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Preview next week’s Free Speech and the Left conference
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.
The full list of panels and conference schedule can be found here: https://www.plebity.org/conference-2023-free-speech-and-the-left/.
Noam Chomsky on What Defines the Left and on the Principle of Free Speech
Panelists: Noam Chomsky
Moderator: Mark White
Description: Noam Chomsky offers his thoughts on what defines the left and on the enduring principle of free speech. Noam Chomsky is a longtime scholar, author, teacher, intellectual, activist and social critic.
Noam Chomsky is a longtime scholar, author, teacher, intellectual, activist and social critic.
Personal experiences and thoughts on identity politics, cancel culture and free speech
Moderator: Tara Henley
Panelists: Amna Khalid, Jeff Snyder
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.
recent ARTICLES
Cancelled for Standing Up For Lesbians: Julia D. Robertson
Julia D. Robertson is an author and journalist. She has contributed to Huffington Post, AfterEllen, Quillette, Curve, Feminist Current and more. She also has her own website, The Velvet Chronicle.
She has been a long time critic of gender identity ideology, especially as it relates to the transing of young lesbians. She was an early voice of dissent around the idea that minors can consent to medical and surgical transition.
Her first novel, Beyond the Screen Door, was published by Flashpoint Publications (formerly Regal Crest) in 2016.
Identity Crisis Episode One: Our Peak Trans Stories
According to Urban Dictionary, "Peak Trans" is defined as the moment when: "the threshold of cognitive dissonance that the trans ideology requires of someone exceeds the limits of a person's willing suspension of disbelief, and that person's eyes open to where they can no longer agree with the narrative."
“Identity Crisis” is a weekly column and podcast for young people struggling with the modern orthodoxy of gender identity ideology—developed in collaboration between Plebity and 4W by Sasha White and M.K. Fain. New episodes every Monday!
Women are Being Gaslighted -Andreia Nobre
Andreia Nobre is a journalist and radical feminist. She is also a comedienne and the author of several books, including her most recent one, The Grumpy Guide to Radical Feminism. She joins me for a funny, passionate, and insightful conversation to discuss her book, the gaslighting of women with the concept of “cisgender”, and many other elements of the state of feminism today.
On the Rise of Hyper-Individualism
Individualism is highly coveted in Western culture. Entire industries exist exclusively to profit off of our increasingly unhealthy preoccupation with ourselves. And with the arrival of the Internet, many more opportunities for people to express their individuality emerged.
Chatter about individualism grew amid the pandemic, with issues of identity being the focal point of many debates. The question of identity and its related discontents became a mainstay of public discourse.
These issues didn’t start in the pandemic, nor did they emerge with the rise of post-modernist thought – which has been years in the making. Indeed, today’s preoccupation with identity has a long history – and its popularity largely stems from transformative changes undergone in the centuries preceding, though at that time, it had a different name.
How about a coup against Silicon Valley?
A decade ago for a brief moment following the 2008 global economic crash, there was a world-wide wave of angry emotion when the unbridled greed of the dominant capitalist elite was suddenly laid bare. Here in the US this engendered a movement called Occupy, which started in Zuccotti Park in the New York City financial district and spread quickly throughout the country.
Occupy, with all its imperfections, was widely viewed as a genuine populist movement. The movement focused on issues of economic inequality and coined the phrase ‘we are the 99%.’ Chris Hedges said at the time in an article on Truthdig that “Occupy articulated the concerns of the majority of citizens.”
Occupy set off a powerful emotional surge that swept across the country and genuinely frightened the elite. The State moved quickly to ensure that Occupy was effectively quashed. Under Obama, the federal government and local police forces joined to dismantle, often brutally, Occupy encampments across the country. No effort was spared in terms of mass arrests, surveillance, and other forms of State powered repression to ensure that Occupy couldn't metastasize into anything lasting or inspire any actual challenges to power.
Q&A with Zoe
For the first entry on the Identity Crisis Forum, I present to you a Q&A with a young woman we will refer to as Zoe. I received an email from Zoe, who told me that she was about to turn eighteen. She wrote that she is secretly a gender critical lesbian, but that if her peers knew what she was really thinking, they would label her a TERF and cancel her. Zoe wanted to tell her story and share her views on feminism, but wasn’t comfortable revealing her name, face, or voice for an interview.
That is how terrible this debate has become‒‒intelligent young women silence themselves about their experiences and their opinions out of the very rational fear of backlash from gender identity idealogues. After corresponding for a couple of weeks, Zoe and I did this interview over email. Her raw and honest answers paint a picture of an intellectually nonconforming and pensive young woman. Zoe’s range of experience will defy any attempts to put her into a box.
Justice for Marguerite
The Plebity Free Speech Fund has awarded an initial grant of $1300 for Marguerite Stern, a French feminist who has been an activist in the trenches for many years. This will be our first fundraising campaign.
Members of our Patreon site reviewed the details of Marguerite's story and voted to move forward to award the grant to Marguerite, who after more than a decade of feminist activism is out of work and in need of a new living space.
In 2019 Marguerite began a campaign of posters put up in the streets to publicize the issue of femicide in France. The campaign spread to cities throughout the country and she has become a familiar name and face in France. She was just featured in the French version of National Geographic Magazine to illustrate the word justice - see the image above.
Most recently, Marguerite has been severely targeted and harassed by gender identity ideologues for her woman centered activism.
“Proud to Stand My Ground” – Raquel Rosario Sánchez
Raquel Rosario Sánchez is a writer, campaigner and researcher from the Dominican Republic. She is currently pursuing a PhD with the Centre for Gender and Violence Research at the University of Bristol. Raquel’s academic specialism is violence against women, and her PhD work focuses on online communities of men who pay for sex. In 2018, when she chaired a meeting for the organization Woman's Place UK, she began to be targeted by transgender activists on campus.
For two years Raquel endured bullying and harassment from gender identity ideologues while the University not only failed to protect her, but treated her like a perpetrator. She was subject to cross examination in front of one of the trans activist students who was leading the charge against her. She was ignored and blamed, as well as subject to questioning of her feminist beliefs. She tells me that she could never have accepted the University’s offers to settle the matter with money, and she is instead proudly standing up for women everywhere by bringing a legal case against the University.
We discuss what it feels like to momentarily be at the center of the gender war, how to weather the storm of being mobbed, and how we think the tide may be turning. The story of such an intelligent, clear-thinking feminist woman being subject to this level of abuse is deeply chilling. If you’re looking for a modern day feminist hero, look no further than Raquel.