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    Naval Academy Censors Ryan Holiday’s Lecture on Censorship

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    For the past four years, I have been delivering a series of lectures on the virtues of Stoicism to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and I was supposed to continue this on April 14 to the entire sophomore class on the theme of wisdom.Roughly an hour before my talk was to begin, I received a call: Would I refrain from any mention in my remarks of the recent removal of 381 supposedly controversial books from the Nimitz library on campus? My slides had been sent up the chain of command at the school, which was now, as it was explained to me, extremely worried about reprisals if my talk appeared to flout Executive Order 14151 (“Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing.”)When I declined, my lecture — as well as a planned speech before the Navy football team, with whom my books on Stoicism are popular was canceled. (The academy “made a schedule change that aligns with its mission of preparing midshipmen for careers of service,” a Navy spokesperson told Times Opinion. “The Naval Academy is an apolitical institution.”)Had I been allowed to go ahead, this is the story I was going to tell the class:In the fall of 1961, a young naval officer named James Stockdale, a graduate of the Naval Academy and future Medal of Honor recipient who went on to be a vice admiral, began a course at Stanford he had eagerly anticipated on Marxist theory. “We read no criticisms of Marxism,” he recounted later, “only primary sources. All year we read the works of Marx and Lenin.”It might seem unusual that the Navy would send Stockdale, then a 36-year-old fighter pilot, to get a master’s degree in the social sciences, but he knew why he was there. Writing home to his parents that year, he reminded them of a lesson they had instilled in him, “You really can’t do well competing against something you don’t understand as well as something you can.”At the time, Marxism was not just an abstract academic subject, but the ideological foundation of America’s greatest geopolitical enemy. The stakes were high. The Soviets were pushing a vision of global Communism and the conflict in Vietnam was flashing hot, the North Vietnamese fueled by a ruthless mix of dogma and revolutionary zeal. “Marxism” was, like today, also a culture war boogeyman used by politicians and demagogues.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Trumpland, ‘defending free speech’ means one thing: submission to the president | Rafael Behr

