The Canadian Association for Free Expression Proudly Present
Paul Fromm
· Director, Canadian Association for Free Expression
· Winner of the George Orwell Free Speech Award, 1994
Are We Coming to the End of the Age of Woke?
· Jews now find their events cancelled – the deflatformers are now being deplatformed
https://ugetube.com/watch/IUUPv8lrQhJaidj
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· Jews now find their events cancelled – the deflatformers are now being deplatformed
· Finally, a leftist charged under the “hate law”
By Mark Moore and Mark Lungariello June 14, 2021 3:36pm Updated
A North Korean defector said she viewed the US as country of free thought and free speech – until she went to college here.
Yeonmi Park attended Columbia University and was immediately struck by what she viewed anti-Western sentiment in the classroom and a focus on political correctness that had her thinking “even North Korea isn’t this nuts.”
“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park told Fox News. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”
The 27-year-old told The Post that she could’t believe she would be asked to do “this much censoring of myself” at a university in the United States.
“I literally crossed the Gobi Desert to be free and I realized I’m not free, America’s not free,” she said.
Yeonmi Park fled North Korea at age 13 in 2007, a voyage that took her and her family to China and South Korea before she went to school in New York in 2016.
Her professors gave students “trigger warnings,” sharing the wording from readings in advance so people could opt out of reading or even sitting in class during discussions, Park told The Post.
“Going to Columbia, the first thing I learned was ‘safe space,’” she said.
“Every problem, they explained us, is because of white men.” Some of the discussions of white privilege reminded her of the caste system in her native country, where people were categorized based on their ancestors, she said.
In one class, a teacher discussing Western Civilization asked students if they had a problem with the name of the topic – most students raised their hands, according to Park. Some, she said, mentioned issues with the “colonial” slant of the discussion.
And classes often began with professors asking students for their preferred pronouns, with the use of “they” becoming scary as she feared being socially penalized for not being inclusive enough in her vocabulary.
“English is my third language,” she said. “It’s very hard for me to say he and she sometimes, I misuse them.”
She told Fox that she also was chided for saying she enjoyed the writings of Jane Austen.
“I said ‘I love those books.’ I thought it was a good thing,” Park told the network. “Then she said, ‘Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’”
Park said North Korea students were constantly informed about the “American Bastard.”
“I thought North Koreans were the only people who hated Americans, but turns out there are a lot of people hating this country in this country,” she told The Post.
Cancel culture and shouting down opposing voices is becoming an issue of self-censorship.
Park, who chronicled her escape from North Korea and life in the repressive regime in the 2015 memoir “In Order to Live,” said Americans seem willing to give their rights away not realizing they may never come back.
“Voluntarily, these people are censoring each other, silencing each other, no force behind it,” she said.
“Other times (in history) there’s a military coup d’etat, like a force comes in taking your rights away and silencing you. But this country is choosing to be silenced, choosing to give their rights away.”
Park said she knows what a country could become with rights and discourse stripped away.
“North Korea was pretty insane,” she said. “Like the first thing my mom taught me was don’t even whisper, the birds and mice could hear me.”
“She told me the most dangerous thing that I had in my body was my tongue,” Park said. “So I knew how dangerous it was to say wrong things in a country.”
Park, who grew up in the last Stalinist dictatorship and witnessed people dying from starvation, said Americans are obsessed with oppression even though there is not much oppression they’ve witnessed firsthand.
“This a completely nuts, this is unbelievable,” she said. “I don’t know why people are collectively going crazy like this or together at the same time.”
She said the situation in North Korea is one thing because the people don’t have access to the internet and have limited exposure to the globe, but students here have much more access to information.
Park said as a child she had thought dictator Kim Jong Un was “starving” and overworked until she was in South Korea and was shown pictures that showed how large he was in pictures compared to other people who looked thin and hungry.
“That’s what it does when you’re brainwashed,” she said.
“In some ways they (in the US) are brainwashed. Even though there’s evidence so clearly in front of their eyes they can’t see it.”
