Plebity

Israel - Palestine: Is Jewish religious fundamentalism the flip side of Islamism?

Plebity — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 12:56:53 GMT

Are there parallels that can be made between Jewish religious fundamentalism or perhaps Jewish ethno-nationalism, political Judaism and Islamism, political Islam?

Hamas has Islamist roots but makes political claims. In Israel there is a ruling coalition that includes the Religious Zionism Party and a party called Otzma Yehudit, the 'Jewish Power' party. Are there parallels to be made here between Hamas and Jewish fundamentalism?

This panel is bilingual, French and English. Plebity had the simultaneous translation services of Pierre-Adrien Lascazes to enable communication across the languages.

The video is subtitled in both French and English.

Ce panel est bilingue, français et anglais. Plebity a utilisé des interprètes simultanés pour permettre la communication entre les langues. La vidéo est sous-titrée en français et en anglais.

It's easy to be partisan, follow a party line and repeat ready made phrases. It's difficult to listen to arguments you don't like to hear, but being able to do that is the only genuine way to arrive at your own judgement and to truly support the principle of free speech. If you believe in critical thinking, and you value your own right to make an independent judgement, you owe it to yourself to listen to Rony and Daniel in this video.

Il est facile d'être partisan, de suivre une ligne de parti et de répéter des phrases toutes faites. Il est difficile d'écouter des arguments que vous n'aimez pas entendre, mais être capable de le faire est la seule véritable manière de se forger son propre jugement et de vraiment soutenir le principe de la liberté d'expression. Si vous croyez en la pensée critique et que vous tenez à votre droit de porter un jugement indépendant, vous vous devez d'écouter Rony et Daniel dans cette vidéo.

Participants: Rony Brauman: doctor, former president of Doctors without Borders, author of numerous books, in particular about the reality of 'humanitarian wars' he is a French citizen, born in Jerusalem into a staunchly Zionist family and is a former Zionist himself.

Rony Brauman : médecin, ancien président de Médecins sans Frontières, auteur de nombreux livres, notamment sur la réalité des « guerres humanitaires ». Il est citoyen français, né à Jérusalem dans une famille farouchement sioniste et est lui-même un ancien sioniste.

Daniel Ben-Ami - runs the Radicalism of Fools website, which is about antisemitism. In over 30 years as a journalist, he has written for many publications, including The Australian, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian and Spiked and others. He has written two books and contributed to several others.

Daniel Ben-Ami : dirige le site web Radicalism of Fools, qui traite de l'antisémitisme. En plus de 30 ans de carrière en tant que journaliste, il a écrit pour de nombreuses publications, notamment The Australian, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, Spiked, et d'autres. Il a écrit deux livres et contribué à plusieurs autres.

Moderator: Sasha White of Plebity

Simultaneous interpretation from French into English by Pierre-Adrien Lascazes

Palestinians are suffering - who is to blame, Israel or Hamas?

Plebity — Tue, 21 May 2024 13:06:03 GMT

This panel is bilingual, French and English. Plebity used simultaneous interpreters to enable communication across the languages. The video is subtitled in both French and English.
Ce panel est bilingue, français et anglais. Plebity a utilisé des interprètes simultanés pour permettre la communication entre les langues. La vidéo est sous-titrée en français et en anglais.

Instead of shouting slogans, our panelists debate on ideas and the facts. You may think there are not two sides to this issue, but if you haven't heard the arguments, the genuine arguments and not the straw men caricatures of arguments, you're giving up your right to make up your own mind.

Au lieu de crier des slogans, nos panélistes débattent des idées et des faits. Vous pouvez penser qu'il n'y a pas deux côtés à cette question, mais si vous n'avez pas entendu les arguments, les véritables arguments et non les caricatures d'arguments, vous renoncez à votre droit de vous faire votre propre opinion.

Rony Brauman: doctor, former president of Doctors without Borders, author of numerous books, in particular about the reality of 'humanitarian wars' he is a French citizen, born in Jerusalem into a staunchly Zionist family and is a former Zionist himself.

Moderators: Sasha White joins with French journalist Rosa Moussaoui to co-host this discussion. Rosa is a Senior Journalist with the French daily l’Humanité where she has worked for decades, reporting extensively on North Africa, the Mediterranean region and Latin America.

Co-animatrices : Sasha White rejoint la journaliste française Rosa Moussaoui pour co-animer cette discussion. Rosa est grand reporter au quotidien l’Humanité, où elle travaille depuis des décennies, couvrant largement l'Afrique du Nord, la région méditerranéenne et l'Amérique latine.

Rosa joins with Plebity today as an independent journalist to co-host this joint production of The Kiosk, a coalition of independent media.

Rosa se joint à Plebity en tant que journaliste indépendante pour co-animer cette production conjointe de The Kiosk, une coalition de médias indépendants.

Dov Osheroff and Willy Maley – perspectives from the left

Plebity — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 19:44:55 GMT

Two scholars and sons of veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Will Maley and Dov Osheroff discuss a broad range of issues that roil today’s left.

Additional sources:
Anti-fascism: Descendants of Spanish Civil War Veterans on their fathers and identity politics
Panel discussion with Janette Higgins, Willy Maley, Dov Osheroff

https://youtube.com/watch?v=NKw1ujpEmZ0

Our Fathers Fought Franco (Edinburgh: Luath, 2023), edited by Willy Maley
by Lisa Croft, Willy Maley, Jennie Renton and Tam Watters
https://www.luath.co.uk/product/our-fathers-fought-franco

Dreams and Nightmares: Abe Osheroff documentary:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0Xsf-H5cl94

Fighting for Democracy, the true story of Jim Higgins (1907-1982) published in 2020., edited by Janette Higgins

The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
The End of Jewish Modernity, Enzo Traverso
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn

‘Their Song Is Over’ (and other familiar refrains):
Irish Revolutions, Gyrations and Ululations from Lenin to Lennon, Willy Maley

Books, articles and essays by Willy Maley
https://www.gla.ac.uk/services/library/view/author/12587.type.include

Free speech debate: IS STEM SYSTEMICALLY RACIST?

Plebity — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 13:09:55 GMT

MIT Free Speech Alliance and the MIT Sloan Adam Smith Society are hosting this free speech debate coming up on Thursday, November 2 at 8pm EST. The topic of the debate is Is STEM Systemically Racist? and it will be moderated by Nadine Strossen.

