Category: Censorship

  • Media scholar Carl Jensen was deeply influenced by the independent muckraking journalists of the twentieth century—so much so that he founded Project Censored at Sonoma State University, in 1976, in the wake of the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal, as a watchdog organization focused on exposing “the news that didn’t make the news.” Project Censored began in a sociology course Jensen taught at Sonoma State, but quickly evolved into a national effort to promote independent journalism and news literacy. The Project produced an annual list of the most important investigative news reports, which attracted attention—and praise—from some of Jensen’s best-known contemporaries, including broadcast journalists Walter Cronkite and Hugh Downs, reform activist Ralph Nader, and a contemporary muckraker, investigative journalist I.F. “Izzy” Stone.

    Jensen’s purpose was not to tear down so-called “mainstream” media outlets but to constructively criticize their news judgment. By showing what the major media missed, or even “censored,” he hoped to improve what he saw as the lifeblood of democracy: a truly free press. Industry professionals didn’t always take kindly to such criticism, which led Jensen to turn his critique into a systematic study of what they did cover. He discovered a morass of fluff, sensationalism, and pap—what used to be called “yellow journalism” in the early 1900s. Jensen called it Junk Food News in 1983. He saw that the public would ultimately pay the price for the major media outlets’ myopic focus and critical omissions in the form of accelerating civic decay. Sadly, he wasn’t wrong.

    Today, we are awash in 21st-century versions of junk food news, as produced by corporate media and propagated on social media. Worse, we are also subject to ‘round-the-clock infotainment and propaganda masquerading as journalism, what Jensen’s successor, sociologist Peter Phillips, called News Abuse in the early 2000s (now also referred to as malinformation). Of course, numerous media critics and scholars—including Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky, Ben Bagdikian, Neil Postman, and Robert McChesney—have long warned against rising levels of mis- and disinformation, increased consolidation of media ownership, and their combined toll on press freedom and a well-informed public. In the last decade, with the moral panic around the weaponized epithet of “fake news,” these challenges have spawned a cottage industry of so-called fact-checkers—supposedly objective third parties trying to reverse the troublesome trend of declining public trust in the Fourth Estate.

    However, most of those efforts have been exposed as Trojan horses for re-establishing corporate media dominance in a digital era of podcasts, TikTok, Instagram reels, and “tweets” (or “posts” as they are now called on X). As Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker bemoaned last year at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, news industry leaders are losing control of the narrative (emphasis added):

    If you go back really not that long ago, as I say, we owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well. If it said it in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, then that was a fact. Nowadays, people can go to all sorts of different sources for the news, and they’re much more questioning about what we’re saying. So, it’s no longer good enough for us just to say, this is what happened, or this is the news. We have to explain– almost like explain our working. So, readers expect to understand how we source stories. They want to know how we go about getting stories. We have to sort of lift the bonnet, as it were, and in a way that newspapers aren’t used to doing and explain to people what we’re doing. We need to be much more transparent about how we go about collecting the news.

    “Lift the bonnet.” “Explain to people what we’re doing.” It’s almost as if the public wants more fact-based, transparently sourced reporting in their news, not partisan propaganda. And, go figure, in a rabidly consumerist culture, they want receipts too. Tucker seems to agree, though the corporate media and their advertisers/investors from Big Pharma, Big Tech, the Military-Industrial Complex, and other powerful institutions whose narratives the public is questioning, likely do not. For Tucker and other gatekeepers, this public scrutiny is inconvenient, perhaps even impertinent, but also a market reality news organizations must now at least pay lip service to addressing. Perhaps this is what has contributed to record-low levels of approval and trust of the news media among the public.

    Indy Journalism Can Build Public Trust While Fighting Fake News

    Media scholars have described this conundrum as an epistemic one, the ushering in of a “post-truth” world “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The mis- and disinformation ecosystem that has emerged in this post-truth climate has establishment institutions from the WEF to Congress and the mass media themselves clutching pearls. Even the American public has come to believe that the lack of trustworthy information is a greater threat than terrorism. With the return of Donald Trump to the presidency, these concerns, along with increasing existential attacks on journalists and the news media itself, including ABCCBSNPR/PBS, and even the Associated Press as “enemies of the American people,” are growing rapidly and in unprecedented ways.

    There certainly are major issues with corporate media and establishment outlets, which we at Project Censored have documented for nearly half a century. However, our critiques are not meant to undermine major media for partisan gain. Instead, the Project’s criticisms of corporate news expose systemic gaps and slant in coverage, in order to pressure the nation’s most prominent news outlets to use their massive budgets and influence to serve the public good, rather than private interests, by holding corporate and government abusers of power accountable. Given the well-documented limitations of corporate media, we support a robust, independent, and public media system, because a commercial, for-profit model cannot “tell the people what is really going on,” as George Seldes once put it. The solution to our present journalistic woes does not lie with industry leaders, biased fact-checkers, or Big Tech content moderators. It rests on critical media literacy and a fiercely independent free press.

    In support of this proposed solution, Project Censored advocates for a healthy democracy by promoting news literacy education, especially by providing hands-on training in critical media literacy for students, through our curriculum, student internships, and Campus Affiliates Program, each of which distinguishes Project Censored from other news watch organizations and press freedom groups. Further, each year, Project Censored also recognizes some of the best independent journalists, reporting factually, transparently, and ethically in the public interest, pointing out that these are among the best advocates of news literacy, literally teaching by example. So, ironically, the very solutions to the revitalization of our failing Fourth Estate are its most radical independent practitioners, not their owners/employers or meddling partisan outsiders. History shows this to be the case, and we should listen to what the past can teach us.

    “All Governments Lie”

    Among the many books Jensen published, one of the most significant might be Stories That Changed America: Muckrakers of the 20th Century. In it, he collected exemplary work by nearly two dozen legendary journalists, his selection of the previous century’s most significant truth-tellers, including excerpts from decisive reports by Ida Tarbell (The History of the Standard Oil Company), Lincoln Steffans (The Shame of the Cities), Upton Sinclair (The Jungle and The Brass Check), George Seldes (In Fact), Edward R. Murrow (In Search of Light), and I.F. Stone (I.F. Stone’s Weekly). As Jensen wrote, “Their words led to a nationwide public revolt against social evils and [decades] of reforms in antitrust legislation, the electoral process, banking regulations, and a host of other social programs.” The reporting Jensen collected in Stories That Changed America continues to inspire those of us who believe journalism can make a difference.

    “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out,” the iconic muckraker “Izzy” Stone once wrote. But Stone had great faith in the power of the press to expose and counter those lies. We need brave, independent journalists and newsrooms to tackle the most controversial and suppressed issues of our era. Stone relentlessly exposed governmental prevarications and injustices throughout his career. He also saw the shortcomings of his own profession, to the point of resigning from the National Press Club in 1941, rather than kowtowing to its racism and political sycophancy. After realizing he had limited influence in the establishment press, he started I.F. Stone’s Weekly and dared to report the truth on his own. He took on McCarthyism at a time when his peers were being attacked, arrested, deported, and disappeared. He fought for truth and peace in the face of the unjust, murderous conflicts of the Cold War, especially in Vietnam. Sound familiar?

    Governments lie. Stone’s insight is timeless, but it seems more relevant than ever in 2025. The Trump administration and its enablers bombard us daily with lies and half-truths, what Reporters Without Borders has characterized as “a monumental assault on freedom of information.” At best, the establishment press seems capable of little more than chronicling the barrage; at worst, they capitulate to it.

    The notion of a press “watchdog” on a governmental leash did not begin with the current administration—as Jensen and his students at Sonoma State noted in 1976 looking back on the eve of Richard Nixon’s re-election, no major news outlet even mentioned the Watergate scandal—and the roots of a subservient press reach back to the earliest history of American journalism on the presidency. But the return of Trump to power is a nadir for many of our cherished freedoms, including those of the First Amendment, which links freedom of speech and press with the rights to assemble and petition—and the public, our democracy, needs journalism that can help us awaken from what historian Timothy Snyder has described as a “self-induced intellectual coma” that is characteristic of  “the politics of inevitability.”

    The Izzy’s Are Coming!

    Calling out counter-democratic measures is one way to resist the onslaught of authoritarianism. A free press provides the means for this, but people need to act in response. Rather than complain that “the left” needs a media power like Rupert Murdoch’s to “compete,” we should open our eyes and support the amazing people and organizations doing this invaluable work already. Project Censored highlights the most important but under-reported independent news stories each year, promoting the work of independent journalists, news outlets, and press freedom organizations that exemplify “media democracy in action.” Their work embodies the very spirit of resistance and amplifies the voices of those trammeled by oligarchs and would-be despots.

    The Park Center for Independent Media (PCIM) at Ithaca College shares this ethos, supporting independent media as a bulwark against everyday injustices and creeping tyranny. Among the only academic centers of journalism in the United States focused solely on independent media, each year, PCIM honors the leading independent journalists of our time with its Izzy Award, named in honor of I.F. “Izzy” Stone. April 30 marks the seventeenth annual award ceremony, which will also be the occasion for numerous muckraking journalists and free press organizations to convene and build coalitions, strengthen solidarity, and fight to protect our democratic republic from anyone, whether they bat for Team Red or Team Blue, who would subvert it for their own private gain.

    The Izzy Award celebrates the practice of radical muckraking journalism in the public interest, and its continuing relevance in our current Gilded Age of Big Tech plutocracy. The work at PCIM and Project Censored reminds us that we cannot wait for change to simply emerge; we must create it ourselves. If past is prologue, we also have much to learn from and pass on to the next generation, whose experiences and voices will inform and express the stories that change America again, to paraphrase Jensen.

    Now is not a time for cowering; it is a time to exhibit what political activist and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg called civil courage, regardless of the odds. Or, as Izzy noted, it is time “to defend the weak against the strong; to fight for justice; and to seek, as best I can to bring healing perspectives to bear on the terrible hates and fears of [humankind], in the hope of someday bringing about one world, in which [people] will enjoy the differences of the human garden instead of killing each other over them.”

    Hear, hear. Let’s not get lost in the smoke of the hashish blown in our faces by elite media and government actors. Let’s instead recognize and support the reportorial canaries in the coal mines, from the climate crisis and Kafkaesque raids on the vulnerable among us to the dismantling of education, attacks on the arts, and an ongoing genocide. Let’s act on the information independent journalists share at their own risk, for we ignore them at our own.

    The post “All Governments Lie”: Why We Need a Radical and Independent Free Press Now first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We live in perilous times. The mobilizing passions of fascism are no longer a distant echo of history—they are here, surging through the United States like an electric current. We are in a period of social, ideological, and racial cleansing.

