an afterlife [note, my libertarian friend Gillespie, that people without that ‘naïve’ belief in an afterlife generally have a naïve belief in government] and karma, were grammatically and spelling-challenged, hyperbolic, and… completely within the realm of acceptable Internet discourse, especially for an unmoderated comments section.” Gillespie then continued:

But the U.S. attorney for U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York thought differently...

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Orwellian America: Principal Fired for McKinney-comment Thought Crime

By Selwyn Duke

"He did nothing wrong. He was afraid for his life. I commend him for his actions." The essence of this opinion, about ex-McKinney, Texas, police officer Eric Casebolt, has been expressed by many, including talk-radio giant Mark Levin. But the verbatim quotation above was in reality authored by high-school principal Alberto Iber (shown).

Actually, make that former high-school principal — Iber was just fired for rendering his opinion.

Iber’s view, posted on Facebook, certainly isn’t the politically correct one. It may not even be the correct one — that’s a matter for debate. But some might say removing him from his position as head of North Miami Senior High school smacks of the same mentality that calls for criminal charges against climate realists. We already have supposedly “settled science,” based completely on the very unscientific thing called consensus. Do we also now have “settled” positions on perhaps poorly understood current events, so settled, in fact, that deviation from them should mean career destruction?

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Obama’s Justice Dept. Wants Names of Internet Commenters Who Trashed Judge

By Selwyn Duke

In an age where a British politician was arrested for publicly quoting legendary statesman Winston Churchill, it’s not surprising that a loose Internet comment can get a person in trouble. And this may be what’s happening in the case of six Internet posters whom the federal government believes issued “threats” against a federal judge.

The commenters made their remarks at Reason.com under an article about a letter from libertarian Ross Ulbricht, who found himself on trial for running “Dark Web” website Silk Road, a virtual black market that facilitated illegal drug transactions. In the letter Ulbricht pleaded for leniency from U.S. District judge Katherine Forrest — but it fell on deaf ears. Forrest handed him two concurrent life sentences plus 40 years, with no possibility of parole.

This didn’t sit well with Ulbricht’s supporters, many of whom view him as a “Crypto-anarchist” hero who received a gratuitously harsh sentence from an increasingly despotic government. And, not surprisingly, these passions were reflected in their words.

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Shocking Interviews: The Muslims in America Who Want Sharia

By Selwyn Duke

They don’t call it “Little Mogadishu” for nothing. The Cedar Riverside section of Minneapolis is home to the University of Minnesota, supplying college graduates who fight for jobs in a tough market. But this one neighborhood is also supplying something else: Dozens of jihadis — drawn from the area’s large concentration of Somali refugees — who leave Cedar Riverside and travel abroad to fight for terrorist groups.

Just as shocking, though, are the attitudes of some who remain in the North Star State. This was revealed recently by documentarian Ari Horowitz and a film crew from the David Horowitz Freedom Center, who took to the Cedar Riverside streets and asked some important questions. And they got some telling answers — ones that, distressingly, polls show reflect common sentiments among Muslims in America.

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Was Politician Forced Into Mental Institution for “Islamophobia”?

By Selwyn Duke

One tactic Soviet-bloc countries would use to stifle dissidents was involuntary confinement to mental institutions. After all, you have to be crazy to oppose state ideology, right? Now, though, 26 years after the Berlin Wall’s fall comes a similar shocking story — from well west of where the wall stood.

It is alleged that a French mayor has been involuntarily confined to a mental asylum for “Islamophobia.”

The story involves Robert Chardon, mayor of the southern French town of Venelles; the problems began when, participating in a public Twitter discussion initiated by former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, the mayor proposed a prohibition against Islam in France.

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U.K.’s Most Likely New Leader Pledges to Outlaw “Islamophobia”

By Selwyn Duke

Perhaps he just wants to show he’s doubleplusgood, but the man who may be Britain’s next prime minister has pledged to stop at nothing to stamp out “Islamophobia.” Labour Party leader Ed Miliband (shown) — who now enjoys a slight lead in election polls — made the promise during an interview in which he also said he’d support the creation of a Palestinian state. As for his Islamophobia remarks, the Muslim News reports:

“We are going to make it an aggravated crime. We are going to make sure it is marked on people’s records with the police to make sure they root out Islamophobia as a hate crime,” Miliband told the Editor of The Muslim News, Ahmed J Versi in a wide ranging exclusive interview.

“We are going to change the law on this so we make it absolutely clear of our abhorrence of hate crime and Islamophobia. It will be the first time that the police will record Islamophobic attacks right across the country,” he said.

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Will Supreme Court Squelch Free Speech Because "Mob" Might be Offended?

By Selwyn Duke

The five American students were not allowed to display their American-flag T-shirts because Mexican students might be offended and become violent. This certainly might be expected in Chihuahua, or Veracruz, or Tijuana. But it happened in Morgan Hill — California — in the USA.

The American schoolboys were given a choice: turn their shirts inside-out, get suspended, or go home. And you probably thought that anywhere in America was our flag’s home.

That was May 5, 2010, “Cinco de Mayo,” at Live Oak High School, and the students have since sued. And now their case may be heard by the Supreme Court. This is because a lower court issued a late January ruling on the incident that critics say establishes a “heckler’s veto” allowing speech to be prohibited simply because someone else is offended by it.

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Orwell in the Classroom: University Spends Money to Stifle Speech

By Selwyn Duke

The program may seem “crazy” to many, but don’t you dare call it that. Because this is just one of many words and phrases that Orwellian social engineers at the University of Michigan deem are, well, not at all doubleplusgood. It’s part of a sensitivity-oriented “Inclusive Language Campaign” (ILC) at the public institution — funded to the tune of $16,000.

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N.Y. Times Practically Invented No-go-zone Story, but Fox Is Threatened With Suit

By Selwyn Duke

“Je ne suis pas Fox News!” seems to be the attitude of Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. She threatened to sue the station last week over its reporting on her city’s “no-go zones,” areas where non-Muslims are wary to tread but that Hidalgo claims don’t exist. Said she, “When we're insulted, then I think we'll have to sue; I think we'll have to go to court in order to have these words removed.” But if this is going to be her course, a lot of litigation lies before her. And first on her list could be the periodical that, we’re told, practically started the no-go-zone story: the ultra-liberal “newspaper of record,” the New York Times.

Critics may wryly note that, unlike the two Muslim terrorists committing the Jan. 7 massacre at her city’s Charlie Hebdo offices, Hidalgo’s remedy for speech she dislikes would be, at least, a purely legal attack. But unlike the assault on Charlie — a magazine that disgorges truly vile material — the mayor’s efforts amount to an attack on truth.

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U.K. Christian School to be Shut Down After Gov't Brands Students “Bigots”

By Selwyn Duke

The government officials allegedly asked 10-year-old students what lesbians “did.”

Another bureaucrat queried a young boy on what a Muslim was.

And, apparently, they didn’t get the answers they wanted.

Because one Christian school is now being actively monitored by the state — and another is going to be shut down.

The latter is the Durham Free School in Gilesgate, County Durham, United Kingdom, where government inspectors labeled the pupils “bigots,” branded the institution “an educational failure, and said some children displayed ‘discriminatory views’ toward people of other faiths,” reports the Daily Mail. The school’s known “trespass”?

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