For more information about the sponsors, co-sponsers and the event itself please go here: https://members.mitfreespeech.org/Calendar/moreinfo.php?org_id=MIT&eventid=109408

To register to attend the event go here: https://sloangroups.mit.edu/adamsmithsociety/rsvp_boot?id=1928194

For those unable to attend in person the event will be livestreamed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqZLCdl4O90

This is sure to be an amazing event with a great panel and moderated by the incomparable free speech champion, Nadine Strossen!

The Left Fought Long and Hard for the Right to Criticize Religion

Plebity — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 13:12:08 GMT

"Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently" - Rosa Luxemburg

One afternoon last June, Salwan Momika, an Iraqi, Christian refugee living in Sweden, stepped in front of the largest Mosque in Sweden and lit several pages from the Quran on fire. Momika had received a permit from the Swedish authorities and police were there monitoring the event.

Momika’s Quran burning caused an international uproar and widespread condemnation among world leaders; even the Pope and Putin felt the need to weigh in.

See this panel on Religion and Free Speech as part of Plebity’s ongoing conversation on Free Speech and the Left

The event has been both downplayed as a trivial provocation and highlighted as a dangerous act of hateful bigotry. It has been called a manipulation by the far right and also a failure by Sweden, said to have favored intolerance in misguided support of free speech.

All of these characterizations miss the point. The right to criticize religion, in whatever way one chooses, is one of the most important and hard-fought rights in the history of the West. From the time of the French revolution it was a battle historically led by the left.

There is an odd exceptionalism in the West, and particularly among today’s woke left, that is unable to see that the evils of racism, intolerance or religious oppression can have any other source besides Western white supremacy.

Nonetheless, outside the West, Islam is hardly a marginalized belief, and it is non-Muslim minorities who tend to be the targets of blasphemy laws.

Is criticizing a major religion an expression of intolerance against a marginalized minority?

These blasphemy laws are still very much with us today. As recently as 2019, according to a Pew Research survey, 40% of the countries of the world, or 79 countries, still had blasphemy laws on the books. Seven countries still have death penalties for blasphemy—Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Conquistador, Blasphemy laws worldwide, CC BY-SA 4.0

Do blasphemy or hate speech laws protect minorities?

Some countries in the West, such as Germany and France, have adopted hate speech laws—essentially updated forms of blasphemy laws where the state decides what is acceptable speech. There is a widespread feeling, particularly among today’s left, that hate speech laws target intolerance and are therefore a good thing.

This view is based on a mistaken understanding of how hate speech or blasphemy laws work in reality. Where blasphemy laws exist they are found to be used mostly against minorities and not to protect them.

The Pew Research Center, for instance, finds a correlation between the existence of blasphemy laws and governmental discrimination of minorities. In 55% of the countries with blasphemy legislation, the state engages in discrimination of minorities, while this is only the case in 22% of the countries without blasphemy legislation. -
- Marie Juul Petersen, OpenGlobalRights

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which calls itself ‘the collective voice of the Muslim world’, lists some 50 member states, including such bastions of human rights and democratic freedoms as Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Iran.

The OIC thinks we should all adopt blasphemy laws and has been lobbying relentlessly to make these laws a worldwide standard. It has seized on the Quran burning in Sweden to repeat its call for universal punishment of blasphemy, stating that “[t]he relevant stakeholders must ensure that the perpetrators of such acts are brought to justice and appropriate measures are taken to prevent similar incidents in the future.”

Hate speech laws and blasphemy laws may be born out of good intentions, but they are an irresistible tool for those in power to suppress speech they don’t like.

The right to challenge religious power, ‘the opium of the masses,’ was a hard and long fought battle that was opposed at every step of the way with arrests, torture and the spiritual blackmail of excommunication and eternal damnation.

Criticism of the dominant religion would have until very recently been a standard position among the left; part of a long, painful struggle by the weakest and most marginalized against religious oppression—in particular against the Catholic Church, which for centuries was the power center throughout Europe. It is easy to forget how religion used to rule over every aspect of our lives in the West.

In 1765, Francois Jean Lefebvre, known as le Chevalier de la Barre, was the last person condemned and executed (by the state) for blasphemy in France. His crime was the failure to doff his cap to show respect for a passing religious procession. He was tortured, beheaded and his body burned.

In spite of all the lessons from history there is pressure today to turn back the clock and institute new laws to protect religion from criticism.

Passing new hate speech laws or enforcing existing ones to ban certain acts or words that are deemed blasphemous or hurtful is simply replacing the yoke of religious intolerance we worked so long and hard to remove.

Leftist martyr Rosa Luxemburg would be one of the first in line to be prosecuted under the rubric of blasphemy laws for her sharp criticism of the Christian church. In her essay Socialism and The Churches she deplored how Church institutions both supported and profited from brutal exploitation of the very weakest.

“...the clergy falsifying the early teaching of Christianity, which had as its object the earthly happiness of the lowly, tries today to persuade the toilers that the suffering and the degradation which they endure come not from a defective social structure, but from heaven, from the will of “Providence”. Thus the Church kills in the workers the strength, the hope, and the will for a better future, kills their faith in themselves and their self-respect. The priests of today, with their false and poisonous teachings, continually maintain the ignorance and degradation of the people.” -Rosa Luxemburg

Speech can be hurtful, but the right to free speech is still an essential tool for throwing off oppression.

If people on the left who care about social justice goals and material well-being are to be consistent, they have to stand firm in support of free speech that challenges power—all sources of power. That includes the right to criticize religion—all religions.

It seems to be a hard-wired human trait that along with fervent beliefs, whether ideological or religious, comes a powerful need to force others to adopt those same beliefs. But there is an equally powerful human need to arrive freely at one's own opinions and to feel free to honestly express them. It’s only through difficult conversations, where all sides can be openly explored in good faith, that we can build up our personal tolerance for hearing uncomfortable ideas and make up our own minds. Legislating hate speech or blasphemy laws takes us in the exact opposite direction.

Suppression of speech, even when it's done in the name of serving laudable social justice goals, is the opposite of promoting genuine tolerance and real justice.

-Mark White

Personal experiences and thoughts on identity politics, cancel culture and free speech

Plebity — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 16:11:00 GMT

Panelists: Amna Khalid, Jeff Snyder
Moderator: Tara Henley

Description: Tara Henley leads a discussion with Professors Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder on their personal thoughts and experiences with identify politics, cancel culture and free speech.