    First, the notion of government as a democratizing public good and institution of social responsibility—that once held power to account, protected the vulnerable, and nurtured the ideals of justice and collective responsibility—is being methodically destroyed. The common good, once seen as the essence of democratic life, has become the enemy of the neoliberal fascist state. It is not merely being neglected—it is being assaulted, stripped bare, and left to rot in the shadows of privatization, greed, and brutality—the main features of gangster capitalism.

    The post The Fire This Time appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Because I live in Japan and post articles which are critical of America, I am often accused of being anti-American. The truth is both counter-intuitive and disturbing.

    I haven’t changed, but America certainly has.

    America has become anti-American!

    The Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. Yet reporters are now being intimidated and threatened with arrest and incarceration. Whistleblowers who try to expose fraud, corruption, and waste in government by making available in public news media forums information of value to American citizens, are likewise harassed and prosecuted.

    The Constitution requires the government to promote the general welfare. Yet the benefits of our economic wealth are accruing to a tiny elite while poverty is still pervasive and the majority of the population scrambles to make ends meet. Among the 34 highly developed nations in the world, America ranks 17th in terms of life satisfaction — happiness — the key factors for its low ranking being massive income inequality and excessively long hours spent on average in the work place. In terms of health care and life expectancy, for the richest country in the world, America ranks abysmally low, with longevity actually declining.

    The Constitution guarantees equal representation of its citizens. Yet, the electoral system has become corrupted by unverifiable e-voting, grotesque gerrymandering of districts, and torrents of money in politics, which only guarantees the voices of average voters will be drowned out and their participation in our democracy marginalized.

    The Constitution guarantees the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure, and right of trial by jury before peers, yet starting in 2001 by using the endless War on Terror as an excuse, patently unconstitutional legislation has been effected — Patriot Acts I and IIFISA, and the NDAA which Obama signed into law on New Years Eve 2011 while America was preoccupied with celebrating the holidays, which have regularly been renewed ever since — now placing every citizen at risk for arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention with no access to legal counsel.

    The Constitution guarantees equality before the law. Yet rich elite white collar criminals wreak havoc on our economy breaking countless laws and go free, while petty crimes by regular citizens — especially people of color — result in harsh and disproportionate prosecution and punishment.

    The Constitution guarantees the right of free speech, including dissent against questionable policies. Yet, we see individuals protesting the cruel, malevolent and systematic killing of Palestinians by Israel, harassed, persecuted, and prosecuted by establishment authorities, who apparently consider the slaughter of between 50,000 and 200,000 mostly innocent Palestinians, including women and children — horrific war crimes which those in power indisputably support — necessary and laudable. U.S. support for this genocide mocks the principles we hold dear and have at least until now defined us as a people.

    The Constitution specifies that the power to wage war is exclusively the responsibility of Congress. Yet the president as Commander-in-Chief as often as not ignores the constitutional limits as well as those contained in the War Powers Act, using the military purely at his own discretion. This wanton abuse of military power results in the unnecessary deaths of our citizens in uniform, while at the same time counter-productively foments enormous animosity and mistrust across much of the planet.

    Our legal framework via the Posse Comitatus Act has long barred the use of the military for law enforcement but vast and sophisticated surveillance by federal security agencies, the militarization of local police forces, and their handshake agreements with federal agencies, puts us all under the iron fist of enforcement agencies like the NSA and operatives of the Pentagon itself.

    I could go on. But that might offend some people.

    Sometimes the truth can be so anti-American.

    The post America Has Become Anti-American first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Universities in the United States are facing one of the most serious attempts to impose political control on higher education since the anticommunist loyalty tests of the 1950s. Whatever one thinks of the issues being debated today, such as the Israel/Palestine conflict, playing politics with federal funding is a threat to open inquiry. Administrators and faculty are scrambling to respond and resistance is strengthening, although Columbia University’s capitulation to the Trump administration isn’t heartening.

    It’s too early to write an obituary for academic freedom, but whatever the outcome of these battles, universities in the United States have lost prestige that won’t be regained quickly. Though it’s difficult to critically self-reflect when under attack, I think we academics should consider our mistakes when trying to understand public opinion and political realities.

    I retired from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018 and now live in a rural area, and so I’m far from the front lines. I empathize with former colleagues, but I can’t help but reflect on those colleagues’ failures in the past to offer a robust defense of academic freedom in cases in which I was in the crosshairs. So, while at the same time that we organize to defend higher education, I want to highlight two episodes from my career that raise an important question: Where do threats to academic freedom come from? Not always from government officials.

    To be clear: I never faced the kind of threats that some professors and institutions do today, such as deportations and terminating entire academic programs. But I have seen how social penalties can be effective in silencing people, as illustrated by the censure from my bosses because of writing I did after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the shunning that came after my critique of the ideology of transgenderism. In both cases, censure and shunning didn’t change my behavior but did have an effect on choices that others made.

    9/11 and the failure of a university

    One of the most important decisions a country can make is the choice to go to war. In a healthy democratic culture, that decision should be thoroughly debated before political leaders deploy troops in battle. But within hours after the 9/11 attacks, politicians of both parties were climbing over each other to get to microphones to call for a military response.

    I spent most of that day in my office watching the news coverage while trying to reach friends in New York to make sure they were safe. My memory of the day is blurry, but I remember clearly that by mid-afternoon—before anyone even had a clear understanding of the details of the events—it seemed inevitable that the United States would bomb someone, somewhere in retaliation. Whether it would be legal or sensible was irrelevant—politicians were preparing to use the terrorist attacks to justify war. By the end of that day, I had written the first of many articles sharply criticizing US foreign policy and arguing strongly against going to war.

    Not everyone agreed with me. For weeks, my voicemail and inbox were filled with critics who described me as a coward, a traitor, unpatriotic, and/or unmanly. (The most revealing, in a psychological sense, were the messages from men who imagined the sexual punishment I deserved, including being raped by Osama bin Laden.) After that article ran in the state’s largest newspaper and became a topic on conservative talk radio, people began calling for the university to fire me. Within two weeks, the president of the University of Texas at Austin responded publicly, calling me “misguided” and describing me as “an undiluted fountain of foolishness.”  (He was a chemist, not a poet.) Other university officials added their own denunciations, some of which were forwarded to me, but none of my bosses confronted me directly. Because I was a tenured professor with considerable job protection, none of them moved to fire me.

    The criticism continued for a few months, but I continued to write and speak out. At the time, I was already a part of a small national network opposing US militarism, and the support of people in that movement sustained me. Locally, we formed the group Austin Against War to organize protests and do political outreach. Around the country and throughout the world, many people defied the jingoist rhetoric and challenged that militarism.

    The university president’s statement had no effect on my activity, but it was effective in a larger sense. Many UT faculty members shared my views, yet only a handful joined the initial organizing efforts, I assume at least in part because of fear of being targeted as I had been. One untenured professor I knew stopped speaking out against militarism after his dean told him that continuing to circulate critical writing would almost certainly cost him his job, and I assume others made similar choices. Several graduate students from other countries told me they wanted to get involved in antiwar organizing but were afraid it could lead to the US government revoking their visas. Faculty colleagues with lawful permanent resident status who were from Muslim-majority countries on a special-registration list created the following year (the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System) told me they feared that the government would revoke their green cards even for trivial errors in record-keeping. The threat of legal action, fears about losing jobs, and peer pressure were enough to undermine a robust debate on my campus, though student activists created as much space as they could. But the university administration was either hostile or mute.

    The United States invaded Afghanistan with little domestic or international opposition beyond the small antiwar groups and pacifists. The Bush administration’s weak case for invading Iraq sparked more domestic and international opposition, leading to the world’s largest coordinated day of political protest on February 15, 2003, when millions of people unsuccessfully sought to stop the pending invasion. Soon it was clear that the antiwar movement’s analysis had been sound, as the disastrous consequences of those ill-advised invasions began to be measured in hundreds of thousands of deaths, trillions of dollars, and destabilized societies in the Middle East and Central Asia.

    Protected by tenure, I continued teaching at UT until retirement. That was positive for me, but it does not change the fact that my university failed in its obligation to foster the conversation that citizens in a democratic society needed at a crucial moment in history. Throughout that period, I argued not only that I had a right to speak out but that the university had a duty to provide a forum to make use of the expertise of the faculty and engage the community. In debates over going to war, which understandably generate strong emotions, evidence and logic are crucial, and universities have valuable resources to offer. The dominant culture needed, and still needs, to engage the evidence and logic presented by critics of US imperial foreign policy and militarism.

    Transgenderism and the failure of the left

    For more than a decade, I have offered a critique of the ideology of the transgender movement and what I believe is the failure of liberal/progressive/left people and organizations to engage with radical feminist critiques of patriarchy. I knew the potential consequences when in 2014 I wrote my first article outlining an analysis rooted in the radical feminist perspective on transgenderism, but feminist colleagues had challenged me to get off the sidelines in the debate, and I knew they were right.

    Later that year, a local left/anarchist bookstore that I had long supported sent an email blast (without speaking to me first) announcing that it was severing all ties with me. Trans activists came to some of my public lectures on feminist topics to protest or try to shout me down, even though the talks weren’t about transgenderism. Several groups that had invited me to speak about such topics as the ecological crisis withdrew invitations after receiving complaints. And, of course, I can’t know how many people who might have wanted to include me in an activity declined to invite me just to avoid hassles.

    No person or organization has an obligation to associate with me, of course. The unfortunate aspect of all this was that none of the organizations or people who shunned or de-platformed me ever explained why my writing was unacceptable, beyond repeating accusations of transphobia. I was denounced for holding views that were asserted to be unacceptable, though no coherent argument to support that denunciation was ever presented to me.

    This pattern continued for the remainder of my time at the University of Texas and in Austin, as many friends and faculty colleagues with whom I had worked on a variety of education and organizing projects avoided me. After the 2016 presidential election, I was part of a group that organized a teach-in on the political consequences of Donald Trump’s presidency. By that time, I knew my role should be behind the scenes, to avoid everyone’s work being derailed by an objection to my involvement. I had already received enough criticism to know that if I were one of the speakers, trans activists might protest. So, I handled catering and publicity, out of public view, except that the publicity material included my name and email address. That was enough to generate at least one complaint to the university, from someone who said he wouldn’t feel safe attending, knowing that I was involved in any way.

    It turned out that was the last collective education project I was part of, either at UT or with liberal/progressive/left organizations in Austin. When I talked with people about collaborating on education events that in previous years they would have wanted to be involved in, they told me my trans writing made it impossible. More common was silence; faculty colleagues I had worked with in the past simply stopped returning emails or phone messages. I continued to work on projects, either alone or with one trusted friend who shared my analysis, but I was no longer welcome in most left circles.