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      Compared with many countries around the world, the US is still a great democracy, but a much lesser one than it was four months ago. The constitution has not been rewritten. Checks and balances have not been dissolved. The difference is a president who ignores those constraints, and the impotence of the institutions that should enforce them.Which is the true US, the one enshrined in law or the one that smirks in contempt of law? If the latter, should Britain welcome its embrace as a kindred nation? That is an existential question lurking in the technical folds of a potential transatlantic trade agreement.If JD Vance is to be believed, the prospects of such a deal are looking up. The US vice-president reports that Donald Trump “really loves the United Kingdom”. The two countries are connected by a “real cultural affinity” that transcends business interests.This is a more emollient Vance than the one who earlier this year denounced Britain, alongside other European democracies, as a hotbed of anti-Christian prejudice and endemic censorship. In a speech to the Munich Security Conference in February, Vance told his audience that Europe’s greatest threat comes not from Russia or China, but “from within”. He saw a continent in retreat from the “values shared with the United States of America”. Vance returned to the theme when Keir Starmer visited the White House, rebuking the prime minister for “infringements on free speech that … affect American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens”.That was a swipe at the Online Safety Act, which makes social media companies, websites and search engines responsible for “harmful content” published on their platforms. The law had a tortuous genesis between 2022 and 2023. Its scope expanded and contracted depending on what was deemed enforceable and desirable under three different Conservative prime ministers.The version now on the statute book focuses on unambiguously nasty stuff – incitement to violence, terrorism, race hate, encouraging suicide, child abuse images. Technology companies are required to have systems for removing such content. Those mechanisms are assessed by the regulator, Ofcom. Inadequate enforcement is punishable with fines. Refusal to comply can result in criminal prosecutions.That was the theory. The question of how the law should be implemented in practice was deferred. The answer seems to be not much if Britain wants a trade deal with the US.Last month, Ofcom received a delegation from the US state department, which raised the Online Safety Act in line with the Trump administration’s mission “to affirm the US commitment to defending freedom of expression in Europe and around the world”. Last week, answering questions from the parliamentary liaison committee, Starmer confirmed that diluting digital regulation was on the table in trade talks when he acknowledged that “there are questions about how technology impacts free speech”. The prime minister also conceded that the UK’s digital services tax, which aims to clamp down on international tech companies avoiding tax by hiding their profits offshore, could be up for negotiation.These demands from the White House have been flagged well in advance. In February, Trump signed a “memorandum to defend US companies and innovators from extortion overseas”. The administration promised to take a dim view of any attempt to raise taxes from US tech companies and any use of “products and technology in ways that undermine free speech or foster censorship”.Regulation that impedes the operation of US digital behemoths – anything short of blanket permission to do as they please – will apparently be treated as a hostile act and an affront to human liberty.This is an imperial demand for market access cynically camouflaged in the language of universal rights. The equivalent trick is not available in other sectors of the economy. US farmers hate trade barriers that stop their products flooding European markets, but they don’t argue that their chlorine-washed chickens are being censored. (Not yet.)That isn’t to say digital communications can be subject to toxicity tests just like agricultural exports. There is wide scope for reasonable disagreement on what counts as intolerable content, and how it should be controlled. The boundaries are not easily defined. But it is also beyond doubt that thresholds exist. There is no free-speech case for child sexual abuse images. The most liberal jurisdictions recognise that the state has a duty to proscribe some material even if there is a market for it.The question of how online space should be policed is complex in principle and fiendishly difficult in practice, not least because the infrastructure we treat as a public arena is run by private commercial interests. Britain cannot let the terms of debate be dictated by a US administration that is locked in corrupting political intimacy with those interests.It is impossible to separate the commercial and ideological strands of Trump’s relationship with Silicon Valley oligarchs. They used their power and wealth to boost his candidacy and they want payback from his incumbency. There is not much coherence to the doctrine. “Free” speech is the kind that amplifies the president’s personal prejudices. Correcting his lies with verifiable facts is censorship.That warped frame extends beyond the shores of the US. It is shared by Kemi Badenoch, who considers Vance a friend. Asked about the vice-president’s Munich speech, the Conservative leader said she thought he was “dropping some truth bombs, quite frankly”. Badenoch’s own speeches consistently fret about the capture of Britain’s elite institutions, especially the Whitehall bureaucracy, by repressive woke dogma.There is a school of militant leftism that is tediously censorious, stretching liberal piety to illiberal extremes, and there always has been. But it is very far from power. Maybe Badenoch ramps up the menace to appeal to a fanatical audience on social media. Perhaps she radicalised herself by reading about it there. Either way, to fixate on campus protest politics as the main threat to western democracy when a tyrant sits in the Oval Office requires an act of mental contortion that, if not actually stupid, does a strong imitation of stupidity.Britain doesn’t have to take instruction on political freedom from a regime that suffocates media independence with bullying and vexatious litigation; that demands universities teach the ruling party’s orthodoxies; that courts dictatorships while sabotaging democratic alliances; that kidnaps and jails innocent people with no regard for due process, then ignores the court rulings that say they should be free.These are the “values” that Vance is talking about when he laments that Europe and the US are drifting apart. This is the model of “free speech” that a Trump trading partner is expected to endorse; to protect. Is that the stuff of “real cultural affinity” that earns Britain a deal? Let’s hope not.

      Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Being a librarian was already hard. Then came the Trump administration

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      For many librarians, the stakes of the job are high – they’re facing burnout, book bans, legislation pushed by rightwing groups, and providing essential resources in an effort to fill gaps in the US’s social safety net.Now, as Donald Trump’s administration rolls out their agenda, many librarians are describing his policies as “catastrophic” to accessing information and the libraries themselves – institutions considered fundamental to democracy.Rebecca Hass, the programming and outreach manager at the Anne Arundel county public library in Maryland, has seen the effects of Trump’s second term ripple in.“The impact [is] on many different community partners and customers that are represented in some of the executive orders,” said Hass. “We get everyone at the library. When people lose their jobs, they come to the library. When they’re not sure what’s going on, they come to the library.”Hass said the library received some pushback about LGBTQ+ programming, including protesters showing up to its trans Pride event. But the library is undeterred in efforts to meet community needs and supply resources, creating new resource pages on immigration and LGBTQ+ communities, and updating others. They have expanded partnerships, including with social workers in the library. Usage of the community pantry has increased.Much of this is work the library has always done, Hass said, adding: “But now it’s taken on urgency and additional responsibilities.”Emily Drabinski, an associate professor at the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at the City University of New York, said that what is happening to librarians now mirrors what is happening to other workers.“You don’t get paid enough to meet your basic needs. Your autonomy at work is consistently under threat. People who think that they know better how to do your job are trying to get the power to push you out of your position,” she said.Some librarians described the impact of institutions capitulating to censorship on their work. A librarian in the deep south, who asked to remain anonymous in order to protect their safety, described tensions rising on their library board, and how the library is taking pre-emptive measures to make it challenging to find titles considered “controversial”.“I see all that being as a measure of: ‘If we fly under the radar, we’ll be safe,’” they said. “But it’s sad because who gets left behind – for staff members of color, [or] who are visibly queer, who are disabled, we don’t get to turn off that part of ourselves.”Meanwhile, Imani, an academic librarian in Texas who declined to give their full name for privacy concerns, is an active public library user, said “DEI removal” happened in her workplace in 2023. Now, they’re seeing increased scrutiny on how funds are spent, especially in regard to large databases.“It’s really important that people know that this isn’t new at all,” she said, adding that she knew a school librarian who retired several years ago due to fears of criminalization. “At this point, many librarians have done every single thing they can to save things.”Also, Imani noted, librarians are doing their work with “very little money, very little support [and] higher, higher demand”.Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” recently gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which the American Library Association noted greatly affects the important services they offer, including high-speed internet access, summer reading programs, veterans’ telehealth spaces and more, with the most intense losses in rural communities.While the majority of public library funding comes from city and county taxes, according to EveryLibrary, the IMLS provides grants that support these critical services in every state.Marisa Kabas, the independent journalist who writes the The Handbasket, obtained a copy of a letter sent by IMLS’s acting director, Keith Sonderling, announcing that state library grantee funding would be terminated immediately. (Sonderling previously declared his intention to “restore focus on patriotism” to the IMLS, which many groups noted as an attack on freedom of expression.)The IMLS submitted a budget request of $280m for 2025.“That’s nothing in terms of the federal budget, yet it’s going to affect every single library in the country,” said Jessamyn West, who works in a rural, public library in Vermont in addition to working with the Flickr Foundation. “It’s going to make them scramble, it’s going to make them worry, and it’s going to make them have to make really difficult choices for the services that they give to their patrons.”In many cases, the money is already spent because of contracts libraries had with governments, West added.“We’re all pretty furious,” West said.Librarians are speaking out about what communities could lose, including internet access and workforce development in Kentucky, the Talking Book and Braille Center in New Jersey, digital hotspots in North Carolina, and much more outlined in reporting from Book Riot. As librarians grappled with losses that would directly affect their work, the IMLS Instagram account issued posts appearing to mock grantees.“It’s catastrophic,” Drabinski said, adding that IMLS funds significant library infrastructure, including ebook platforms and interlibrary loan systems. “Without those funds, many of those systems will grind to a halt. All of our work is about to become harder at the same time that the need for our resources and services will explode.”Drabinski continued: “What we want is for people to be able to read, and for people to have enough. The problems that we face as American workers are similar to yours, and we share a fight.” More

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      in US Politics

      As Trump rewrites even America’s history, institutions have two choices – submit or find ways to resist | Charlotte Higgins