Tara Henley is a Canadian writer and podcaster, and the author of the national bestseller Lean Out: A Meditation on the Madness of Modern Life. Over the past two decades, her work has appeared on CBC Radio and TV, and in dozens of newspapers and magazines across the country and around the world.

Amna Khalid is a history professor at Carleton College and writer on her substack Banished.

Jeff Snyder is a history professor at Carleton College with a strong interest in the issues of academic freedom and free speech.

*Note: Participation by any panelist does not indicate their agreement with or endorsement of the opinions of any other conference participant. The presence of any panelist does not mean Plebity endorses or shares their opinions.

—

Tara: Amna and Jeff, it’s so great to be with you both again. We’ve had some really fruitful conversations in the past. I’m really pleased that we get to talk through sort of the big issues of our day again, and just delighted to take part in this conference, which is just really an important conversation about free speech on the left. So welcome to you both.

Amna: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

Jeff: Yeah, thank you.

Tara: And I thought today we could start, this is, the topic of the panel today is personal experiences and thoughts on identity politics, cancel culture, and free speech. That’s a big umbrella for us to start with. Let’s maybe start by setting terms. I mean, what do we mean when we say we’re talking about identity politics?

Jeff: You want to start with this one?

Amna: No, I think you’ll take it.

Jeff : Okay. Well, I think this is important to clarify because I think there are various meanings of dentity politics, right? There’s an identity politics that has been central to the long civil rights movement in the United States, where African-Americans have constructed and advanced an idea of being a community, of being a people who share certain interests, who share certain features of oppression.

And so a kind of identity politics in the interests of solidarity and organizing power. So in some ways, you know, the classic civil rights movement of the 1960s, although it was expansive and involved in interracial coalition, at its heart, it was very grounded in identity politics. That is, it came out of the black experience or black experiences, plural. One can also say that identity politics has been foundational to all of us history in terms of taking the broad view and thinking about the role that whiteness, white people have played in advancing racially coded ideas about citizenship.

So for those people who think that identity politics is only for people of color, I would strongly reject that notion. You’ve seen very strong and powerful coalitions of white people across history who have organized to defend their interests, whether that’s property rights or voting rights. In terms of how it’s understood today, the way that I would think about it in the context of a conversation about academic freedom, free speech, cancel culture, and so on, is that identity politics of this vein has been narrowed to a very fine point.

And so I would say that today’s identity politics to my mind in certain areas is about a kind of standpoint epistemology. So the idea is that you can only represent, you can only speak according to the community that you are a part of or the communities that you are a part of. And that constructs a very narrow idea of identity. That’s the, you know, Asian people shouldn’t write about the black experience because they haven’t had that direct lived experience, right? So you see that idea of lived experience. And of course, lived experience is essential for understanding the world, but if lived experience becomes a way of erecting boundaries, a way of telling other people, you can’t speak for me. And in addition to that, you can’t even understand me because you haven’t lived in my shoes.

I’ll let Amna add in here.

Amna: Yeah, just to clarify a couple of things. I mean, the first thing I’d say is I, of course, agree with things that Jeff has laid out, but I think identity politics emerged also out of, you know, has deep connections with feminism and with the idea that your identity is critical to how you are in the world and how you present in the world. So I want you to recognize that. And I think what we’re seeing today is a very different kind of identity politics. I would call it the bureaucratization of identity politics, where it’s turned into a box checking exercise and where it’s very much about your monolithic identity as a community member. And then you were seen as representing that community, which is why the identity politics of today is coming into conflict with freedom of ideas, because there is no room for you to espouse ideas that might go against what your community is supposedly espousing, right? So if you’re kind of a dissenter within the community, then somehow your voice counts for less, and that’s getting in the way of your individual expression.

And the point that Jeff made about standpoint epistemology, again, you know, by way of clarification, standpoint epistemology, when it originated, actually had a lot to contribute to the ways in which we think about knowledge production. And I think those are valuable contributions that your lived experience and your particular position in the world informs your worldview. And that needs to be taken into consideration.

You have to remember that this was coming at a time when the idea was that there’s objective knowledge, you know, that somehow everything can be objective. And it was questioning that idea. So it allowed a lot of minorities in many interesting ways to bring their experiences to bear upon knowledge construction. And I think that is vital. But reducing it to purely lived experience is how we’re experiencing it today. So, for instance, in my classrooms, you know, I’ll ask a question and then about, you know, why are Indians X, Y, and Z, and then some white student will reluctantly raise their hand and say, well, I don’t know, I’m not an Indian. As a white person, I can’t really know their experience.

And I’m like, well, this isn’t about experience. This is really just trying to understand behavior or a social strategy, whatever we’re discussing. So I think there are ways in which both identity politics and standpoint epistemology have been reduced to things that they weren’t initially intended to be. But let’s throw in some additional jargon here, right?

So related to all of this is the idea of intersectionality, right? And so as a social scientist and who straddles also the humanities historian, also in the field of ed studies, intersectionality, the idea that each of us of individuals are made up of multiple overlapping intersecting identities.

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Nadine Strossen: Keynote panel on free speech and the left

Plebity — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 15:13:00 GMT

reviews the history and importance of free speech as she welcomes participants and viewers of Plebity’s Free Speech and the Left conference.

Nadine Strossen is past president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),1991-2017. She is Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School, Senior Fellow of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) and author of the book HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship. Her latest book is: Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press fall 2023)

Transcript:

Nadine Strossen: Conference Keynote

Nadine Strossen reviews the history and importance of free speech as she welcomes participants and viewers of Plebity's Free Speech and the Left conference.

Nadine Strossen is past president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),1991-2017. She is Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School, Senior Fellow of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) and author of the book HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship. Her latest book is: Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press fall 2023)

Transcript

Mark: Welcome, Nadine.

I want to say first, before anything else, how grateful we are for you to come here and talk to us today about free speech in all its different angles and why it's so important, and especially why it's important in relation to our conference, which is the purpose of our chat here now to introduce the Plebity Free Speech on the Left conference for June 2023.

Nadine: Mark, it's just wonderful to be in conversation with you and with all of the participants in this really important conference. I was so excited when I learned about Plebity. Your website motto is just perfect for me. It cried out to me, if I may quote it, if you're a leftist who believes in free speech, you aren't homeless. So as somebody who is both a political liberal, a bleeding heart liberal after all of these years, and a so-called classical liberal who believes in enlightenment values, including free speech and robust discourse, I felt right at home on this website.