    I also had a number of friends and university colleagues who agreed with my critique, but would acknowledge that position only when speaking privately. These were not shy people who were afraid of public conversation about contentious issues in general. But they had observed the backlash to any challenge to the liberal/progressive/left orthodoxy on transgenderism and wanted to avoid being attacked. I never held that against anyone; we all make strategic decisions about what political battles we want to fight.

    The strangest experiences came with a few friends who seemed afraid to talk even privately, always steering conversations away from the subject. In two cases, I never really understood what my friends thought about the issue. Why the hesitancy to discuss something that was so much a part of the public debate about sex/gender justice, which they both cared about deeply, even when talking in private? I can think of two reasons. They may not have trusted me to keep their remarks confidential, but in both cases I had kept confidences before and they had no reason to doubt me. The more plausible explanation is that they didn’t want to consider reasons to challenge the liberal position that was dogma in their institutions. One of them read my 2017 book, The End of Patriarchy, and wrote me to say he thought that the chapter on transgenderism was “a great expansion of your original argument. I just don’t like it, even though it appears to be perfectly logical.” He later told me that he found conversation about the subject “unsettling,” and I honored his request that we not discuss it further.

    While these experiences were at times stressful and generally unpleasant, women who have challenged the transgender-industrial complex tend to fare much worse. I never lost a job and have never been physically attacked.  I lost some friends and missed out on organizing efforts to which I think I could have contributed, but I had other friends to rely on and always found a way to continue doing educational programs on campus.

    Just as in the 9/11 example, my experience isn’t a story of how my freedom of expression was constrained. No governmental agency shut me down, and the rejection didn’t stop me from writing or speaking out. Many other radical feminists continue to write and speak, as well. But many more people have either muted themselves or been driven out of organizations. It’s hard to imagine how we will deepen our understanding of a subject as complex as transgenderism if people making reasonable arguments that challenge the current liberal dogma are constantly attacked.

    One last personal reflection. My biggest frustration is when trans activists tell me that my work is evidence of transphobia. Stonewall, a prominent UK LGBTQ+ organization, defines transphobia as the “fear or dislike of someone based on the fact they are trans, including denying their gender identity or refusing to accept it.”  I do not fear or dislike people who identify as transgender, and I don’t deny their own sense of their identity. Offering an alternative explanation of an experience is not refusing to accept the experience.

    This is not merely an academic question for me. As a child, I was short, skinny, effeminate, and late to hit puberty—I was the smallest boy in my class and lived with a constant fear of being targeted by other boys. I also grew up in an abusive household that made impossible any semblance of “normal” development. Until the age of thirty, I had no way to make sense of that experience and assumed I was just an oddball. When I began reading feminism, especially the radical feminist writers whom I found most compelling, I realized that parts of my experience were common in patriarchy. I had suffered in the way many boys in a patriarchal society suffer, and as a man I had sought to escape that suffering by conforming to patriarchal norms of masculinity. Feminism offered a way out of that trap.

    I have empathy for people who don’t fit conventional categories and face ridicule or violence for being different, in part because I have experienced those struggles and threats. I have tried to present arguments based on credible evidence and sound logic, but underneath those intellectual positions is my own struggle, pain, and grief, which I think has sensitized me to the struggle, pain, and grief of others. But emotions are by themselves not an argument. Evidence and logic matter. The transgender movement needs to engage the evidence and logic presented by radical feminism.

    Lessons learned?

    I’m not bitter about these incidents during my teaching career. I will always be grateful that I had a chance to earn a PhD and make a living teaching. The vast majority of my experiences at the University of Texas were not only positive but joyful.

    In the classroom, I prided myself on considering all relevant points of view. When lecturing to large classes, I would often make a point on one end of the stage, then walk deliberately to the other side and say, “On the other hand …” I didn’t pretend to be neutral—I had a point of view about which analyses were most compelling—but I worked hard to be fair in the presentation of conflicting views.

    I enjoyed engaging with colleagues and students who disagreed and encouraged them to challenge me. As I said often, “Reasonable people can disagree.” I apparently said that so often that at the end of one a semester a student gave me a coffee mug with those words printed on it. I occasionally heard from, or about, a conservative student who disliked my class on political grounds, but that was rare, though of course I can’t know how many students felt that way but never spoke to me about it.

    But outside the classroom, I made a conscious choice to advocate for political positions that I knew would be controversial. I never shied away from defending my views, and I had hoped that colleagues would do the same. I made it clear in public that I was speaking as a citizen, not a representative of the university. But I also argued that when I thought I had knowledge acquired as a professor that contributed to public discourse I should share it, precisely because I was an employee of the state of Texas. That strengthens democracy.

    I wish that university administrators had made that case to the public after 9/11, instead of pursuing the duck-and-cover strategy they chose. I wish my faculty colleagues would engage challenges to left/liberal dogma, such as in the transgender debate.

    As academics today struggle with a hostile culture, it’s important to fight back, to defend the value of higher education. But it’s also wise to reflect on our missteps.

    Where do threats to academic freedom come from? Political partisans, of course. But sometimes from the folks running universities and sometimes from faculty colleagues.

    The post Academic Freedom under Attack first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • In a move that threatens to constrain online communication, congressional Democrats are partnering with their Republican counterparts to repeal a niche but crucial internet law.

    According to tech trade publication the Information (3/21/25), Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.) has allied with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) to reintroduce a bill that would repeal Section 230, a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Section 230 dictates that when unlawful speech occurs online, the only party responsible is the speaker, not the hosting website or app or any party that shared the content in question.

    The post With Section 230 Repeal, Democrats, Media Offer New Censorship Tools appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Audio Advisory – Video Best Experienced With Headphones

    It would be very helpful of you to share this video across your social-media network, as it’s an issue which really needs to be brought to the widest possible audience. Thank you.

    This post was originally published on Digital Activism In Support Of Tibetan Independence.

  • Nearly five years ago, then-President Donald Trump released his first anti-diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) executive order. The executive order, intentionally erroneous in its claims that DEI practices violated civil rights laws, sent shock waves through the academic community. Despite its false claims and eventual overturning, the executive order provided a playbook for right-wing state…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In March 2023, Meeta, who worked as a community mobilizer and network coordinator with a prominent Delhi-based Indian NGO, lost her job of 15 years. Meeta was fired less than a month after her organization lost its status under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA), which governs the receipt and use of foreign funds by nonprofits in India. Organizations without a valid FCRA…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

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    Jeff Danziger: Some Israeli Hostages Are Home After Over a Year of Merciless War

    Jeff Danziger (1/20/25)

    “Watch your step,” says the soldier as he and a medic lead a hostage over a mound of corpses labeled “Over 40,000 Palestinians killed…” The caption reads, “Some Israeli Hostages Are Home After Years of Merciless War.” This cartoon by Jeff Danzinger (Rutland Herald, 1/20/25) was selected by editorial page editor Tony Doris to run in the Palm Beach Post (1/26/25).

    After the cartoon ran last month, a local Jewish activist group took offense at the perceived antisemitic nature of the anti-war cartoon. The Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County was so upset it purchased a full-page ad condemning the cartoon to run in the Sunday edition (2/9/25).

    That Doris and Danzinger are both of Jewish descent did not deter the complainers. Neither did their politics. Doris (Stet News, 3/2/25) describes himself as pro-Israel, as well as the Post‘s “only Jewish editor.” Danzinger told comics scholar Kent Worcester (Comics Journal, 11/05) that he agreed “with a great many things that the Republicans have been traditionally for,” and that he voted for George H.W. Bush twice.

    For his temerity to run an anti-war cartoon acknowledging the Palestinian dead, Doris was fired by Gannett, the conglomerate that owns hundreds of newspapers across the country, including the Post. Gannett issued a statement that the cartoon “did not meet our standards” and “would not have been published if the proper protocols were followed.” “We sincerely regret the error,” said the spokesperson for the Post, “and have taken appropriate action to prevent this from happening again.” Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) remarked that Gannet executives are “afraid of their shadow.”

    The Palestine exception

    Rob Rogers: Why do they hate us so much? (Gazans in a cage surrounded by missiles)

    Rob Rogers (8/7/14)

    Doris’ ordeal was similar to the one cartoonist Rob Rogers suffered ten years ago. Rogers drew Palestinians huddled in a tiny prison, beset on all sides by missiles and Israeli soldiers. “Why do they hate us so much?” one trooper muses (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 8/7/14).

    This cartoon, too, was characterized by pro-Israel readers as antisemitic. Richard Krugel of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Metropolitan Detroit proclaimed it something “out of the Nazi propaganda sheet Der Shturmer [sic]” (Oakland Press, 8/8/14). Rogers’ career survived the incident, but as the editorial page of Rogers’ home paper shifted right, he found himself out of a job (New York Times, 6/15/18; Extra!, 7/18).

    The experiences of Doris and Rogers are clear examples of what civil rights lawyer Michael Ratner termed the “Palestine exception to free speech” (Real News Network, 4/27/15). Support for Palestinian rights is deemed to be an antisemitic attack on Israel, and therefore outside the boundaries of acceptable speech. The Palestine exception is glaringly apparent if a survey is conducted of how Palestinians are treated in political cartoons, and what consequences cartoonists suffer for these artistic choices.

    ‘We side with evil’

    Kirk Walters: Occupying the Administration Building Today Is Not the Same as It Was in the '60s.... (Administrator offering refreshments to antisemitic protesters)

    Kirk Walters (10/18/23)

    Political cartoonists routinely compare Palestinians and the Palestinian cause to Nazis and Nazism. Henry Payne drew Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, as pro-Nazi, with bumper stickers reading “From Rhine River to the North Sea” and “Stop German Genocide” and “Beware Elders of Zion”  (GoComics, 6/4/24). Kirk Walters showed pro-Palestine protesters as tiki-torch wielding white supremacists. One protester looked identical to Adolf Hitler (King Features, 10/18/23).

    Gary Varvel drew a student returning home for Thanksgiving dinner clothed in an “I Heart Hamas” sweater and donning a Hitler mustache. “Son,” his father frets, “your mother and I are concerned about how much college has changed you!” (Creators Syndicate, 11/1/23).

    Symbols of Palestinian identity are equated with nefariousness. Two-time Pulitzer winner Michael Ramirez (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 5/2/24) explicitly placed the Palestinian flag at a rally side by side with a sign reading “We Side With Evil.” Other signs read “We Heart Terrorists” and “We Support Hamas.” Three days later, Ramirez (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 5/5/24) pinned a button reading “Hate” on a keffiyeh-wearing protester.

