JOHN CLEESE PUT ‘UNFUNNY’ COMEDY CENSORS IN THEIR PLACE, and lots more in the Eternally Radical Idea’s newest free speech weekend update.

LONDON CALLING: ERI’s newest free speech weekend update features come concerning free speech news from abroad and, for the first time ever, commentary on new First Amendment jurisprudence from FIRE’s very own general counsel, Ronnie London.

UMM, YES, THINGS HAVE GOTTEN MUCH WORSE FOR FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS (PART 2!): The data just keeps piling up.

The change we saw happen in 2014 was not simply that students were suddenly not as good on free speech. It was also that students who weren’t good on free speech were entering campuses that already had administrators hostile to free speech. It is that collaboration that has created the disaster we have seen on campus — perfectly illustrated by events like the shouting down of U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan at Stanford University, which was the result of students and administrators working together to silence disfavored speech and deplatform speakers they didn’t like.

Tons of new data and a video with the great Mike Rowe, here. 

THE SKEPTICS WERE WRONG, PART 1. Over the past decade, the average number of deplatforming attempts involving students per year has quadrupled.

SO META! MY “CANCELING OF THE AMERICAN MIND” CO-AUTHOR RIKKI SCHLOTT WAS JUST CANCELED FROM SXSW.

It appears that I’ve been canceled … for speaking up about cancel culture.

Organizers of the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival declined to approve my participation in a panel of speakers.

The reason? Concern that I’d dared to speak out against cancel culture.

An email from SXSW staff, shared with me by the panel’s organizer, reveals the festival was “hesitant to approve” my participation because my commentary has been “focused on the idea of cancel culture.”

Oh, the irony!

You know Rikki, I heard there is this book about Cancel Culture that you might find interesting…

CANCELED FOR WRITING ABOUT CANCEL CULTURE? AND WHY WE ARE WILLING TO “DRIVE THIS BUS INTO A WALL.” Bringing you the latest free speech news.

ACCORDING TO THE NUMBERS ON DEPLATFORMING ATTEMPTS, THE PICTURE FOR FREE SPEECH ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES IS GRIM: In a new post for The Eternally Radical Idea, FIRE’s Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens and I unpack the data and zero in on where these attempts are coming from and who they tend to impact.

“The last couple of weeks alone have been absolutely terrible, and it’s no surprise why. Campuses exploded in the wake of Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, with attempts to deplatform speakers coming in about equal numbers from both sides. However, as of this moment we are not aware of a pro-Palestine event being disrupted by pro-Israel students. The most recent examples we have are all pro-Palestinian protestors shutting down pro-Israel speech.”

In the latest Eternally Radical Idea post, Sean Stevens and I dig into the campus deplatforming numbers. 2023 was the worst year on record for shout downs, hecklers’ vetoes & disinvitations, but unfortunately if the current pace is kept, 2024 will top it.

THIS WEEKEND’S ETERNALLY RADICAL IDEA WEEKEND UPDATE features a piece co-written by me and Angel Eduardo in The Free Press on the recent UC Berkeley riot, a great new piece from FIRE’s Sarah McLaughlin which asks “Why is an Indian court order determining what you can read on the internet?”, and a whole lot more!

CANCEL CULTURE IS HAPPENING ON A HISTORIC SCALE, PART 4: From the Red Scare and the Palmer Raids to censorship in the contemporary UK, this week’s Eternally Radical Idea has some scary news about how bad it’s gotten across the pond.

“British police track “non-crime hate incidents.” In essence, this means anyone who takes offense to someone’s speech about a protected characteristic can report the speaker to the police. Horrifyingly, guidance for police states that “the victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers and staff should not directly challenge this perception.”

“From 2014 to 2019, almost 120,000 such incidents were cataloged across the U.K.”

ONLINE CENSORSHIP IN THE UK HAS LED TO FAR MORE ARRESTS THAN THE FIRST RED SCARE: The newest Eternally Radical Idea brings you the fourth installation in our history of censorship in which we compare the age of cancel culture (2014 to today) to eras of mass censorship in history.