And I'm so honored to welcome two equally important groups of participants in this groundbreaking conference, those who will be speaking about a range of substantive issues and thereby illustrating free speech in action, and also endorsing the principles of free speech.

The second equally important group of participants are everybody else who is listening, engaging in respectful and engaged listening. Thank you for your commitment to and exercise of freedom of speech and dialogue and discourse.

Mark: So Nadine, you've written a lot and you've said a lot of things about free speech. And you said that without free speech, nothing else is possible. So I wonder if you could just elaborate for us a little bit about that.

Nadine: More important than my making that observation, Mark, so many philosophical, spiritual, academic giants throughout history have made that point. I mean, when we think of the historic figures in science and the arts who have been so committed to free speech that they were willing to give up their lives, going all the way back to Socrates, who poisoned himself rather than giving up freedom of speech and discourse with his students. You know, one of my favorite Supreme Court justices who was so eloquent about free speech, Louis Brandeis, made a really good point when he said freedom of speech serves both intrinsic values and instrumental values. It is and it promotes the intrinsic value, you know, good in and of itself to each human being as an essential aspect of exploring, developing and expressing who we are as individuals. You know, Descartes, a great philosopher, famously said, I think therefore I am. Justice Anthony Kennedy for the modern Supreme Court said the right to think is the beginning of freedom and speech is the beginning of thought.

So we put those two ideas together and we say, I speak, therefore I am. In addition, speech has an unsurpassed essential instrumental value as the vehicle for communicating with other individuals, other members of our society, with those who in our democratic republic seek to represent us and who are to be held accountable to be the people who wield sovereign power.

Not only is free speech essential to democracy, but it's essential to promoting any cause.

Indeed, if you are opposed to free speech, you need freedom of speech in order to be able to express your opposition.

And so that leads me to the question about, from the left, from the point of view of the left, it seems to be forgotten today in today's climate that how important free speech has been for the very people, the very groups and the very movements that the left has always sought to ally itself with and to promote as its most core functions, the social justice movement, civil rights movement, any marginalized or minority group has always needed free speech. So I wonder if you could help remind us about that.

Nadine: That is a very important point, Mark. And it is sad that it is forgotten that throughout

American history to this very day, by the way, I'm using the United States as an example, but the same thing is true throughout history and around the world as has been documented by many historians. But let me stick with our own country for lack of time. Since you talk about movements on the left end of the political spectrum, let me just reel off kind of in historical order the causes that absolutely depended on a very robust concept of free speech, robust enough to extend even to hate speech and disinformation and extremist speech and terrorist speech, because those detracting adjectives, those stigmatizing adjectives have been marshaled against every cause for social justice and human rights throughout our history, starting with the abolitionists, proceeding through the suffragists, all of the anti-war activists and advocates of pacifism through the World Wars and the Vietnam War, advocates of women's rights, advocates of reproductive freedom, civil rights, as you mentioned, LGBTQ rights, every single one of these causes was especially dependent on free speech and especially thwarted by censorship.

And it is no coincidence that leaders of all of those movements have always strongly supported free speech, strongly opposed censorship, even censorship of unpopular speech, such as hate speech or disinformation. Why? Because they knew that no matter what the rationale was, no matter what the term for this stigmatized speech was, it was predictably disproportionately wielded to silence them.

You know, you go back and you read cases from the abolitionist era, the women's suffrage era or the civil rights era. And these terms that we now hear deployed by the left in the hope or the advocacy of suppressing speech that they disagree with were wielded by people who were opposing civil rights, who were advocating abolition. They said that the abolitionist speech was insulting, was traumatizing, was causing them emotional distress, was defamatory and the same thing throughout the civil rights movement. So I do want to repeat that no matter what your views or values are all across the ideological spectrum from left to right, you do depend on free speech. But that certainly is true for those on the left end of the political spectrum. And to this day, Mark, there are many government officials and others who are denouncing various left of center speech as being hate speech, as being terrorist speech, as being extremist speech.

Those charges, every single one of those charges has been made, for example, against Black Lives Matter advocacy.

Mark: So those are the principles around free speech. And I wonder if you could just say a few words about the idea behind this conference. So we're promoting free speech, but we're promoting it specifically as a core value of the left, kind of a reminder to people. But we're not explicit, we're not trying to be a cheerleader rally for any, for leftist ideology, we really want to just demonstrate free speech and open exchange of ideas. And I wonder if you might just be able to say a few words about the conference, the idea behind the conference.

Nadine: The idea behind the conference, which is so compelling to me, and why I am so honored to participate not only as being able to deliver these introductory remarks, but I really look forward to listening to and engaging with and learning from everybody else who is participating in this conference. It is so compelling, Mark, because not only is it endorsing the intrinsic and instrumental values of free speech in general, but it is emphasizing the intrinsic and instrumental values for those of us who happen to have political values that are to the left of center.

And for those of us who care passionately about liberal or progressive public policies, we really have a special reason to defend free speech and to ensure that it is respected and protected robustly, because that is not only our best hope, but our only hope for advancing our ideological agenda.

We've seen that throughout history, movements for social justice and for human rights have a very long legacy in this country. You know, certainly the abolitionist movement goes back centuries, even movements for women's equality and reproductive justice and gay rights, you know, they began at least in the 19th century. It's no coincidence that they did not take off, did not get off the ground and make progress until the middle of the 20th century, when the U.S. Supreme Court robustly protected free speech, even for ideas that, let's face it, for most of our history, were deeply controversial.

And especially for those of us who are advocating ideas that do not have majoritarian support, let us not forget, even though he was not ultimately reelected, Donald Trump got the votes of, you know, about 50% of the people in our country who voted. So we can't count on majority support for a liberal public policy agenda.

Therefore, we especially need the freedom to advocate as vigorously as we can, even against those who are going to denounce our ideas as hateful and hate it. So that, to me, is the purpose of this conference, coming together to confer, to educate, to reinforce and reaffirm and encourage and galvanize each other and to launch continuing conversations about these incredibly important issues.

Mark: Well, thank you so much, Nadine, for ringing the bell on the conference. And as you said, we're hoping that this will turn into an ongoing series of conversations. And we hope that we'll be able to welcome you back again. Thank you.

Nadine: I would love that. Thank you so much, Mark, and congratulations on this really historic event.

Mark: Thank you very much, Nadine.