    Ramirez: I Remember When Going to College Was Supposed to Make You Smarter (College protesters with pro-"evil" banners)

    Michael Ramirez (5/2/24)

    Editorial cartoonists often make a false connection between pro-Palestine activism and antisemitism. After the first wave of protests on college campuses in Fall 2023, Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 10/18/23) drew a Halloween cartoon featuring a Frankenstein’s Monster labeled “Antisemitism” and a Dr. Frankenstein labeled “College Campuses,” shouting “It’s alive!”

    Bob Gorrell (Creators Syndicate, 4/30/24) had Joe Biden informing readers about “all those antisemitic, pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses.” Echoing President Trump’s description of the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Biden declared, “There are very fine people on both sides!”

    At Chip Bok’s “Back to School Sale for Your Pro-Hamas Student” (Creators Syndicate, 9/5/24) the title “Antisemitism for Dummies” was sold.

    Nor is this solely a quirk of the US: Canadian cartoonist Malcolm Mayes (Edmonton Journal, 11/23) depicted students chanting, “From the river to the sea/killing Jews is fine with me.”

    ‘Make Gaza great again!’

    Henry Payne: Odd. My Pager Just Exploded. (Rep. Tlaib with exploding pager.)

    Henry Payne (9/19/24)

    In one anti-Palestinian cartoon, the cartoonist made light of assassinating a member of Congress. After the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah, Henry Payne (National Review, 9/19/24) drew an exploding pager on the desk of Rashida Tlaib, also naming her a member of Hamas.

    Tlaib described this as “racism” that would incite “hate and violence against Arab and Muslim communities,” and Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud argued it showed that “anti-Arab bigotry and Islamophobia have become normalized in our media.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, herself not an Arab or Muslim, was less direct, although she also condemned the cartoon. “It further stokes the divide in our politics and does absolutely nothing to move us forward on the issues that matter,” she said (Metro Times, 9/20/24).

    Bok: Two State Solutions (cartoon illustrating how much better Gaza would be if ethnically cleansed)

    Chip Bok (2/7/25)

    After Trump revealed his plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, cartoonists lined up to endorse this proposed violation of international law. Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 2/7/25) had a beaming Trump announcing, “Make Gaza Great Again!” Chip Bok (Creators Syndicate, 2/7/25) showed Trump’s future casino and riviera as an improvement over United Nations administered refugee camps. Cheekily, it was labeled “Two State Solutions.” Payne (GoComics, 2/6/25) advertised a “Mar-a-Gaza” that will be “Hamas-free”—as well as Palestinian-free—once construction is finished.

    No mainstream American cartoonist would draw Israeli soldiers as Nazis, as Varvel, Gorrell and Payne did with Palestinians. It would be considered beyond the pale for an anti-war or pro-Palestinian cartoonist to crack a joke about assassinating a leading pro-Israel politician, as Payne did with Tlaib. Cartoon endorsements of ethnic cleansing of virtually any nationality other than Palestinian would be met with quite accurate comparisons to the oeuvre of Philipp Rupprecht (“Fips”), cartoonist for the pro-Nazi Der Stürmer.

    ‘Missed something profound’

    Michael Ramirez: How Dare Israel Attack Civilians(Cartoon of "Hamas" with children strapped to his body)

    Michael Ramirez (11/6/23)

    The consequences for the two approaches to cartooning could not be more different. When Varvel lost his spot at the Toronto Sun (12/21/23), it was not for his drawings of Palestinians, but rather a take on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (12/20/23) that Jewish groups found offensive. Payne’s cartoons still run in the National Review, and he kept his post as auto critic for the Detroit News.

    One of Ramirez’s cartoons (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 11/6/23), showing a snarling hook-nosed Arab labeled “Hamas,” was removed from the Washington Post after reader backlash. Editorial page editor David Shipley said that reader reactions calling the cartoon “racist” and “dehumanizing” showed that the Post “missed something profound, and divisive” (Washington Post, 11/8/23). Ramirez continues to be published at the Post.

    Because of syndication and the absorption of many newspapers into chains like Gannett, some media markets are only exposed to one side, cartoon-wise. In Detroit, for example, the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News publish under a joint operating agreement that ensures that the editorial cartoons in the News run in both newspapers. The most prominent syndicated cartoonist in the News is Ramirez, who declared Palestinians ontologically evil. This means that in the metro area with the largest Arab population in America, the political cartoons in both papers are overwhelmingly dominated by a virulently anti-Palestinian viewpoint.

    Benson: Yasir Ararat (Arafat depicted as a dead rat)

    Steve Benson (6/27/82)

    Tony Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) expressed concerns that limiting the range of acceptable opinion in editorial pages is bad for democracy. “Democracy needs journalists who care about the mission and not just about page views,” he said.

    Not only is it bad for democracy, it trivializes antisemitism and allows promoters of racism and ethnic cleansing off the hook. Indeed, despite acting as defenders of Jewish people, these cartoonists indulge in many of the same tropes that antisemitic caricaturists use. Editorial cartoonists may have progressed past depicting Yasser Arafat as a rodent caught in a Star of David–shaped mousetrap (Arizona Republic, 6/27/82), but there are still images of anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian racism on the editorial pages.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • A far-right, pro-Israel group with a history of support for terror and genocide is working closely with the Trump administration, preparing dossiers on thousands of pro-Palestine figures it wants deported from the United States. Betar U.S. is known to have had several meetings with senior government officials and has claimed credit for the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of the nationwide anti-genocide student demonstrations that began at Columbia University last year.

    Ross Glick, the group’s executive director until last month, noted that he met with a diverse set of influential lawmakers, including Democratic senator John Fetterman and aides to the Republican senators Ted Cruz and James Lankford.

    The post The Far-Right Hate Group Helping Trump Deport Israel’s Critics appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Yesterday, in the US Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on global threats with the five heads of intelligence agencies of the US government, Senator Tom Cotton, accused on national TV a group I have worked with for over 20 years, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, of being funded by the Communist Party of China.

    During the hearing CODEPINK activist Tighe Barry stood up following the presentation of the Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard’s lengthy statement about global threats to US national security and yelled ‘Stop Funding Israel,’ since neither Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton and Vice Chair Mark Warner had mentioned Israel in their opening statement nor  had Gabbard mentioned the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza in her statement either.

    As Capitol police were taking Barry out of the hearing room, in the horrific style of the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, Cotton maliciously said that Barry was a “CODEPINK lunatic that was funded by the Communist party of China.”  Cotton then said if anyone had something to say to do so.

    Refusing to buckle or be intimidated by Cotton’s lies about the funding of CODEPINK, I stood up and yelled, “I’m a retired Army Colonel and former diplomat. I work with CODEPINK, and it is not funded by Communist China.”  I too was hauled out of the hearing room by Capitol police and arrested.

    After I was taken out of the hearing room, Cotton libelously continued his McCarty lie, “The fact that Communist China funds CODEPINK which interrupts a hearing about Israel illustrates Director Gabbard’s point that China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are working together in greater concert than they ever had before.”

    Senator Cotton does not appreciate the responsibility he has in his one-month-old elevation to the chair of the Senate’s intelligence committee.

    Senator Cotton does not seem to care that his untruthful statements in a US Congressional hearing aired around the world can have immediate and dangerous consequences for those he lies about, their friends and family.  In today’s polarized political environment we know that the words of senior leaders can rile supporters into frenzies as we saw on January 6, 2021 with President Trump’s loyal supporters injuring many Capitol police and destroying parts of the nation’s capitol building in their attempt to stop the Presidential election proceedings.

    CODEPINK members have been challenging in the US Congress the war policies of five presidential administrations, beginning in 2001 with the Bush wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, long before Senator Cotton was elected as a US Senator in 2014.  We have been in the US Senate offices and halls twice as long as he has. We have nonviolently protested the war policies of Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden and now Trump again.

    After getting out of the Capitol Hill police station, a CODEPINK delegation went to Senator Cotton’s office in the Russell Senate Office building and made a complaint to this office staff.

    We are also submitting a complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee for the untrue and libelous statements Senator Cotton made in the hearing.

    The abduction and deportation of international students who joined protests of U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the scathing treatment of visitors who have wanted to enter our country and now the McCarthy intimidating tactics used by Senator Cotton in a Senate intelligence committee hearing of telling lies about individuals and organizations that challenge U.S. government politics, particularly its complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza must be called out and pushed back against.

    And we must push back against US Senators who actually receive funding from front groups for other countries.  Senator Cotton has received $1,197,989 from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to advocate for the genocidal policies of the State of Israel.

    The post Senate Intelligence Committee Hearing on Global Threats Turns into a McCarthy Hearing of Lies about CODEPINK: Women for Peace first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ANALYSIS: By Valerie A. Cooper, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

    Of all the contradictions and ironies of Donald Trump’s second presidency so far, perhaps the most surprising has been his shutting down the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) for being “radical propaganda”.

    Critics have long accused the agency — and its affiliated outlets such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia — of being a propaganda arm of US foreign policy.

    But to the current president, the USAGM has become a promoter of “anti-American ideas” and agendas — including allegedly suppressing stories critical of Iran, sympathetically covering the issue of “white privilege” and bowing to pressure from China.

    Propaganda is clearly in the eye of the beholder. The Moscow Times reported Russian officials were elated by the demise of the “purely propagandistic” outlets, while China’s Global Times celebrated the closure of a “lie factory”.

    Meanwhile, the European Commission hailed USAGM outlets as a “beacon of truth, democracy and hope”. All of which might have left the average person understandably confused: Voice of America? Wasn’t that the US propaganda outlet from World War II?

    Well, yes. But the reality of USAGM and similar state-sponsored global media outlets is more complex — as are the implications of the US agency’s demise.

    Public service or state propaganda?
    The USAGM is one of several international public service media outlets based in Western democracies. Others include Australia’s ABC International, the BBC World Service, CBC/Radio-Canada, France Médias Monde, NHK-World Japan, Deutsche Welle in Germany and SRG SSR in Switzerland.

    Part of the Public Media Alliance, they are similar to national public service media, largely funded by taxpayers to uphold democratic ideals of universal access to news and information.

    Unlike national public media, however, they might not be consumed — or even known — by domestic audiences. Rather, they typically provide news to countries without reliable independent media due to censorship or state-run media monopolies.

    The USAGM, for example, provides news in 63 languages to more than 100 countries. It has been credited with bringing attention to issues such as protests against covid-19 lockdowns in China and women’s struggles for equal rights in Iran.

