The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) used to be a regulatory body established by the federal government. As of late, the CRTC has been acting as a state censorship body. That the CRTC is even considering banning the Fox News Network from Canadian distribution due to complaints from activist groups shows just how broad the CRTC feels its mandate for controlling content is.
Do we even need a CRTC nowadays?
An LGBTQ rights group asked the CRTC to ban Fox News over ‘false and horrifying claims’ made by host Tucker Carlson regarding transgender individuals
h/t XC
Online activists are the new revolutionaries and, as with their historical counterparts, they are becoming radicalised and violent in pursuit of their political goals.
The press at large have been ignoring most of this thuggish behaviour because it doesn’t fit with their official narrative of weakness and victimhood. Even when public figures such as female author JK Rowling found themselves receiving rape and bomb threats, the press remained reluctant to openly criticise the trans movement.
Why is anyone shocked that authors reflect their times?
The republic of letters has been providing the world with some characteristic examples of courage in recent years. In 2020, we had the sight of junior staffers staging a walkout over the plan of their employer, Hachette, to publish a memoir by Woody Allen. The book was duly canceled, because what major publisher would ever want to go against the whims of a few twentysomething graduates in their first job?
“I stand by my words.”
In 2006, I visited New York City for the first time. A member of the city’s cultural cognoscenti flew me over, on the strength of one blog comment I had left, to participate in a colloquium on the digital transformation of society. That experience left me with an indelible love of the Big Apple: the beating heart of intellectual life in America—and the world. It’s a sleepless, restless, questioning place, where you could find yourself bantering about metaphysics with someone over pizza at 3 a.m., then never see him again.
Last week The Telegraph reported that Agatha Christie’s novels are being sanitized for re-release. HarperCollins, their publisher, is removing references to physique, race and ethnicity in new editions of Miss Marple and selected Poirot novels. Christie joins Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming on the list of dead literary icons whose works have met similar fates in recent weeks. Shakespeare, Dr. Seuss and Mark Twain have been curbed in other ways. If it seems like small potatoes, you may be missing the big picture. When publishers defile literature, you know the writing is on the wall.
h/t felis gracilis
The publishers of “Gone with the Wind” will amend the latest printing of the classic American novel to include a trigger warning over racism and a new introduction that addresses “white supremacy.”
The London-based publishing house, Pan Macmillan, determined that a cautionary note was necessary to include with Margaret Mitchell’s detailed depiction of slavery in America during the Civil War.
“Rechte Richter” (“Right-Wing Judges”; no English edition so far) is a book published in 2022 by journalist and trained lawyer Joachim Wagner. Its subtitle asks the question: “A danger to the rule of law?”
Wagner is referring to cases like that of Jens Maier, who was a member of Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party between 2017 and 2021. After his spell in parliament, he wanted to return to his post as a judge in the eastern state of Saxony.
This, however, didn’t happen, because Saxony’s Justice Minister Katja Meier took the matter to court and was successful: Maier, categorized as a right-wing extremist by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), was sent into early retirement. The verdict is not yet final, however, because the suspended judge can appeal the decision.
Michigan State University (MSU) issued its latest style guide and Chairman Mao couldn’t be happier.
The style guide is updated yearly and appears easily translatable from its original Chinese (that’s a joke… I think… ). The new additions are sure to annoy you—and brainwash your kids—who are forced to toss the 1st Amendment into the trash lest they “offend” the school’s incoming milksops.
It turns out that the disruption by several dozen Stanford University law school students of a speech to be given by federal judge Kyle Duncan was not a spontaneous exercise of freedom to protest.
It was a well-planned and carefully orchestrated effort to prevent other Stanford students from hearing the judge’s conservative views. The disruption was organized by the local chapter of National Lawyers Guild as part of a nationwide effort to suppress conservative speech. Although not all the participants were associated with the NLG, the main organizers were. The Guild praised “every single person” who participated in the disruption, and called it “Stanford Law School at its best,” suggesting it would confront “judicial architects of systems of oppression” with “social consequences for their actions.” Here the consequences went beyond “social” to censorial.
A Christian theology lecturer who reportedly claimed he was threatened with a referral to a counter-terror programme after tweeting that ‘homosexuality is invading the church’ has been sacked.
Dr Aaron Edwards, 37, was sacked from Cliff College, Derbyshire, after he was found to have brought it ‘into disrepute’ following a social media post.
The father-of-five, who refers to himself as a ‘cancelled Christian lecturer’, is understood to have subsequently been informed he could be referred to the government-led counter-terror counter-extremism programme Prevent.
SEXISM in sports writer melts down into shrieking pool of DUMB over James Reimer’s LGBTQ jersey statement
A statement from Goaltender, James Reimer: pic.twitter.com/GwhWxhbmb4
— San Jose Sharks (@SanJoseSharks) March 18, 2023
How the left’s hero fell out of favour
Russell Brand’s hero status among a prominent section of the British left began on Friday 13 September 2013 and officially came to an end one week ago. On both occasions the medium was the Guardian.
The 2013 moment came when he wrote for the paper giving ‘his side of the story’ after being kicked out of a GQ awards event for making a joke about the Hugo Boss fashion label and its historic links with the Nazis. Just shy of ten years later, the paper’s columnist George Monbiot last week published a mea culpa for having once been an advocate for Brand. He had nominated the comedian as his ‘hero’ of 2014, saying he was ‘the best thing that has happened to the left in years’.
Love him or loathe him, country music superstar Morgan Wallen has a dedicated following, and with the recent release of his new album, One Thing at a Time, his fans have made their devotion known. The album, which has a whopping 36 tracks, debuted at the top of the Billboard 200 album charts, and Wallen set a record with every single one of the 36 tracks appearing on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
DAYS BEFORE MY termination as a history teacher for being off script, the CBC reported that NDP MP Leah Gazan – who on Oct. 27, 2022 managed to get the House of Commons to unanimously recognize that “genocide” occurred at Indian residential schools – now also wanted legislation to outlaw attempts to “deny” this putative genocide or to make “false” assertions about residential schools. “Denying genocide is a form of hate speech,” said Gazan, the MP for Winnipeg Centre. “That kind of speech is violent and re-traumatizes those who attended residential school.” I certainly don’t wish to retraumatize the many former students at residential schools who suffered from abuse or neglect. Nor do I wish to appear to be an adherent of the theory of Presentism: the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and thinking. I simply wish to tell my story.