Preview next week’s Free Speech and the Left conference

Plebity — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 18:37:03 GMT

View this 5 minute preview of next week’s Free Speech and the Left conference

Our panelists discuss censorship, cancel culture, identity politics, the relevance of today’s left and other issues during the upcoming Free Speech and the Left conference.

The online event will take place June 17 to 24 and feature authors, academics, journalists and activists from a dozen countries. The conference will consist of pre-recorded presentations, panel discussions and livestream segments.

Participants include Nadine Strossen, Richard Wolff, Freddie deBoer, Noam Chomsky, Jill Stein, Susan Neiman, Tara Henley, Paul Jay, Jacob Mchangama, Norman Finkelstein, Wayne Hsiung, Katherine Corcoran, Ioan Grillo, Matthew Hoh, Lawrence Wilkerson and others…

Co-hosted by Plebity, India & Global Left, Redline, and acTVism Munich, the conference will be broadcast on Plebity’s YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/plebity).
The full list of panels and conference schedule can be found here: https://www.plebity.org/conference-2023-free-speech-and-the-left/.

Full written transcripts of every panel will be available to our Patreon subscribers.
If you find this conference to be interesting or useful, consider supporting our work by joining us on Patreon or donating via PayPal. Your support is our only source of revenue.

The post Preview next week’s Free Speech and the Left conference first appeared on Plebity.

Class Solidarity not Cancel Culture with Jay Lesoleil and Clementine Morrigan

Plebity — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 15:29:46 GMT

Panelists: ,

Moderator:

Description: Today’s identity politics is a toxic morass but it is possible to work towards a leftist vision of a society based on solidarity and mutual tolerance.

Jay and Clementine produce the fuckingcancelled podcast.

https://fuckingcancelled.libsyn.com/

https://www.clementinemorrigan.com/

Scott Costen is a freelance journalist based in Nova Scotia, Canada

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Transcript

Scott: Good day, my name is Scott Costen and I’m an independent journalist based in Nova Scotia, Canada. In this discussion, we’ll be critiquing identity politics and exploring options for leftist solidarity. I’m very glad to be joined by Clementine Morrigan and Jay Lesoleil. Clementine and Jay are the socialists behind the Fucking Cancelled podcast. The podcast offers analysis and critique of cancel culture and social justice orthodoxy while moving toward a vision for the left that’s grounded in solidarity, freedom, and responsibility. In other words, a left that is capable of posing a real and tangible threat to capitalism.

Thanks for being here, Clementine and Jay.

Clementine: Thanks for having us.

Jay: Thanks for having us.

Scott: So I want to begin by talking about the nexus and that’s a concept that comes up very frequently on your podcast, which I highly recommend. What is the nexus and how does it operate?

Jay: All right, we’re getting right into it. Yeah, I mean, listen, basically we have been trying to critique this phenomenon, broadly speaking, on the left for a long time and it’s a phenomenon that kind of has no name. Some people will call it woke or some people will call it social justice culture or some people have called it the toxic left or whatever.

There’s a lot of different names that people have come up with for it, but it doesn’t really have a name for itself, which is a very interesting and weird thing about it. But we kind of needed a placeholder name and we just came up with the nexus as a way to have a way to refer to it. But what it is in broad strokes is a sort of intersection between identitarianism, cancel culture and social media on the left. And so it’s the place where those three things meet and sort of produce another emergent phenomenon from their three parts.

Scott: Okay, and what I gather from the podcast is that both of you have been caught up in the nexus. Can you describe what it’s like for that to happen to you and kind of what the rules are of the nexus and that if you violate these rules, what happens to you?

Clementine: Sure, I guess like I often talk about on the podcast how being a queer person, I came into this sort of subculture very early on. And I think early on in the nexus, like I was first introduced to this way of thinking as early as like 2003 when I was like a queer, like youth in a queer alternative school. And so I think that this way of thinking has become way more mainstream since then. It used to be a lot more fringe and it used to be something that was in certain like lefty subcultural spaces. And now it’s like way more common and mainstream.

But basically, like Jay mentioned, identitarianism, identitarianism is an important aspect of how this culture or way of thinking works. And so it’s a way of thinking about power where you’re constantly sort of like adding up identity points is a way of saying it. So you’re basically thinking that you can sort of understand a person’s relationship to power and what their life has been like, by making a list of their identities, some of which are marginalized and some of which are privileged.

And then the way that you relate to other people in these spaces is by constantly referring back to your identity. So like what you are saying needs to be grounded in your identity, what you’re allowed to say, what you’re not allowed to say, who you’re allowed to agree with or disagree with is all sort of bolstered by this like identitarian language. So that’s like one piece of it.

And then the other piece is like this sort of sense of suspicion and surveillance. Because when you understand power as only something that is being enacted sort of interpersonally among your peers, rather than something that is happening like from above in a sort of socialist analysis of what’s happening with capitalism, then you are constantly monitoring your friends and your community for like missteps or for places where they’re being like oppressive.

And so this becomes a sort of performative politics in which people are constantly sort of flagging that they know the correct and ever-changing rules, that they know where their place is in the in the identitarian hierarchy, that they’re being appropriately subservient and like deferring where they’re supposed to and that they’re like, you know, drawing attention to their marginalized identities where they’re supposed to.

And then like the cancel culture piece is is basically like what happens when people do not follow the rules, or they’re accused of not following the rules in some way. And that is where there’s like call outs. And back in the day, we called it call out culture. And now it has since like, developed and morphed. And I think cancel culture is more accurate now, because it used to be that a call out could just be a call out. Whereas now cancel culture functions as basically creating a stigma around the person. So that being friends with them or associating with them in any way is a punishable offense.

And so it creates this like, general culture of like suspicion, paranoia, performative politics, and not a very sincere engagement with politics, in my opinion. Want to say more?

Jay: I guess, yeah, to sort of touch on how people fall into this, kind of this, this, this culture. It’s an interesting question. It’s one that we’ve thought about a lot. But in general, I think that like anyone who has been sort of like, deeply engaged in some way with the radical left, especially the radical left that is focused around like university campuses, in the past 20 years, will have like, at least been like aware of this culture and probably have been like pulled into it, you know.

And I think that another like huge element of like, why people end up in it is that it’s very, very affiliated with, with like queer world with just like queerness in general. And a lot of people who are queer, queer or trans, like end up sort of like, floating into this community, almost not exactly by accident, but because it’s sort of like where all their peers are, you know. And so it has this like attractive force in that way as well.