    On the other hand, the independence of USAGM outlets has been questioned often, particularly as they are required to share government-mandated editorials.

    Voice of America has been criticised for its focus on perceived ideological adversaries such as Russia and Iran. And my own research has found it perpetuates stereotypes and the neglect of African nations in its news coverage.

    Leaving a void
    Ultimately, these global media outlets wouldn’t exist if there weren’t benefits for the governments that fund them. Sharing stories and perspectives that support or promote certain values and policies is an effective form of “public diplomacy”.

    Yet these international media outlets differ from state-controlled media models because of editorial systems that protect them from government interference.

    The Voice of America’s “firewall”, for instance, “prohibits interference by any US government official in the objective, independent reporting of news”. Such protections allow journalists to report on their own governments more objectively.

    In contrast, outlets such as China Media Group (CMG), RT from Russia, and PressTV from Iran also reach a global audience in a range of languages. But they do this through direct government involvement.

    CMG subsidiary CCTV+, for example, states it is “committed to telling China’s story to the rest of the world”.

    Though RT states it is an autonomous media outlet, research has found the Russian government oversees hiring editors, imposing narrative angles, and rejecting stories.

    Staff member with sign protesting in front of Voice of America sign.
    A Voice of America staffer protests outside the Washington DC offices on March 17, 2025, after employees were placed on administrative leave. Image: Getty Images/The Conversation

    Other voices get louder
    The biggest concern for Western democracies is that these other state-run media outlets will fill the void the USAGM leaves behind — including in the Pacific.

    Russia, China and Iran are increasing funding for their state-run news outlets, with China having spent more than US$6.6 billion over 13 years on its global media outlets. China Media Group is already one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, providing news content to more than 130 countries in 44 languages.

    And China has already filled media gaps left by Western democracies: after the ABC stopped broadcasting Radio Australia in the Pacific, China Radio International took over its frequencies.

    Worryingly, the differences between outlets such as Voice of America and more overtly state-run outlets aren’t immediately clear to audiences, as government ownership isn’t advertised.

    An Australian senator even had to apologise recently after speaking with PressTV, saying she didn’t know the news outlet was affiliated with the Iranian government, or that it had been sanctioned in Australia.

    Switched off
    Trump’s move to dismantle the USAGM doesn’t come as a complete surprise, however. As the authors of Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America described, the first Trump administration failed in its attempts to remove the firewall and install loyalists.

    This perhaps explains why Trump has resorted to more drastic measures this time. And, as with many of the current administration’s legally dubious actions, there has been resistance.

    The American Foreign Service Association says it will challenge the dismantling of the USAGM, while the Czech Republic is seeking EU support to keep Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty on the air.

    But for many of the agency’s journalists, contractors, broadcasting partners and audiences, it may be too late. Last week, The New York Times reported some Voice of America broadcasts had already been replaced by music.The Conversation

    Dr Valerie A. Cooper is lecturer in media and communication, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • ANALYSIS: By Valerie A. Cooper, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

    Of all the contradictions and ironies of Donald Trump’s second presidency so far, perhaps the most surprising has been his shutting down the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) for being “radical propaganda”.

    Critics have long accused the agency — and its affiliated outlets such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia — of being a propaganda arm of US foreign policy.

    But to the current president, the USAGM has become a promoter of “anti-American ideas” and agendas — including allegedly suppressing stories critical of Iran, sympathetically covering the issue of “white privilege” and bowing to pressure from China.

    Propaganda is clearly in the eye of the beholder. The Moscow Times reported Russian officials were elated by the demise of the “purely propagandistic” outlets, while China’s Global Times celebrated the closure of a “lie factory”.

    Meanwhile, the European Commission hailed USAGM outlets as a “beacon of truth, democracy and hope”. All of which might have left the average person understandably confused: Voice of America? Wasn’t that the US propaganda outlet from World War II?

    Well, yes. But the reality of USAGM and similar state-sponsored global media outlets is more complex — as are the implications of the US agency’s demise.

    Public service or state propaganda?
    The USAGM is one of several international public service media outlets based in Western democracies. Others include Australia’s ABC International, the BBC World Service, CBC/Radio-Canada, France Médias Monde, NHK-World Japan, Deutsche Welle in Germany and SRG SSR in Switzerland.

    Part of the Public Media Alliance, they are similar to national public service media, largely funded by taxpayers to uphold democratic ideals of universal access to news and information.

    Unlike national public media, however, they might not be consumed — or even known — by domestic audiences. Rather, they typically provide news to countries without reliable independent media due to censorship or state-run media monopolies.

    The USAGM, for example, provides news in 63 languages to more than 100 countries. It has been credited with bringing attention to issues such as protests against covid-19 lockdowns in China and women’s struggles for equal rights in Iran.

    On the other hand, the independence of USAGM outlets has been questioned often, particularly as they are required to share government-mandated editorials.

    Voice of America has been criticised for its focus on perceived ideological adversaries such as Russia and Iran. And my own research has found it perpetuates stereotypes and the neglect of African nations in its news coverage.

    Leaving a void
    Ultimately, these global media outlets wouldn’t exist if there weren’t benefits for the governments that fund them. Sharing stories and perspectives that support or promote certain values and policies is an effective form of “public diplomacy”.

    Yet these international media outlets differ from state-controlled media models because of editorial systems that protect them from government interference.

    The Voice of America’s “firewall”, for instance, “prohibits interference by any US government official in the objective, independent reporting of news”. Such protections allow journalists to report on their own governments more objectively.

    In contrast, outlets such as China Media Group (CMG), RT from Russia, and PressTV from Iran also reach a global audience in a range of languages. But they do this through direct government involvement.

    CMG subsidiary CCTV+, for example, states it is “committed to telling China’s story to the rest of the world”.

    Though RT states it is an autonomous media outlet, research has found the Russian government oversees hiring editors, imposing narrative angles, and rejecting stories.

    Staff member with sign protesting in front of Voice of America sign.
    A Voice of America staffer protests outside the Washington DC offices on March 17, 2025, after employees were placed on administrative leave. Image: Getty Images/The Conversation

    Other voices get louder
    The biggest concern for Western democracies is that these other state-run media outlets will fill the void the USAGM leaves behind — including in the Pacific.

    Russia, China and Iran are increasing funding for their state-run news outlets, with China having spent more than US$6.6 billion over 13 years on its global media outlets. China Media Group is already one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, providing news content to more than 130 countries in 44 languages.

    And China has already filled media gaps left by Western democracies: after the ABC stopped broadcasting Radio Australia in the Pacific, China Radio International took over its frequencies.

    Worryingly, the differences between outlets such as Voice of America and more overtly state-run outlets aren’t immediately clear to audiences, as government ownership isn’t advertised.

    An Australian senator even had to apologise recently after speaking with PressTV, saying she didn’t know the news outlet was affiliated with the Iranian government, or that it had been sanctioned in Australia.

    Switched off
    Trump’s move to dismantle the USAGM doesn’t come as a complete surprise, however. As the authors of Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America described, the first Trump administration failed in its attempts to remove the firewall and install loyalists.

    This perhaps explains why Trump has resorted to more drastic measures this time. And, as with many of the current administration’s legally dubious actions, there has been resistance.

    The American Foreign Service Association says it will challenge the dismantling of the USAGM, while the Czech Republic is seeking EU support to keep Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty on the air.

    But for many of the agency’s journalists, contractors, broadcasting partners and audiences, it may be too late. Last week, The New York Times reported some Voice of America broadcasts had already been replaced by music.The Conversation

    Dr Valerie A. Cooper is lecturer in media and communication, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • In the last decade, there has been a growing concern about a democratic deficit in Europe, while the liberal mainstream has replaced all other forms of thinking from the socio-political landscape. Moldova — where pressure on the opposition and independent media increases every year, and the ruling party always has the last word on all political issues — is not an exception.

    Since Maia Sandu’s Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) came to power in 2021, political pluralism and freedom of speech in the country have essentially ceased to exist. Against the backdrop of rapidly rising prices and poverty levels, the Moldovans began to hold mass protests demanding the government resignation. The authorities responded by shutting down a number of television channels and electronic media outlets under the pretext that they allegedly were spreading pro-Russian propaganda and provoking contradictions within the state. Later, a “hunt” for undesirable politicians and a fight against opposition parties began in the republic. Thus, in 2023, at the request of the government, Moldova’s Constitutional Court declared the Șor Party unconstitutional, and in May 2024, the country’s Justice Ministry asked a Chisinau court to place restrictions on political activities by the Chance Political Party.

    After the constitutional referendum was held on the same day as the presidential election in 2024, tensions within the country grew even deeper. Sandu was accused of intending to use the plebiscite to save her declining popularity amid the economic crisis and protests. According to the results of the referendum on EU membership, 50.35% supported the amendments; however, some opposition parties did not recognize the results of the vote. The dissatisfaction of Sandu’s opponents was also facilitated by the results of the presidential elections, which Party of Socialists of Moldova(PSRM) called dishonest and undemocratic, pointing to the unreasonable reduction of polling stations, blocking voters’ access to ballot drop boxes, as well as cases of falsification.

    Moldova is currently positioning itself as a democratic and liberal country. However, is this actually true? Numerous arrests of activists, the suspension of broadcasting of television channels as well as blocking of dozens of information sources that have opinions different from those of the government – does not all this indicate a complete elimination of freedom of speech and pluralism in the country? Moreover, the presence of a single “correct” opinion within the divided Moldovan society could lead to a situation where part of the population begins to turn towards a more extreme and radical opposition, prepared to engage in conflict with the current authorities. Thus, with its actions, Sandu’s team is paving the way for the emergence of far-right political parties in the country, similar to Alternative for Germany and Freedom Party of Austria. Increase in the number of such parties could lead to instability not only at the local level, but could also completely undermine the already fragile political situation within the EU. In this scenario, the prospects for cooperation between Europe and the United States would become even more dim.

