Russian censors won't be out (Fire)foxed, SCOTUS opines on 'Trump so small,' and ‘The Fourth Turning is Here’ by Neil Howe is my book of the month
Bringing you the latest free speech news (6/15/24)
Story of the week
Firefox browser blocks anti-censorship add-ons at Russia’s request (The Intercept) by Nikita Mazurov
The Mozilla Foundation, the entity behind the web browser Firefox, is blocking various censorship circumvention add-ons for its browser, including ones specifically to help those in Russia bypass state censorship. The add-ons were blocked at the request of Russia’s federal censorship agency, Roskomnadzor — the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media — according to a statement by Mozilla to The Intercept.
UPDATE! Mozilla defies Kremlin, restores banned Firefox add-ons in Russia
This week in ERI
This week in FIRE’s blog
Did Penn just squash free speech rights to avoid more pro-Palestinian protests? by Ryan Ansloan
Confidence in colleges and universities hits new lows, per FIRE polls by Nathan Honeycutt
How college leaders can overcome the current campus crisis by Connor Murnane
Media censorship in Israel, Tiananmen memorials criminalized, and the perils of criticizing the powerful by Sarah McLaughlin
International free speech stories of the week
Indonesian court jails comedian for joking about the name Muhammad (Reuters)
Russia formally charges U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich with ‘espionage’ (Meduza)
Vietnam police arrest journalist for violating national security law over critical Facebook post (Jurist) by Nova Kruijning
‘Canceling’ in the news
I joined the Brendan O’Neill Show to talk about some of the themes in ‘Canceling’ and recent protests on American college campuses.
London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Rundown
Tough call this week, what with a SCOTUS First Amendment decision in a novel context (content-based but viewpoint-neutral trademark regs), and a federal judge temporarily enjoining new Title IX regs partly because their harassment standard is “obviously contrary” to the statute and there are “compelling arguments” it can violate the First Amendment – but I’m going with a First Circuit decision that made a bit of a hash out of the Supreme Court’s Tinker v. Des Moines framework to uphold application of a dress code to bar a middle schooler from wearing a “There Are Only Two Genders” t-shirt. The court merges Tinker’s “substantial disruption” and “invasion of the rights of others” exceptions to hold school officials reasonably concluded the shirt demeaned transgender and gender-nonconforming students’ personal characteristics, and thus reasonably predicted it would be materially disruptive to their learning environment due to negative psychological impact. It thus effectively holds silent, passive expression of a viewpoint that doesn't target any specific individual can be banned if it talks about a person's racial or sexual characteristics and it is reasonably forecast the speech would “poison the educational environment.” If left to stand, it would seem to seriously dilute both Tinker exceptions.
Book of the month
I normally do a full book review to establish my Prestigious Ashurbanipal Award (last month’s winner was
’s “Why Buddhism is True”), but given how busy FIRE has been this June, I'm going to announce the book of the month for June 2024 right here. My pick is “The Fourth Turning is Here” by . I came to the idea of historical cycles extremely skeptical, thinking it sounded like pseudo-mystical, superstitious claptrap. But both this book and, in particular, its 1997 precursor, “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy” (co-authored by William Strauss), make a solid argument for historical cycles that repeat certain themes.Most interesting to me, given my work on “Coddling,” are the centrality of the role of parenting and how generations differ in fairly predictable ways from each other—starting with what might be called authoritative parenting, followed by a generation of more sheltered parenting, and then a coddled generation. After that there’s often a generation in which parents are neglectful, which is my generation, Gen-X. It's why we're so jaded, but also so cool.
So check out this discussion with the author on
’s and buy the book. If you think it's silly, let me know as well, but both and I were impressed by it. And check out the author's Substack, .
FWIW, Mozilla seems to have restored the add-ons in Russia, according to The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/14/mozilla_firefox_russia/
Putting the Neil Howe book on my Christmas list! I've got too much to read on my 2-read pile at the moment.