Scott: Now, there’s always been division on the left, but typically it’s been based on theory, you know, that you would have, you know, so called tankies versus Trotskyites, and so on and so forth. But this is something different and new. And it seems to occur largely, or at least, you know, in many cases, online on social media and things like that, you know, for people who aren’t as engaged on social media, can you just describe how, I guess, how ugly this type of controversy and call out culture or cancel culture can become?

Jay: Sure, sure. Yeah, I think that you’re right that like in the past, often among like leftists, when people were trying to discuss like the best way forward or like whatever, sometimes it could get pretty nasty, but you’re right that usually it was about, like, ideas and which one was the correct one, you know, and that people would have like debates, right?

And like, communist newspapers would publish these like long winded, you know, essays about like various sort of like questions of socialist esoterica, right? Whereas like, I think that something that really differentiates the nexus from that kind of intellectual environment is that, like, okay, there’s there’s a bunch of things like one is that it doesn’t really have a theory like it in the same way that it doesn’t name itself, it doesn’t have like a theoretical basis that it uses, other than I guess, like intersectionality is probably like the, the major sort of like theoretical basis of it, but it’s very, like, it’s not thought through very clearly.

And often, like the the kind of take that that takes off that becomes the the more mainstream take within within the nexus, it happens almost by accident, sometimes, you know, like people decide that a certain acronym, like is the correct one. And that if you use a different one, it’s like deeply problematic, for example, but it’s like, it could easily have been the other way around, you know, like, we talk sometimes about this is a tiny tangent, but we talk sometimes about the great trans asterisk wars of like, I don’t know when that when that was 2014. Because for a while, like it was, like, people were adding an asterisk after the word trans, like to sort of like gesture at the idea that there was like different kinds of transness.

Clementine: it was supposed to be inclusive of non binary people.

Jay: Yeah. And then other people decided that this was, you know, deeply problematic. And then it marked transness as something like other and bad, you know…

Clementine: Well, I think that the argument was that trans always included non binary people. So it like separated out non binary people unnecessarily. And it actually got to a place where I knew someone who was writing trans with a slash and then an asterisk as their way of being like, I am both putting the asterisk and not putting the asterisk. So this is how weird it can get.

Jay: Right. And it’s kind of like, it’s kind of like a meaningless debate. And like, also isn’t based in any particular, like theoretical understanding of the world, right? It’s just sort of people having like feelings about like, what is like best, you know, and the way in which it can get really nasty is that like, often, if you are sort of convicted in the court of public opinion of having transgressed one of these rules that somebody just came up with on Twitter or whatever, it can have these like extraordinarily insane effects on your life, right. And, you know, a good cancellation campaign can can vary from, you know, deeply irritating to like, world destroying for people, right? You want to talk more about that?

Clementine: Yeah, um, I think one just point I want to kind of add in that I feel like we’re kind of floating around is that like, the way that this culture functions is more like a religion than a politics. Because it is very faith based, and it doesn’t really have like a coherent internal logic or argument. It doesn’t name itself, it doesn’t have its own theories. It’s sort of like, it’s like dogma.

But to speak to the cancel culture piece, I really think, you know, there’s this some people say cancel culture doesn’t exist, you know, others say cancel culture is just consequences. When people bring up cancel culture, everybody wants to talk about celebrities, you know, and to debate about some comedian or something like this.

The reality is, is that the vast majority of people who are canceled are not famous. They’re not celebrities, they’re definitely not rich, they’re just regular people. And we are in contact with hundreds of them, you know, so we definitely know that this is a very real phenomenon. And basically, what it is, is it is a marking for social death.

So when a person has been marked as canceled, um, they can no longer be associated with, and a harassment campaign is directed at them. But it is also directed at anyone who associates with them. So it is like this very extreme social stigma, in which anyone ranging from like, you know, someone who follows you on social media, to like your closest friends to your partner, are being pressured to, quote, hold you accountable, and or publicly denounce you and abandon you. And so what ends up happening is that when people are put in this position, you know, people often frame cancel culture as just the natural consequences of people wanting to withdraw support or relationship.

But if that were the case, we wouldn’t need to harass people into doing that people would make that decision themselves, right. But they’re being socially pressured by other people to withdraw support and to denounce. And if they don’t, then they risk also receiving harassment, right. And so it is a total category of canceled people, like to be the partner of a canceled person.

Because if you have a partner and your partner has been canceled, and you do not leave your partner, you now are canceled as a result of that, and you will have personal consequences, professional consequences.

But yeah, so this means you will probably in the worst case scenario, it means people losing the majority of their friends and relationships and their communities, it can mean them losing their job. It can also mean them losing like future opportunities for employment, because this slander about them is all over the internet. So if somebody googles them, they will see it probably and so like, if the chances of a person being able to maintain employment is affected, people obviously lose their like creative projects, if they’re like in a band, or they do something creative that usually goes away.

And, you know, in my case, I literally had to move because the people that I was living with were demanding that I do an accountability process. And so I literally lost my housing over it. So it’s very material. And I think that like, a lot of the times people are like, Why are we talking about this do we cancel culture stuff? And it’s like, I literally would love to not be talking about it anymore. But the reality is, is that the impact that it has on people’s lives is so extreme.

And it basically creates a situation in which people are barred from empathy, it is like a form of dehumanization, in which you are no longer allowed to empathize with the person because they have been marked as the bad guy. And so even when a person is so distressed from the harassment, and the profound loss that they’re experiencing, and their mental health is like in shambles, and they’re like, potentially, like, concerned about suicide, for example, there is no stopping it.

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Cartels, Corruption and Investigative Reporting – Ioan Grillo – Luis Chaparro – Katherine Corcoran

Plebity — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 15:27:24 GMT

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Panelists: Katherine Corcoran
Moderator:

Description: Independent journalists and authors discuss their investigations into the power of cartels and government collusion.

Ioan Grillo is a journalist and writer based in Mexico City, working for outlets including the New York Times, France 24 and National Geographic. He has been covering Latin America since 2001 for news media such as Time Magazine, Esquire, CNN, Reuters, Al Jazeera, The Houston Chronicle, The Associated Press, GlobalPost, France 24, The Sunday Telegraph, Letras Libres and many others. Grillo is author of the books Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels (2021), Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields and the New Politics of Latin America (2016), and El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency (2011).

Katherine Corcoran is a former Associated Press bureau chief for Mexico and Central America. She has been an Alicia Patterson fellow, the Hewlett Fellow for Public Policy at the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, and a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow. At the AP, she led an award-winning team that broke major stories about cartel and state violence and abuse of authority in Mexico and Central America. Corcoraan is author of the book In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, a Cover-Up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press.