    The post Moldova Could Become a Powder Keg of the European Union first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Here is a case that so richly displays the thorough-going corruptness of the U.S. Government so that to document it in its structural details — as will be done here — is to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the U.S. is, in fact, a dictatorship (controlled by a Deep State consisting not of its bureaucracy but of its billionaires), not at all a democracy, regardless of what the U.S. Constitution says; and it also displays how flagrantly our Constitution is routinely being violated by this Government, which, consequently, now must be seriously doubted as to this Government’s very legitimacy:

    Donald Trump as President is doing the work of his third-biggest political donor the Israeli-American thirty-billionaire Miriam Adelson, who demands Governmental punishment of students who protest against — or even just privately oppose — the Israel-U.S. ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

    While Israel provides the troops, America (under both Biden and now Trump) provides the weapons, ammunition, and satellite intelligence, that together are producing the slaughter in, and ethnic cleansing of, Gaza; and Adelson wants it to continue so as to eliminate completely (via extermination and/or expulsion) the people who live there. Students in America who have joined public demonstrations against this ethnic-cleansing are called by Adelson and her hired agent, Trump, “anti-Semites” and supporters of “terrorists” for opposing it. Here’s how this is playing out today:

    On March 19, the Wall Street Journal headlined “Columbia Is Nearing Agreement to Give Trump What He Wants: The school faces a deadline to yield to administration demands in negotiations over federal funding,” and reported that, in order to get Trump “to restore $400 million in federal funding,” Columbia University will punish enough the students who opposed the ethnic-cleansing of Gaza.

    The U.S. Government’s poster-boy of this ‘anti-Semitism’ and support of ‘terrorists’ is the Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, whom Adelson-Trump and their Administration, have in detention awaiting forced expulsion from the United States. On March 11, CNN headlined “Who is Mahmoud Khalil? Palestinian activist detained by ICE over Columbia University protests” and reported that, “‘As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other,’ he told CNN last spring when he was one of the negotiators representing student demonstrators during talks with Columbia University’s administration.” Here is the 2-minute video of him being arrested while his wife cries “I don’t know what to do!” and the federal agents refuse to identify themselves, as they drive her husband away in an unmarked car. Trump wants Khalil to be flown out of the country as soon as possible.

    Also on March 19, City Journal, of the right-wing, rabidly “corporationist” (as Mussolini proudly described himself) Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which had been set up and maintained by Ronald Reagan’s CIA chief Bill Casey and some billionaires, headlined “Who Are the Shadowy Figures Defending Mahmoud Khalil? The accused Hamas sympathizer is shrouded in mystery—and so are his supporters.” In the fascist world, not merely freedom of speech and of the press cannot be tolerated, but also freedom-of-association (which the Supreme Court accepts as being protected in order for the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment to be meaningful — even billionaires need freedom-of-association) cannot be tolerated — and this is today’s U.S.A. Whereas during the long period of U.S. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and of the Senator Joseph R. McCarthy witch-hunts against communists, freedom-of-association did not exist in the United States, it started to exist in order to protect businessmen, in Roberts v. United States Jaycees (1984), and then further in order to protect discrimination against homosexuals, in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000). But now, freedom-of-association likewise might, yet again, no longer exist in the U.S.

    Also on March 19, Politico made public another case, which, in some ways, is even more extreme than that of Khalil, especially against freedom-of-association. It headlined “Badar Khan Suri, a fellow at Georgetown, says he is being punished because of the suspected views of his wife, a U.S. citizen with Palestinian heritage. Masked immigration agents arrested a Georgetown University fellow and told him his visa had been revoked, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.” The Departments of State and of Homeland Security were involved in this action. The article says that Dr. Suri has no criminal record, and that “Suri is a postdoctoral fellow at the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, which is part of the [Georgetown] university’s School of Foreign Service. According to his court petition and a university directory, he is teaching a class this semester on ‘Majoritarianism and Minority Rights in South Asia.’ Suri has a Ph.D. in peace and conflict studies from a university in India.” Suri has been removed from his home and his wife in Virginia, and — en-route to a detention facility in Texas — is reported to be at “an Immigration and Customs Enforcement ‘staging’ center at the Alexandria, Louisiana, airport,” ultimately to be flown back to India. This is like, if the totalitarian-minded long-time and founding chief of the ‘Justice’ Department’s FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, were now the President of the United States (which, fortunately, he never was) — he, too, routinely violated the Constitution and broke the law that he was supposedly enforcing.

    Here is how the U.S. Supreme Court itself has produced these and other such results — blatant and increasingly routine violations of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment (among others) (as a therefore treasonous — anti-U.S.-Constitution — Supreme Court):

    The Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo ruling said that the existing political-campaign-expenditure ceiling imposed “direct and substantial restraints on the quantity of political speech” and so the Court invalidated three expenditure limitations as violating the First Amendment. In other words: they said that money is “speech” — the more spending of it in politics, the better (although the First Amendment says nothing about the “quantity” of “political speech” — the Supreme Court there invented that concern, though the Founders never expressed it) — and so any limitations on campaign-spending would violate the First Amendment’s free-speech clause. (The Court’s ruling even included the brazenly stupid falsehood: “The quantity of communication by the contributor does not increase perceptibly with the size of his contribution, since the expression rests solely on the undifferentiated, symbolic act of contributing.” So, a million-dollar contribution is merely “symbolic.”) The overall limitations on expenditures by federal candidates and their committees were therefore struck down by the Court, as being inconsistent with (their lie-based interpretation of) freedom-of-speech. Thus (despite their lie that all of this is merely “symbolic” — which they knew wasn’t at all true), people who donate more to politicians should have a bigger say in who wins office than people who can’t. This ruling — granting the rich person a bigger say in ‘our’ government than the poor person has — is widely considered to have opened the floodgates for corruption to control the U.S. Government.

    The Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling said that the anti-corruption interest is not sufficient to displace the speech in question from Citizens United, and that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” This ruling — based on that blatant lie by the U.S. Supreme Court — is widely considered to be the death-knell for any hope of democracy in the United States, because it opened the floodgates for corruption to rule the U.S. Government at the other end — this time, not at the candidates-end (like Buckley) but at the donors-end (the Citizens United donors-group), by the ruling’s alleging that a “corporation” is a “person,” whose free-speech right can be expressed by its political-campaign donations, without any legal limit (the more that corporations donate to political campaigns, the better, according to the U.S. Supreme Court).

    This leaves American politics in a perfectly libertarian (or “neoliberal”) condition, such that property (a person’s net worth — wealth) reigns (on a one-dollar-one-vote basis); persons (one-person-one-vote) really don’t rule in America, because the super-rich need only to donate enough to the most-corrupt candidates so as to defeat any honest political competitor (i.e., any candidate who actually intends to fulfill on his/her public campaign-promises to the voters). Only the campaign-promises (usually made in private) to the mega-donors will be actuated as governmental policies once the winner is in office. And the scientific findings unanimously CONFIRM that at least ever since 1980, this is the way it is, in the United States.

    And once this is the way it is, the public (the voters, the consumers, the workers — the public, as opposed to the OWNERS of corporations — and especially the billionaires who control the corporations) are, in any situation that involves their personal rights as against the corporate owners, actually powerless, because the super-rich now control the Government and can always far outspend (on lawyers and anything else) any one of them (any non-rich person). This is NOT “equal justice under law.” Or, as one of the mega-billionaires himself said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (There are only around a thousand billionaires in the U.S., and they rule over the entire population of 340 million.) That statement, made in 2006, is by now, very clearly an understatement: the billionaires have already won. The U.S. Constitution already means only what America’s super-rich WANT it to mean. If you want it to mean something else than what they want it to mean, then you will need to be able to outspend them to achieve that in the actual Government. (And the billionaires control almost all of the ‘nonprofits’ that advertise they represent “the public interest”; so, if what you want is inconsistent with what the billionaires want, then you won’t get any help from them to make that case.) This is the present reality, and only a Second American Revolution might be able to restore some democracy here, because, right now, we don’t have any — none, at all, in the United States of America. This is a proven fact — proven many times over. Anyone who continues to refer to the U.S. as being a “democracy” is either a fool or a liar. And America isn’t a dictatorship by “the bureaucrats,” nor by “the Democrats,” nor by “the Republicans” — it is being done by the billionaires, ones such as Adelson on the Republican Party side, and ones such as Soros on the Democratic Party side, who are collectively puppet-masters for the entire corrupt political show, which show elicits anger from the public against the puppets, instead of against the puppeteers, who fund and run the show.

    On March 19, Dawn News in Pakistan headlined “Mahmoud Khalil Wins Legal Battle Over Deportation” and reported that a judge ruled that Khalil’s case must be heard by a court, not result in his immediate deportation, and that a court in New Jersey must consider whether his rights of free speech and due proces have been violated by Trump. No timeline was set for a ruling, and so Khalil might continue in prison in Louisiana for a long time while his appeal moves forward in the courts.

    On the night of March 20, ABC News headlined “Judge blocks deportation of Georgetown fellow detained by immigration authorities” and reported that Badar Khan Suri’s lawyers had filed suit against the U.S. by saying that “the Trump administration appeared to be targeting the Georgetown University fellow due to his wife’s identity as a Palestinian and her constitutionally protected speech.” So, now, the judge is requiring Trump’s people to justify their action.

    Therefore, even if these and other similar cases might produce ultimate wins for the victims, their cases could produce long terms in prison while the courts consider them. If, at the end of these cases, Trump loses, there is still the question of whether Trump will do what judges order him to do. Of course, if he won’t, then congressional Democrats might try to impeach and remove him. At that point, it will be again Democratic Party billionaires versus Republican Party billionaires. What could be more serious would be if the result would be a Constitutional crisis: a contest of wills between the Executive and the Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. That would be a much better, more substantive, outcome. It could produce the necessary Second American Revolution, if the American public decide to make it so. Leaving such matters only to the billionaires to settle, needs to stop at some point, because, otherwise, America will simply continue to rot. The more that the billionaires continue to succeed against the public, the more that the country itself will continue to rot.

    The post How Miriam Adelson Exemplifies the Supreme Court’s Rulings that Political Corruption Is Protected by the 1st Amendment first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone is a harrowing account of life in Gaza as seen through the eyes of Palestinian children. It provides a rare window into young lives devastated by months of relentless bombings, displacements, and unspeakable horrors.

    It aired on 17 February on BBC Two, but was swiftly removed from iPlayer four days later, following fierce lobbying from pro-Israel voices. The reasons given for its removal? Well, they simply don’t add up.

    The main objection was that the father of Abdullah, the 13-year-old narrator, is the deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza’s Hamas-run government. But like it or not, it’s a fact of life in Gaza that almost anyone living there will have some connection to Hamas. Hamas runs the government, so anyone working in an official capacity must also work with Hamas. Not only that, but Abdullah’s father is hardly a “terrorist leader” as was claimed. He is a technocrat, in a role concerned with agriculture, not politics or military, who even studied at UK universities.

    Other objections included the risk of payments potentially funding Hamas. But as Hoyo Films and now the boy himself have confirmed, Abdullah was paid a very small sum via his sister’s bank account which was used to cover basic living expenses. And the complaints around the use of antisemitic language have been rebuffed by many – including Jewish Voice for Labour. The word ‘“Yehudi” is simply Arabic for “Israeli,” and is used by Jewish Israeli journalist Yuval Abrahamto to describe himself in the Oscar-winning film No Other Land.