Columbia University did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
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HAS YOUR CREDIT UNION OR BANK TRIED TO GAG YOU? |
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Donna trusted her financial institution with her money. But it didn’t like her ideology and froze her account, Now she can’t fund her organization or retrieve her money from her account. Welcome to the world of Woke financial institutions. Donna Murphy learned her lesson. The hard way, She learned that the financial institution she trusted (Paypal) was on a political mission, and that it would break every rule to pursue it. Donna’s problem was that she too was on a political mission, and she had constructed an organization and a website to promote it, as is her constitutional right. It was a project that required funding, and she naturally assumed that the reputedly “trustworthy” institution she dealt with would enable her to do so. Trouble was, it so happened that Donna’s cause and the cause of her financial institution were in flat contradiction. Succinctly put, Donna is a patriot. A Canadian nationalist dedicated to the preservation of Canada’s natural and ethno-cultural heritage. In contrast, her financial institution ( Paypal) was committed to globalism. Say no more. As one might have expected, one fine day Donna woke up to find that Paypal was not fulfilling its contractual obligations. It was not collecting donations—and she couldn’t find out why. She even tried to get answers from Paypal’s HQ in Omaha. No dice. They stonewalled her for months. Worse than that, they even denied her access to her account. Finally, a Canadian PayPal representative shamelessly admitted to Donna that she had been censored and punished for her “unacceptable” views”) which ran counter to the stated core values of PAYPAL and its terms and conditions. According to the Paypal rep, Paypal opposes the promotion of “hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory”. The policy even stipulates that PayPal will fine violators $2,500 US for each infraction, debited from their account. No appeal. Perhaps Donna should have seen it coming but she didn’t. She didn’t realize that zealous corporations with a social justice/open borders agenda were armed with algorithms to track down “thought criminals”, with the objective of de-platforming those customers, a circumstance that is happening with increasing regularity across North America as well as in Europe. The important issue is this : Who determines what is “hateful” or “discriminatory”, or what constitutes “harmful misinformation?” PayPal of course. In other words, PayPal has appointed itself the arbiter of what is the acceptable use of funds that it keeps in its accounts. PayPal’s actions were almost as crippling as they were designed to be. As even PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel confessed, “If online forms of your money are frozen, that’s like destroying other people economically and limiting their ability to exercise their political voice.” The legal director of the digital rights group “Electronic Frontier Foundation”, Corynne McSherry, concurred. “If businesses get removed during fundraising months, it could put them at risk of losing huge sums of money.” No kidding. Ask Peter Brimelow, the editor of the online magazine “VDare” which was the victim of Paypal. Or scads of other editors of “heretical” online publications. A disinterested observer with a rudimentary grasp of ethics should easily understand that the arbitrary termination of a client’s service without explanation and the simultaneous theft of thousands of dollars of his money for subjectively perceived ‘hate’ speech is not only Orwellian, but outrageous. Donna Murphy wanted a payment service. But instead she got Big Brother : A politically extremist and activist platform posing as a business. Donna was dumfounded. Why was a payment service concerned about her speech ? She would rather they forget about her political orientation, as she theirs, and that they focus on providing the service they were commissioned to provide. But it became apparent that PayPal was just one example, a trailblazer or template perhaps, of some 200 service providers who feel obliged to provide public political commentary about issues like “social justice”, “affirmative action”, “employment equity, trans “rights” and climate change. These pretenders see it as their mandate to not only manage your money, but to manage your beliefs—and their expression. Everyone is completely at the mercy of payment service providers, financial institutions and corporations that want to play politics and virtue-signal. Blatant political partisanship and ideological persecution is able to seek refuge in the Trojan horse of “corporate” and social “responsibility”. Their behaviour offers solid testimony on behalf of the observation that governments have outsourced censorship to transnational corporations who are able to do an end run around U.S. First Amendment Rights or the sacred right to free speech and expression which once enjoyed an inviolable status in nations like Canada or the UK. Lest we think that Donna’s fate was exceptional or exclusive to “heretics” like her , and that law abiding citizens need not be worried, it would be best to consider the path we are taking, and to look at the horror of China’s Social Credit system and the leverage that a Central Bank Digital Currency regime would have over basics such as what we purchase, what services we can access , what we can or cannot say. The future is here. We need to ask ourselves urgent questions. If our financial accounts can be instantly frozen or drained, if our public comments can be summarily punished by financial reprisals, if words and ideas that were recently acceptable can suddenly be deemed unacceptable by a ruling clique gone mad, if a nurse in British Columbia can be suspended or fired for daring to say that men cannot have babies, if an organization like Gays Against Grooming can be de-platformed for condemning the sexual abuse, indoctrination and medicalization of children, if the Free Speech Union of the UK can be denied payment services for questioning the efficacy of anti-Covid measures, can you feel certain that you will not be the next on the chopping block? The fact is, you have skin in this game. You