Luis Chaparro is a bilingual journalist who reports in English and Spanish on the drug wars and the cartels at CNN, Business Insider, The Daily Beast, Vice World News, The Guardian, Univision, Playboy, and others outlets. Chaparro’s YouTube channel is here https://www.youtube.com/luischaparro and his website is https://www.lchaparro.com/.

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Transcript

Ioan: Great to be here for participating as part of this conference on free speech and the left.

We’ve got a great panel here. Okay, so myself I'm Ioan and so I say great, myself but myself, I'm moderating this panel, and also I’m a journalist, covering cartels and corruption, I’m based in Mexico City I've been here for 22 years, author of three books.Free Speech and the Left Conference - June 2023.

We’ve got Luis Chaparro who is a fantastic journalist originally from Ciudad Juarez. He grew up there with all of the crazy violence when it was the most murderous city in the world it was the beginning of his journalistic career, and he’s still been at it one of the kind of hardcore few Mexican journalists really going deep into the cartel stuff, Sinaloa, all over the country and on the US side as well.

And then Katherine Corcoran, She was the bureau chief for AP in Mexico City for many years, is author of this fantastic book investigating the murder, one of the most high profile murder cases of a Mexican journalist Regina Martinez, In the Mouth of the Wolf. And it's a very, very great book there.

So yeah, it's a very, very short bio if there’s anything else you want to add in.

But just to get the thing rolling we want to talk now about, free speech, obviously a big issue that people are discussing in the United States, in the UK, in various countries. In Mexico, it’s a whole different level of threats to free speech, and the issue of organized crime cartel violence which is not only Mexico it's also the United States it's also Europe it's also global.

So, just to get the ball rolling and starting off, Luis.

So in Mexico itself, people have already seen the news, you've had, you know, more than 150 journalists who have been murdered in Mexico in the last 20 or so years. Most of the cases are unsolved, but the presumption of cartels organized crime, being involved in a large number of those, often with corrupt officials, I mean, so first of all, Luis to start off.

I mean, you grew up doing this, you grew up getting into journalism, when it was all extremely violent. You know a guy being murdered on his lunch break in Ciudad Juarez for the newspaper. What kind of motivated you despite that, to do it anyway, to kind of make a career of not only doing journalism, but doing narco journalism in Mexico.

Luis: Yeah, so first of all, thanks for the kind introduction, Ioan, great to see you here, and great to see Katherine as well, I feel honored to be with with two of the guys that I grew up reading you know your stuff so really, really glad to be here.

And well I think I started off because, yes, I mean, I was literally graduating college, when Ciudad Juarez was labeled the most dangerous city in the world. This was something that I was watching brew as I was growing older.

But then there was this case that really affected me personally, and launched me into this we could call it probably a rabbit hole of finding what happened and why. And those questions. I mean, 15, probably over 15 years later I can’t still find the answers. I think the answers are way more complicated or complex than just a single answer. But what happened is, by the time I was still in college, I was working as a correspondent for EFE news agency, which is, which is a news service in Spanish covering Ciudad Juarez and the border.

And then my editor one night, very late in the night, I think probably it was like one in the morning. He called me and said that there was a multiple murder at a bar that was actually not far from where I was living back then in Ciudad Juarez.

He asked me if I could go there to meet a photographer who was already at scene and try to write a short piece for a hit for that same night, and probably a follow up on the next morning. So I drove my motorcycle, I used to have a motorcycle, showed up to this bar, and the five young guys killed at the spot were all my friends…that really affected me personally, that was something that first threw me into the question of what happened.

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Religion and Free speech – Daniel Ben-Ami and Jacob Mchangama

Plebity — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 15:16:27 GMT

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Panelists: , Jacob Mchangama
Moderator: Daphna Whitmore

Description: Jacob Mchangama and Daniel Ben-Ami discuss the limits to free speech with focus on blasphemy, anti-semitism, and islamophobia.

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Reflections on Covid: One of the Most Elaborate Propaganda Campaigns in Modern History?

Plebity — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 14:47:47 GMT

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Panelists: Max Blumenthal, Christian Parenti

Description: An exploration of the Covid propaganda from March 2020 to the present day; how the official Covid Narrative is unraveling (or not), the left’s support for authoritarianism, democratic societies’ descent towards authoritarianism, the rapid adoption of digital tech under the guise of public health, inequities created by Covid, capitalism and the wealth disparity, the psychology behind conformity, the conflation of ‘freedom’ and far-right beliefs, the state of health care, and more.

Max Blumenthal is a journalist and editor of the independent site The Grayzone. He is the author of several books and documentaries and is based in Washington, DC.

Christian Parenti is a professor at John Jay College and a journalist. He has written a number of articles about the pandemic, including How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy. Christian is author of the book The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America, from Slavery to the War on Terror.

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Ukraine, Empire, and Forever Wars with Matt Hoh, Larry Wilkerson

Plebity — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 14:40:15 GMT

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Panelists: Lawrence Wilkerson, Matthew Hoh
Moderator: Sasha White

Description: Discussion about the war in Ukraine and the power and influence of censorship and propaganda

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired army colonel and former chief of staff to Colin Powell. He served 31 years in the US Army and worked as a distinguished adjunct professor of government and public policy at the College of William and Mary, and taught National Security Affairs in the Honors Program at George Washington University.

Matthew Hoh is a Marine Corps veteran and former Department of Defense and State Department official. In 2009, Matthew resigned from his post in Afghanistan with the State Department in protest against the American escalation of the war. He was also a Green Party candidate in 2022 for the US Senate in North Carolina. He is the associate director of Eisenhower media network which ran a full page ad on May 16 in the New York Times, urging diplomacy and not more war in Ukraine.

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Transcript Wilkerson Hoh

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Anti-fascism: Descendants of Spanish Civil War Veterans Compare Their fathers’ Left to Current Identity Politics, Language Policing and Social Activism

Plebity — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 14:38:16 GMT

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Panelists: Janette Higgins, Dov Osheroff
Moderator: Willy Maley

Description: Three descendants of Spanish Civil War veterans sit down to talk about their fathers, their working class backgrounds their growing political consciousness and how they literally went off to fight fascism in the international brigades of the Spanish Civil War.