    Crucially, absolutely nothing in the film has been found to be factually inaccurate.

    The film received five stars in the Guardian and the Times, which described it as “exceptional”. It’s an outstanding, powerful film and a crucial piece of journalism. Since international journalists are banned from Gaza, there are scant opportunities to witness Gazan children’s stories. This film gave us a small insight and humanised Palestinian children.

    Why then, is an innocent child, the victim of unimaginable suffering, put under such intense scrutiny as to whether or not they should be allowed to tell their story?

    Consider the source

    When you consider the source of the complaints, you can’t help but feel like the humanisation of Palestinians was precisely the problem.

    Spearheading the campaign to have the documentary removed from public view was Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK. Throughout her political career, Hotovely has gone out of her way to dehumanise Palestinians, accusing them of being “thieves of history” who have no heritage, and calling the Nakba – the violent mass displacement of Palestinians – “an Arab lie.” More recently, she claimed there was “no humanitarian crisis” in Gaza.

    Despite strong counterprotests from a far greater number of people wanting the documentary to stay put – including over 1,000 industry professionals and more than 600 British Jews – the BBC bowed to pressure from the pro-Israel lobby, and dutifully took the documentary down.

    That’s why I decided to start a petition, calling on the BBC to reconsider its decision, and allow Palestinian children their right to be heard. The petition quickly gained lots of support and now has over 25,000 signatures.

    Failing Palestinian children

    Not long after I started the petition, it emerged that Abdullah, the film’s 13-year-old narrator, has experienced harassment as a result of the kickback against the film, and now fears for his life. “I did not agree to the risk of me being targeted in any way”, he said. And “[if] anything happens to me, the BBC is responsible for it.”

    Putting children’s safety and mental wellbeing at risk is not only blatantly wrong, but is in breach of the BBC’s own guidelines on safeguarding young people. Sadly, Abdullah’s was not an isolated case.

    In a recent interview with the Independent, former BBC newsreader Karishma Patel explained her reason for quitting the BBC: its longstanding refusal to show the full extent to which Irael is harming Palestinian children. She recalls how she begged the BBC to cover five-year-old Hind Rajab’s story while she was still alive, trapped inside a car with her murdered relatives. The BBC chose not to, only naming her after she was killed, and not even making clear in the headline who had done it. “The BBC failed Hind,” says Patel. “And it has failed Palestinian children again in pulling the [Gaza] documentary.”

    I’ve just written to Tim Davie, Controller-General of the BBC, to draw his attention to the huge number of people who want the documentary to be reinstated, and why the reasons put forward to justify its removal simply do not add up. I told him, “Anyone who is offended by a child sharing their lived experiences of survival can choose not to watch it. But do not deny innocent children – who have experienced unimaginable grief and loss – the right to tell their stories.”  You can read my full letter here.

    Let’s see if he responds. The BBC didn’t bother reaching out to Abdullah to apologise to him after they pulled the film. So I’m not holding out too much hope.

    The post In Pulling the Gaza Documentary, the BBC is Failing Palestinian Children first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Despite winning an Oscar, the Israeli-Palestinian-made film No Other Land cannot be found on any streaming platforms in the United States, making independent cinemas the only places to view it. However, in Miami Beach, even featuring the film will get you labeled an antisemite and kicked out of the city.

    Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner, who is Jewish and has deep personal and political ties to Israel, stirred controversy last week for seeking to shut down an independent art house cinema over its showing of the “No Other Land” documentary after attempting to pressure organizers to cancel a planned screening. Meiner claims that the film is antisemitic and a “propaganda attack on the Jewish people that is not consistent with the values of our City and residents.”

    The post How Miami Beach Became A Lab For Pro-Israel Censorship Laws appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • A cinema house in Miami Beach, Florida, is urging city residents to oppose the city’s attempt to censor them and terminate their lease agreement after the theater showed an Oscar-winning documentary film that focuses on Israel’s apartheid and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. City leaders, including Mayor Steven Meiner, have accused the theater, O Cinema, of promulgating “pro-Hamas” and…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Washington, D.C., March 15, 2025The Committee to Protect Journalists urges United States congressional leaders to protect the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) after President Trump signed an executive order on Friday aimed at dismantling the parent of Voice of America and six other federal agencies.

    “It is outrageous that the White House is seeking to gut the Congress-funded agency supporting independent journalism that challenges narratives of authoritarian regimes around the world,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna in New York. “We call on congressional leaders to protect this critical agency, which provides uncensored news in countries where the press is restricted.”

    In addition to Voice of America (VOA), USAGM funds Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and Radio Free Asia. VOA recorded weekly global audiences of more than 350 million in 2023, and RFE/RL reaches more than 47 million people in 23 countries every week. The agency operated with a budget of more than $886 million in 2024 and employed more than 3,500 people. USAGM also subsidizes annual training for hundreds of media professionals around the world. 

    CPJ’s research shows that journalists for VOA and RFE/RL often put themselves at risk by reporting in highly censored or dangerous countries.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Once the principle is established that the government can arrest and jail protesters… officials will use it to silence opposition broadly.

    — Heather Cox Richardson, historian

    You can’t have it both ways.

    You can’t live in a constitutional republic if you allow the government to act like a police state.

    You can’t claim to value freedom if you allow the government to operate like a dictatorship.

    You can’t expect to have your rights respected if you allow the government to treat whomever it pleases with disrespect and an utter disregard for the rule of law.

    There’s always a boomerang effect.

    Whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now—whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting America’s borders or making America great again—rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

    Arresting political activists engaged in lawful, nonviolent protest activities is merely the shot across the bow.

    The chilling of political speech and suppression of dissident voices are usually among the first signs that you’re in the midst of a hostile takeover by forces that are not friendly to freedom.

    This is how it begins.

    Consider that Mahmoud Khalil, an anti-war protester and recent graduate of Columbia University, was arrested on a Saturday night by ICE agents who appeared ignorant of his status as a legal U.S. resident and his rights thereof. That these very same ICE agents also threatened to arrest Mahmoud’s eight-months-pregnant wife, an American citizen, is also telling.

    This does not seem to be a regime that respects the rights of the people.

    Indeed, these ICE agents, who were “just following orders” from on high, showed no concern that the orders they had been given were trumped up, politically motivated and unconstitutional.

    If this is indeed the first of many arrests to come, what’s next? Or more to the point, who’s next?

    We are all at risk.

    History shows that when governments claim the power to silence dissent—whether in the name of national security, border protection, or law and order—that power rarely remains limited. What starts as a crackdown on so-called “threats” quickly expands to include anyone who challenges those in power.

    President Trump has made it clear that Mahmoud’s arrest is just “the first arrest of many to come.” He has openly stated his intent to target noncitizens who engage in activities he deems contrary to U.S. interests—an alarmingly vague standard that seems to change at his whim, the First Amendment be damned.

    If history is any guide, the next targets will not just be immigrants or foreign-born activists. They will be American citizens who dare to speak out.

    If you need further proof of Trump’s disregard for constitutional rights, look no further than his recent declaration that boycotting Tesla is illegal—a chilling statement that reveals his fundamental misunderstanding of both free speech and the rule of law.

    For the record, there is nothing illegal about exercising one’s First Amendment right of speech, assembly, and protest in a nonviolent way to bring about social change by boycotting private businesses. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-0 in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. (1982) that nonviolent boycotts are a form of political speech which are entitled to First Amendment protection.

    The problem, unfortunately, when you’re dealing with a president who believes that he can do whatever he wants because he is the law is that anyone and anything can become a target.

    Mahmoud is the test case.

    As journalists Gabe Kaminsky, Madeleine Rowley, and Maya Sulkin point out, Mahmoud’s arrest for being a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States” (note: he is not actually accused of breaking any laws) is being used as a blueprint for other arrests to come.

    What this means is that anyone who dares to disagree with the government and its foreign policy and express that disagreement could be considered a threat to the country’s “national security interests.”

    Yet the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.

    Indeed, the First Amendment does more than give us a right to criticize our country: it makes it a civic duty. Certainly, if there is one freedom among the many spelled out in the Bill of Rights that is especially patriotic, it is the right to criticize the government.

    Unfortunately, the Deep State doesn’t take kindly to individuals who speak truth to power.

    This is nothing new, nor is it unique to any particular presidential administration.

    Throughout history, U.S. presidents have used their power to suppress dissent. The Biden administration equated the spread of “misinformation” with terrorism. Trump called the press “the enemy of the people” and suggested protesting should be illegal. Obama expanded anti-protest laws and cracked down on whistleblowers. Bush’s Patriot Act made it a crime to support organizations the government deemed terrorist, even in lawful ways. This pattern stretches back centuries—FDR censored news after Pearl Harbor, Woodrow Wilson outlawed criticism of war efforts, and John Adams criminalized speaking against the government.

    Regardless of party, those in power have repeatedly sought to limit free speech. What’s new is the growing willingness to criminalize political dissent under the guise of national security.

    Clearly, the government has been undermining our free speech rights for quite a while now, but Trump’s antagonism towards free speech is taking this hostility to new heights.

    The government has a history of using crises—real or manufactured—to expand its power.

    Once dissent is labeled a threat, it’s only a matter of time before laws meant for so-called extremists are used against ordinary citizens. Criticizing policy, protesting, or even refusing to conform could be enough to put someone on a watchlist.

    We’ve seen this before.

    The government has a long list of “suspicious” ideologies and behaviors it uses to justify surveillance and suppression. Today’s justification may be immigration; tomorrow, it could be any form of opposition.

    This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.

    It’s just a matter of time.

    It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results, etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.

    The groundwork has already been laid.

    Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military can detain and imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.

    So it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government could get you labeled as a terrorist.

    After all, it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore, especially given that the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

    This is what happens when you not only put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police but also give those agencies liberal authority to lock individuals up for perceived wrongs.

    It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.

    Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives. And for as long as we let them, government officials will continue to trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of the people.

    Yet the government can only go as far as “we the people” allow. Therein lies the problem.

    This is not just about one administration or one set of policies. This is a broader pattern of governmental overreach that has been allowed to unfold, unchecked and unchallenged. And at the heart of this loss of freedom is a fundamental misunderstanding—or even a deliberate abandonment—of what sovereignty really means in America.

    Sovereignty is a dusty, antiquated term that harkens back to an age when kings and emperors ruled with absolute power over a populace that had no rights. Americans turned the idea of sovereignty on its head when they declared their independence from Great Britain and rejected the absolute authority of King George III. In doing so, Americans claimed for themselves the right to self-government and established themselves as the ultimate authority and power.

