“Cancel Culture”

Students and academics will be able to sue their universities for suffocating their free speech on campus under new Government plans to tackle the ‘very real and alarming threat of censorship’.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has unveiled plans for a ‘free speech champion’ who will have the power to defend academics amid rising fears institutions are trying to cancel people due to their views.

It comes after a December report claimed more than a third of universities are imposing ‘severe’ restrictions on freedom of speech.

Charges were dismissed Tuesday against Amy Cooper, the white woman who called police on a Black birdwatcher in Central Park last May, after she completed a psycho-education and therapy program focused on racial equity, prosecutors said.

Cooper was facing a misdemeanor charge of falsely reporting an incident to police after prosecutors said she twice called 911 falsely claiming that Christian Cooper was threatening and tried to attack her.

Interesting tweet from her lawyer.

After a thorough & honest inquiry, the New York DA's office dismissed all charges today against #AmyCooper. We thank them for their integrity & concur w/ the outcome. Others rushed to the wrong conclusion based on inadequate investigation & they may yet face legal consequences.

— Robert Barnes (@barnes_law) February 16, 2021

…A slew of English literature teachers told the School Library Journal (SLJ) how they were ditching the likes of “Hamlet,” “Macbeth” and “Romeo and Juliet” to instead “make room for modern, diverse, and inclusive voices.”

“Shakespeare was a tool used to ‘civilize’ Black and brown people in England’s empire,” insisted Shakespeare scholar Ayanna Thompson, a professor of English at Arizona State University.

Actress Gina Carano has been fired by Disney for purportedly controversial remarks she made in social media comparing the treatment of conservatives by progressives to how in its beginning years the Nazis mistreated Jews. No doubt the oppression against Jews during the 1930s was of a much higher degree and based on a pronounced bigotry exclusively against Jews.

The woke Left has come for Odysseus, that hyacinth-haired favorite of Athena, master mariner, foremost of men, and King of Ithaca. Last month, a teacher named Heather Levine bragged on social media that she’d gotten the Odyssey removed from her school’s curriculum. Her effort is part of a larger woke movement called #DisruptTexts.

The New York Times is an influential newspaper with a worldwide readership and 130 Pulitzer Prizes for excellence in journalism to its name. It is known to have a liberal bias, but it has still generally been recognized for reporting the news, rather than for making it.

This month, however, the Times itself has been the stuff of headlines. Cancel culture is reaching disturbing heights all around, and the Times is at the centre of many of the stories.

Related… Read the column the New York Times didn’t want you to read

George Orwell published Animal Farm in August 1945, in the closing weeks of the Pacific War. Even then, most naïve supporters of the wartime Soviet-British-American alliance were no longer in denial about the contours of Moscow’s impending postwar communist aggression.