may have mainstream views. Views that are currently mainstream. But the tide can turn quickly in this crazy political climate, and you might find yourself on the outside looking in. A lot of people worked hard and suffered greatly to secure our rights and freedoms, but it seems that too many of us of younger generations are willing to squander those rights and freedoms. We must not let this happen. We must find a way to stop the contagion of censorship in its track, both on the political and commercial level. We cannot allow the PayPal model to spread. We cannot permit Canada’s large banks and credit unions like Van City, with assets over $28 billion, to cancel customers and rob their funds with impunity. We cannot entrust our money to activist financial organizations who feel little compunction about stealing it at the first opportune moment. We cannot sit silent while the elite establishes a Central Bank Digital Currency that can be programmed by the issuer to restrict how the currency is used by the receiver from the get-go. Naked discrimination and the destruction of lives for the purpose of quelling ideologies that differ from those of financial institutions is intrinsic to this system. This is not a far-fetched scenario. The totalitarian impulse is alive and well in Canada, as we saw so plainly when Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act last year, and when he composed Bill C-ll, the Bill to enable online censorship. If significant measures are not enacted to prevent financial institutions and corrupt politicians from imposing their political views on us, then what happened to Donna Murphy and what happened to the leading spokesmen of Canada’s Freedom Convoy will be common place. Act now. Speak out. And vote with your dollars. Find alternatives . Or help build them. Take Canada back, while there is still time. Tim Murray January 2, 2023. |
Sean Corby is currently being investigated by his bosses after staff complained over critiques of woke culture that he posted on a forumByEwan Somerville22 January 2022 • 8:30pm
22 January 2022 • 12:00pm
Thoroughly modern man: singer Harry Styles at the Grammys in March 2021 CREDIT: Anthony Pham
In front of me are two books about men, and, curiously, it’s the one by a woman that is sympathetic and the one by a man that would consign my sex to the dustbin of history. It borders on a hate crime.
Patriarchy, according to Ivan Jablonka, a French historian, is immoral and artificial – something we’ve invented over the centuries to keep men on top. The problem with that thesis, he acknowledges, is that in primitive societies, too, male dominated female. To explain why something invented is perennial and universal, Jablonka tries to distinguish between biological sex (i.e. cavemen were more “robust” than women, so they took the lead in hunting) versus the cultural norms of gender, which he sees as an evolved effort to institutionalise the differences between men and women.
“Patriarchy proceeds from an interpretation of bodies: it transforms female biology into destiny, subjecting women to one function”, namely reproduction, and while women are expected to pop out babies or care for them, “men are at leisure to take over other spheres: the economy, war, power, and so on”. This order was threatened by the French Revolution, which by opening the door to universal rights allowed female equality to follow behind.Advertisement : 15 sec
Jablonka is obsessed with patriarchy the way others are with critical race theory or ancient UFOs – it explains almost everything – and in his reduction of all human experience to the battle between the sexes, the individual becomes depressingly powerless. Jane Austen’s clever female characters might know what they want, but they still want a man – “struggling within stifling gender norms” – and women who claw their way up the corporate ladder in the 21st century, by exhibiting “masculine norms” such as “leadership, competition, toughness”, become “accomplices of the patriarchy that reserves a place for them”. Women might think they’re winning, but they’re not.
And when men think they’re being moral, they’re actually doubling down on the system. Jablonka divides up male strategies for dominance into four categories: we lead by “ostentation”, a display of virility; by “control” or self-denial; by “sacrifice”, offering one’s life for a higher cause; and through the game of “ambiguity”, by integrating the feminine.
A drawing of early men learning to create fire CREDIT: Alamy
Sacrifice is “horrifying”, argues Jablonka, because it validates war and suicide. Yet critics will counter that it also encourages charity, modesty and martyrdom – just as virility can sometimes protect the weak. Indeed, if our natural state really is men clubbing each other over the head, perhaps patriarchal civilisation is a step up.
It also contains a space for joyous gender-bending (trans, drag, queer, etc.), though Jablonka believes men who soften their masculinity with eyeliner are often reasserting that while women are “tied to their sex”, men are free to be “armed or bejewelled, tearful or insensitive”. Again, it’s impossible to win. Even Harry Styles is a tool of the system. This book is so pessimistic that it’s hard to see on what basis men and women can ever progress peacefully; for one to advance, the other must retreat.
Far more hopeful, and better written, is philosopher Nina Power’s What Do Men Want? If you proceed on the assumption that masculinity is inherently toxic, she argues, you risk implying that most men are bad – and they’re not. “Far from possessing great power, men are frequently trapped in systems of other men’s making.” To be a man nowadays is “in great part, and at the risk of sounding dramatic, to suffer” – from comparatively high rates of suicide, homelessness and murder, and stereotyping.
Patriarchy might be part of the problem, as Jablonka also argues, by compelling men to live according to masculine codes that are as repressive to them as they are unfair to women, but declaring war on masculinity will only add to men’s sense of alienation, at a moment when aspects of culture and economics have moved in women’s favour. The new economy rewards brain; brawn is out of style. “It’s more fashionable to be a woman,” Fay Weldon is quoted as saying. “Women appear to be more powerful, at least among young men.”