    In other words, as the preamble to the Constitution states, in America, “we the people”—sovereign citizens—call the shots.

    So, when the government acts, it is supposed to do so at our bidding and on our behalf, because we are the rulers.

    That’s not exactly how it turned out, though, is it?

    In the 200-plus years since we boldly embarked on this experiment in self-government, we have been steadily losing ground to the government’s brazen power grabs, foisted upon us in the so-called name of national security.

    The government has knocked us off our rightful throne. It has usurped our rightful authority. It has staged the ultimate coup. Its agents no longer even pretend that they answer to “we the people.”

    This is how far our republic has fallen and how desensitized “we the people” have become to this constant undermining of our freedoms.

    If we are to put an end to this steady slide into totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none, we must begin by refusing to allow the politics of fear to shackle us to a dictatorship.

    President Trump wants us to believe that the menace we face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.

    Don’t believe it. That argument has been tried before.

    The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence and illegal immigration have all been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.

    We are walking a dangerous path right now.

    Political arrests. Harassment. Suppression of dissident voices. Retaliation. Detention centers for political prisoners.

    These are a harbinger of what’s to come if the Trump administration carries through on its threats to crack down on any and all who exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech and protest.

    We are being acclimated to bolder power grabs, acts of lawlessness, and a pattern of intimidation, harassment, and human rights violations by government officials. And yet, in the midst of this relentless erosion of our freedoms, the very concept of sovereignty—the foundational idea that the people, not the government, hold ultimate power—has been all but forgotten.

    “Sovereignty” used to mean something fundamental in America: the idea that the government serves at the will of the people, that “we the people” are the rightful rulers of this land, and that no one, not even the president, is above the law. But today, that notion is scarcely discussed, as the government continues its unchecked expansion.

    We have lost sight of the fact that our power is meant to restrain the government, not the other way around.

    Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted, derailed or desensitized.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the moment these acts of aggression becomes the new normal, authoritarianism won’t be a distant threat; it will be reality.

    The post When Dissent Becomes a Crime: The War on Political Speech Begins first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Columbia University administrators garnered widespread condemnation last year for overseeing a violent crackdown on students who protested against U.S. support for Israeli war crimes in Gaza, but those actions against pro-Palestinian students didn’t stop the Trump administration from cutting contracts and grants for the school on Friday. The White House announced it was canceling contracts…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • As the Trump administration engages in a frontal assault on the teaching of race and ethnicity at the K-12 level, a quieter but no less important battle is shaping up in deep blue California. Communities of color are mobilizing statewide to defeat AB 1468, the latest bill to emerge from the CA Legislative Jewish Caucus (LJC) in its campaign to censor Palestinian voices in ethnic studies classes, and police all ethnic studies content along with it.

    Although the words “Gaza,” “Palestine” and “Israel” are nowhere to be found in the proposed legislation, the language of AB 1468 restricts the discipline to the “domestic experience” of “marginalized people” to discourage teachers from developing lessons on the impact of Israeli settler colonialism on Palestinian American and Muslim communities.

    The post California Teachers Fight Palestine Censorship appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • For Kathy Zappitello, it was the Dobbs decision. For Mary Kunesh, it was the gutting of licensing requirements for school media specialists. For Ilana Stonebraker, an academic librarian who ran for — and won — a seat on the Tippecanoe County Council in 2018, it was the first election of Donald Trump. “I felt it viscerally,” she told Truthout. “I needed to do something tangible.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Over 500 film, TV, and media workers have condemned BBC executives for “racism” and “censorship” after the British broadcaster pulled a documentary highlighting the horrific impact the US–Israeli genocide in Gaza has had on Palestinian children.

    “As industry professionals who craft stories for the British public, including for the BBC, we condemn the weaponization of a child’s identity and the racist insinuation that Palestinian narratives must be scrutinized through a lens of suspicion,” the letter reads.

    The letter also condemned a “racist” and “dehumanizing” campaign targeting the film ‘Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone,’ which the BBC removed from its iPlayer streaming service after pressure from pro-Israel activists.

    The post Media Workers Condemn BBC For ‘Dehumanizing’ Censorship Of Gaza Documentary appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The post Community Standards first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • On Thursday morning, as scheduled, author and activist Yves Engler was arrested by the Montreal police for his social media posts criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza. Before turning himself in to Montreal Police at 980 Guy Street, Engler addressed the media, denouncing the politically motivated charges against him and the broader crackdown on those speaking out against Israeli violence.

    Surrounded by supporters, Engler reaffirmed his commitment to freedom of expression and criticized the Montreal police’s collaboration with anti-Palestinian figures. He highlighted the absurdity of the new charges, which claim he harassed the police simply by writing about the accusations already brought against him.

    This arrest follows a campaign led by anti-Palestinian media personality Dahlia Kurtz, who lobbied for Engler to be charged after he called out her pro-Israel rhetoric. Over 2,500 people have emailed the Montreal police, demanding they drop the charges.

    Watch Engler’s final words before entering police custody.

    The post Yves Engler Arrested for Criticizing Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • An investigation has exposed the tech firm’s cooperation with autocratic regimes to remove unfavourable content

    Google has cooperated with autocratic regimes around the world, including the Kremlin in Russia and the Chinese Communist party, to facilitate censorship requests, an Observer investigation can reveal.

    The technology company has engaged with the administrations of about 150 countries since 2011 that want information scrubbed from their public domains.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • In its eagerness to appease supporters of Israel, the media is happy to ride roughshod over due process and basic rights. It’s damaging Australia’s (and New Zealand’s?) democracy.

    COMMENTARY: By Bernard Keane

    Two moments stand out so far from the Federal Court hearings relating to Antoinette Lattouf’s sacking by the ABC, insofar as they demonstrate how power works in Australia — and especially in Australia’s media.

    The first is how the ABC’s senior management abandoned due process in the face of a sustained lobbying effort by a pro-Israel group to have Lattouf taken off air, under the confected basis she was “antisemitic”.

    Managing director David Anderson admitted in court that there was a “step missing” in the process that led to her sacking — in particular, a failure to consult with the ABC’s HR area, and a failure to discuss the attacks on Lattouf with Lattouf herself, before kicking her out.

    To this, it might be added, was acting editorial director Simon Melkman’s advice to management that Lattouf had not breached any editorial policies.

    Anderson bizarrely singled out Lattouf’s authorship, alongside Cameron Wilson, of a Crikey article questioning the narrative that pro-Palestinian protesters had chanted “gas the Jews”, as basis for his concerns about her, only for one of his executives to point out the article was “balanced and journalistically sound“.

    That is, by the ABC’s own admission, there was no basis to sack Lattouf and the sacking was conducted improperly. And yet, here we are, with the ABC tying itself in absurd knots — no such race as Lebanese, indeed — spending millions defending its inappropriate actions in response to a lobbying campaign.

    The second moment that stands out is a decision by the court early in the trial to protect the identities of those calling for Lattouf’s sacking.

    Abandoned due process
    The campaign that the group rolled out prompted the ABC chair and managing director to immediately react — and the ABC to abandon due process and procedural fairness. Yet the court protects their identities.

    The reasoning — that the identities behind the complaints should be protected for their safety — may or may not be based on reasonable fears, but it’s the second time that institutions have worked to protect people who planned to undermine the careers of people — specifically, women — who have dared to criticise Israel.

    The first was when some members — a minority — of a WhatsApp group supposedly composed of pro-Israel “creatives” discussed how to wreck the careers of, inter alia, Clementine Ford and Lauren Dubois for their criticism of Israel.

    The publishing of the identities of this group was held by both the media and the political class to be an outrageous, antisemitic act of “doxxing”, and the federal government rushed through laws to make such publications illegal.

    No mention of making the act of trying to destroy people’s careers because they hold different political views — or, cancel culture, as the right likes to call it — illegal.

    Whether it’s courts, politicians or the media, it seems that the dice are always loaded in favour of those wanting to crush criticism of Israel, while its victims are left to fend for themselves.

    Human rights lawyer and fighter against antisemitism Sarah Schwartz has been repeatedly threatened with (entirely vexatious) lawsuits by Israel supporters for her criticism of Israel, and her discussion of the exploitation of Australian Jews by Peter Dutton.

    Targeted by another News Corp smear campaign
    She’s been targeted by yet another News Corp smear campaign, based on nothing more than a wilfully misinterpreted slide. She has no government or court rushing to protect her.

    Meanwhile, Peter Lalor, one of Australia’s finest sports journalists (and I write as someone who can’t abide most sports journalism) lost his job with SEN because he, too, dared to criticise Israel and call out the Palestinian genocide. No-one’s rushing to his aide, either.

    No powerful institutions are weighing in to safeguard his privacy, or protect him from the consequences of his opinions.

    The individual cases add up to a pattern: Australian institutions, and especially its major media institutions, will punish you for criticising Israel.

    Pro-Israel groups will demand you be sacked, they will call for your career to be destroyed. Those groups will be protected.

    Media companies will ride roughshod over basic rights and due process to comply with their demands. You will be smeared and publicly vilified on completely spurious bases. Politicians will join in, as Jason Clare did with the campaign against Schwartz and as Chris Minns is doing in NSW, imposing hate speech laws that even Christian groups think are a bad idea.

    Damaging the fabric of democracy
    This is how the campaign to legitimise the Palestinian genocide and destroy critics of the Netanyahu government has damaged the fabric of Australia’s democracy and the rule of law.

    The basic rights and protections that Australians should have under a legal system devoted to preventing discrimination can be stripped away in a moment, while those engaged in destroying people’s careers and livelihoods are protected.

    Ill-advised laws are rushed in to stifle freedom of speech. Australian Jews are stereotyped as a politically convenient monolith aligned with the Israeli government.

    The experience of Palestinians themselves, and of Arab communities in Australia, is minimised and erased. And the media are the worst perpetrators of all.

    Bernard Keane is Crikey’s politics editor. Before that he was Crikey’s Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics. First published by Crikey.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The Swiss official who ordered the arrest of renowned Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah justified doing so on the false and defamatory basis that Abunimah is “an Islamist Jew-hater.” Mario Fehr, the head of Zurich’s Department of Security, made the bogus accusation in a recent comment to the Swiss publication NZZ, which also falsely characterized Abunimah as an “Islamist” and an “extremist.”

    Swiss authorities detained Abunimah on Jan. 25, after they initially allowed him entry into Switzerland following an hour-long interrogation.

    The post Swiss Official Who Jailed Journalist Ali Abunimah Is Pro-Israel Fanatic appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.