Janette Higgins is the daughter of Spanish Civil War veteran Jim Higgins. She resides in Toronto and is the editor of her father’s memoir Fighting for Democracy, the true story of Jim Higgins (1907-1982) published in 2020.

Dov Osheroff is a carpenter, son of Spanish Civil War veteran Abe Osheroff and lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Willy Maley is the son of James Maley, veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Willy is a professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, Scotland as well as a playwright, poet and co-author of the book Our Fathers Fought Franco.

The conversation is organized in two parts.

Part I begins with a short clip of Christian Parenti and Max Blumenthal talking about today’s left and pointing out how it is no longer made up of working class people.

This sets the stage for our three panelists whose fathers represent a left that couldn’t have been more different than that of today – totally rooted in the working class.

The discussion begins with an introduction to their fathers, their childhoods and how they became politicized and eventually volunteered to fight fascism in the international brigades of the Spanish Civil War. They talk about their careers after the war and how they were affected by their experiences in the war.

Part II is a conversation about how their fathers might view today’s political and social climate of rising censorship, identity politics and today’ forms of activism that bear no resemblance to their own struggles to create a more just world.

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Animal Rights with Wayne Hsiung and Dušan Pajović

Plebity — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 14:36:00 GMT

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Panelists: , Dušan Pajović

Moderator: Rozali Telbis

Description: Discussion on how animal rights are a free speech issue as well as a core concern for the Left.

Wayne Hsiung is an American attorney and environmental and animal rights activist. He is co-founder of the animal rights network Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) and most currently The Simple Heart Initiative dedicated to animal rescue. Wayne has a long history of non-violent direct action in support of his activist convictions.

Dušan Pajović is a Montenegrin activist and author. He is the Campaigns Coordinator and a member of the Coordinating Collective of the pan-European leftist organization DiEM25. Previously, Dušan led DiEM25’s Green New Deal for Europe campaign. In 2021, Wayne wrote this article: Why we need to liberate animals as part of the Green New Deal.

Rozali Telbis writes about society, technology, culture, propaganda, and more. She is a regular contributor to Plebity and Nevermore. To get the latest updates on her work, subscribe to her mailing list at Growing up Alienated.

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Ukraine and Forever Wars with Jill Stein and Dimitri Lascaris

Plebity — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 14:30:28 GMT

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Panelists: Jill Stein,
Moderator: Zain Raza

Description: Jill Stein and Dmitri Lascaris discuss the war in Ukraine and today’s Left

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Transgender ideology and free speech – Stella O’Malley, Arty Morty

Plebity — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 14:20:45 GMT

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Panelists: Stella O’Malley, Arty Morty

Moderator: Sasha White

Description: Stella and Arty discuss the difficulties of speaking up and being heard on the topic of transgender ideology.

Stella O’Malley is an Irish psychotherapist and author, with three books on parenting and mental health. She is a regular contributor to Irish national newspapers, podcasts, and TV. Her latest book is What Your Teen is Trying to Tell You.

Stella O’Malley’s BBC documentary ‘Trans Kids – it’s time to talk’: https://vimeo.com/304866757

Arty Morty is a commentator, writer and YouTuber who reports on gender ideology and its effects on children, women and the gay rights movement. Arty co-hosts an online show called The Mess We’re In with Graham Linahan and Helen Staniland. He’s known for his clarity and breaking down complex and contentious issues, and for his strong advocacy for gender non conforming individuals. He’s written for Plebity, Lesbian and Gay News and on his substack artymorty.substack.com.

Sasha White became a free speech advocate in 2020 after being fired for her personal comments on transgender ideology. She has written for Spiked online, Tablet Magazine, and 4W. She co-founded the Plebity Free Speech Fund and hosts interviews on the Plebity Youtube channel.

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Transcript Arty Stella

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Holocaust Denialism and the Limits of Free Speech with Norman Finkelstein and Daniel Ben-Ami

Plebity — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 14:10:32 GMT

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Description: and exchange opinions about Holocaust denialism, hate speech laws and the boundaries of permissible speech.

Daniel Ben-Ami runs the Radicalism of Fools website, which is about rethinking antisemitism.
In over 30 years as a journalist, he has written for many publications, including The Australian, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian and Spiked. He has also written two books and contributed to several others.

Norman Finkelstein is a long time scholar and author of numerous books, including the Holocaust Industry, which generated significant controversy when it came out in the year 2000.

Norman has written and spoken extensively on the Israel Palestine conflict, and his latest book is called I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom and can be purchased here: https://www.sublationmedia.com/books/i’ll-burn-that-bridge-when-i-get-to-it.

Notes: In the discussion, Norman referenced Alan Sokal: https://www.commentary.org/articles/james-meigs/alan-sokal-parody-predicts-dreadful-woke-future/.

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Nadine Strossen on the History and Importance of Free Speech

Plebity — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 14:08:12 GMT

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Panelists:
Moderator: Sasha White

Description: Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU, responds to a range of questions regarding the historical and enduring importance of the principle of free speech.

Nadine Strossen is past president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1991-2017. She is Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School, Senior Fellow of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) and author of the book HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship. Her latest book is: Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press fall 2023).

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Left is Not Woke author Susan Neiman in conversation with Freddie deBoer

Plebity — Sat, 03 Jun 2023 13:36:16 GMT

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Panelists:
Moderator:

Description: Susan and Freddie discuss issues of racism, identity and U.S. politics and why today’s woke has veered so far from traditional principles that identify the Left.

Susan Neiman is an American philosopher and writer. She has written extensively on the Enlightenment, moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics. She is director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. She is the author of nine books, translated into 15 languages, which have won prizes from, among others, PEN, the Association of American Publishers, and the American Academy of Religion. Her shorter pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and many other publications. Her latest book, the subject of this discussion, is Left is not Woke.

Freddie deBoer is an independent journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. He’s the author of The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, and his newest book is How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. Freddie is a self-styled old-school Marxist and writes regularly on his Substack about politics, Marxism, education, police reform and other topics.

Left is Not Woke author Susan Neiman in conversation with Freddie deBoer

Panelists: Susan Neiman

Moderator: Freddie deBoer

Description: Susan and Freddie discuss issues of racism, identity and U.S. politics and why today’s woke has veered so far from traditional principles that identify the Left.

.Freddie deBoer is an independent journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. He’s the author of The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, and his newest book is How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. Freddie is a self-styled old-school Marxist and writes regularly on his Substack about politics, Marxism, education, police reform and other topics.

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