Author, essayist and playwright Fay Weldon CREDIT: Heathcliff O’Malley
Nina Power suggests that, rather than dismissing the whole notion of masculinity, it might be better to recognise the reality of sex differences rooted in nature; encourage men to identify as part of a class, one that has severe problems and could do with more solidarity; and investigate those aspects of masculinity that are useful to us all, “to revisit old values and virtues” such as “honour, loyalty and courage… in the name of reconciliation”.
If Jablonka favours a Year Zero approach, Power is almost conservative, building a future upon the best of the past. The family “came to be seen by those on the left as traditional or oppressive. [But] the family can also be understood as a bastion of resistance against the outside world.” When life goes mad, mum and dad “bring you back down to earth with love and understanding”. Power deserves credit for trying to get into the heads of the men she quotes, even if boorish or chauvinist. She displays female empathy. Jablonka, more of a man than he might admit, does not.
An alternative view, alien to both writers yet held deeply by billions across the planet, is that sex is not an evolutionary accident, but designed for a purpose, and that our characteristics flow from a divine order. Male and female, according to the Bible, were meant for each other. Adam was incomplete, so God created Eve. And, yes, Eve then tempted man to eat the forbidden fruit, destroying our collective innocence, but, as the 18th-century monk Benito Feijóo argued, the fact that Adam fell for this scam only confirms man’s intellectual and moral weaknesses. I’d wager more men have enthusiastically replied to emails from Nigerian princes than women have.
Men are flawed, often in a very funny way. By peppering her book with humour, Power rehumanises the gender debate. Jablonka, deadly serious in his academic gobbledygook, descends into a woke self-parody that sounds suspiciously like mansplaining. At the end, he writes: “While I am a man in my body, heterosexual in my choices, a professor in my career, I feel uncomfortable in the masculine. I am not inclined to become a woman, but I gladly switch genders.” This is the kind of nonsense a man typically spouts in a misguided attempt to talk a feminist into bed.
A history of masculinity by Ivan Jablonka, tr Nathan Bracher (★ ) and What do men want? by Nina Power (★ ★ ★ ★ ) are published by Allen Lane at £25 and £18.99 respectively. To order these books from the Telegraph for £19.99 and £16.99, visit books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514
BBC makes ‘woke cuts’ to archives, including Dad’s Army
The broadcaster has purged a number of racist and misogynistic jokes as well as mentions of disgraced stars Jimmy Savile and Rolf HarrisByMax Stephens22 January 2022 • 1:32pm
Television Dad’s Army
The BBC has purged mentions of disgraced stars Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris along with a number of racist and misogynistic jokes used in several of its classic radio comedies.
An anonymous Radio 4 Extra listener discovered the BBC had been quietly editing repeats of shows over the past few years to be more in keeping with social mores, the Times reported.
Labelling them as “woke cuts,” the listener found edits had been made to old episodes of Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son and I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again.
In some cases entire sketches had been removed.
For example, a repeat of a 1970 episode of I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again, starring John Cleese and Bill Oddie, had a joke about a scantily clad woman removed.
In the original broadcast, Cleese, impersonating a BBC spokesman, said: “We have noticed that it is possible to see right up to the girls’ knickers, owing to the shortness of their miniskirts, so we’ve asked the girls to drop them.”
The BBC also stripped a mention of the n-word from a 1972 episode of the Ronnie Barker sketch show Lines From My Grandfather’s Forehead.
A reference to African people being “cannibals” was also removed from a 1950 episode of Much Binding in the Marsh, a comedy set in a RAF station.
In a sketch from 1970, David Hatch adopted an Indian accent and was described as being “browned off”. The skit was removed.
Other deleted sketches included a spoof of Harris’s songs, titled Rolf Harris’s Dirty Songbook.
A spokesman for the BBC said: “Listeners enjoy a huge number of old comedies from the archives on 4 Extra and on occasion we edit some episodes so they’re suitable for broadcast today, including removing racially offensive language and stereotypes from decades ago, as the vast majority of our audience would expect.”
It is no surprise that American politicians and celebrities were taken in by a fake ‘racist and homo-phobic’ attackBORIS STARLING11 December 2021 • 10:00am
It was the perfect story for these atomised and fractious times. The victim was a gay black actor on a successful television show: his attackers were two white men who shouted racist and homophobic abuse referencing Donald Trump slogans, poured bleach on him and tied a noose around his neck. If ever you wanted an example of America’s ugly side, one both legitimised and enabled by Trump’s presidency, this was too good to be true.
Which, of course, is just what it turned out to be. That actor, Empire’s Jussie Smollett, was