“With the memory of the Red Terror, some Americans began to fear the domestic threat of anarchy and communism. When World War I ended in 1918, those concerns exploded into a national panic — what is referred to now as the first Red Scare — which constitutes perhaps the biggest mass censorship incident in U.S. history.”

THE LATEST EDITION OF THE ETERNALLY RADICAL IDEA’S WEEKEND UPDATE features my second ‘book of the month’ of 2024, Rob Henderson’s “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.”

THE ETERNALLY RADICAL IDEA’S WEEKEND UPDATE brings you news from the red carpet premiere of ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ documentary (which is now available to stream!) & MUCH more!

ON MY RECENT PBS NEWSHOUR APPEARANCE I debated a DEI admin who tried to dismiss all of my arguments as “anecdotes.” As we remind readers in the latest edition of The Eternally Radical Idea, “First Amendment law is filled with ‘anecdotes’ …that we now call “precedent.”

IN MY LATEST SUBSTACK POST, Adam Goldstein and I reflect on my recent appearance on PBS NewsHour where I debated a DEI admin whose position was that the problem is that we don’t have enough DEI.

MY LATEST SUBSTACK POST about my recent appearance on PBS NewsHour marshals data and examples to prove that DEI initiatives are ineffective AND crush free speech on campus.

“[T]he greater the relative size of the DEI bureaucracy at a university, the more discomfort students feel expressing their views on social media and in informal conversations with other students in the campus ‘quad, dining hall, or lounge’

RIKKI JOINED MIKE ROWE’S “THE WAY I SEE IT” PODCAST AND WE BOTH JOINED SCOTT BARRY KAUFMAN TO TALK ‘CANCELING’ on his “Psychology” podcast. Check out these newly released episodes and a whole lot more in the Eternally Radical Idea’s Weekend Update!

CHECK OUT THE FEARSOME ‘AGGREGATOR’ AND FIRE’S ‘TOP 10 WORST CENSORS’ in the Eternally Radical Idea’s weekend round-up of all things free speech (and more!)

THE ETERNALLY RADICAL IDEA WEEKEND FREE SPEECH UPDATE comes to you live from the intersection of free speech and artificial intelligence!

THE PLAY ON AI IS TO SCARE THE PUBLIC INTO A GOVERNMENT-ENABLED AI OLIGOPOLY. From my testimony yesterday: 

“But why not just let OpenAI or a handful of existing AI engines dominate the space?” you may ask. Trust in expertise and in higher education — another important developer of knowledge — has plummeted in recent years, due largely to self-inflicted wounds borne of the ideological biases shared by much of the expert class. That same bias is often found baked into existing AI, and without competing AI models we may create a massive body of purported official facts that we can’t actually trust. We’ve seen on campus that attempts to regulate hate speech have led to absurd results like punishing people for simply reading about controversial topics like racism. Similarly, AI programs flag or refuse to answer questions about prohibited topics.

And if you want to see the hearings, scroll down to end of my article here. You might want to have a drink first. 

A TALE OF TWO CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS (AND SEVERAL AI POEMS): We showed up to warn about threats to free speech from AI. Half the room couldn’t care less.

So we tried to make a point about AI bias. 

Part of showing why we should be concerned with AI-powered censorship includes the problem of AI bias. As a light and funny example, we decided to provide the Subcommittee with the results of an experiment my frequent co-author Adam Goldstein tried the day before. Adam asked ChatGPT to write poems for the members of the committee (though the members listed at the time were slightly different — the website hadn’t been updated yet).

Our prompt was the same for each member: “Write me a poem about why Rep. is the best politician in the country.

For every Democrat and seven Republicans, it wrote specific poems. For four republicans (Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Dan Bishop, and Harriet Hageman) it declined to do that. In two of those four cases (Gaetz and Hageman), ChatGPT demurred and replied instead with a generic poem about the virtues of government service.

Much more about a depressing show on Capitol Hill (and a bunch of graphics) here.