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      It has come to this: we are now in Ministry of Truth territory. In Washington DC, the Smithsonian Institution, the US’s ensemble of 21 great national museums, last week became the subject of an executive order by President Donald Trump. “Distorted narratives” are to be rooted out. There will be no more of the “corrosive ideology” that has fostered a “sense of national shame”. The institution has, reads the order, “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” that portrays “American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive”. The vice-president, JD Vance, is, by virtue of his office, on the museum’s board. He is charged by Trump to “prohibit expenditure” on programmes that “divide Americans based on race”. He is to remove “improper ideology”. The order is titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”. George Orwell lived too soon.The move is deeply shocking, but predictable. After Trump’s insertion of himself as chair of the John F Kennedy Center and his railing against the supposed wokeness of the national performing arts venue, the federally funded Smithsonian was bound to be next in line. Those who imagined the Kennedy Center was a one-off, attracting the president’s ire for personal reasons, were deluding themselves about the scale of Trump’s ideological ambition. Picked out for opprobrium in the executive order are the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum for celebrating transgender women (the museum, it should be pointed out, has yet to be built); the National Museum of African American History and Culture; and an exhibition titled The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture at the American Art Museum.I visited the Museum of African American History for the first time a couple of weeks ago. It is a vast book of a museum, heavy with text. It was full, when I visited, of mostly Black families seeking out an encounter with a narrative that has long been a footnote to, or erased completely from, the main national story. You could spend days absorbing the web of stories that the museum offers, beginning in its basements with the transatlantic slave trade, where one of the most moving objects is, unexpectedly and profoundly, a piece of iron ballast that took the place of a human body after a ship’s cargo of enslaved people had been disgorged on the triangular route between Africa, the Americas and Europe. The whole strikes a fascinating balance between an unflinching gaze on systems of oppression, and a sense of Black achievement and cultural richness that has nevertheless effloresced.Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the museum, gave a talk at the House of Lords in 2011 about the institution, which was still in the planning, and would open five years later. I can still recall how moving it was to hear about the difficulties of making a museum – a place where a story is told through objects – from communities traditionally poor in material things. The institution had put out a call for loans and donations. Precious, carefully treasured objects – a bonnet embroidered by someone’s enslaved grandmother, for example – were arriving into the new collection.Fast forward to the present, and Bunch is in charge of the entire Smithsonian Institution. This is a man who believes, as he told Queen’s University Belfast last year, that history can be used to “understand the tensions that have divided us. And those tensions are really where the learning is where the growth is, where the opportunities to transform are.” That compassionate vision of the past, as a means through which the citizens of the present can better understand each other, is completely opposed to the monolithically triumphalist spirit of Trump’s executive order, in which history is reduced to “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness”. How much easier it is, to sink into this pillowy, comforting notion of glorious progress than to grapple with the kind of knotty, often upsetting and confronting history that the Museum of African American History offers its visitors. But it makes me wonder: can the museum survive this government?I visited, too, the American Art Museum, whose show The Shape of Power is targeted in the executive order as emblematic of the Smithsonian’s decline into “divisive, race-centered ideology”. The exhibition, which was years in the careful making, points out what is surely obvious, once it has been given a moment’s thought: that race is not an inherent and prepolitical category, but rather a constructed set of ideologies that served (and still serve) a set of economic and political interests. (One way to tell that race is a socially constructed category, in fact, is by looking to the Greeks and the Romans – the people who established, in the minds of many on the US right, “western civilisation”. They were xenophobic in their own way, and enslavement was a fact of their societies. But as is obvious from their literature, whiteness and Blackness were for them simply not operative categories.) The exhibition is an eye- and mind-opening look at how race ideology has translated into and been reinforced, or deconstructed, by sculpture – that peculiarly lifelike and thus “truthful”-seeming artform.The catalogue quotes Toni Morrison, who once wrote that “I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World.” Such intellectual adventuring is not what is wanted by the White House now. Trump’s world is more like Viktor Orbán’s, under whose government the school history curriculum has been rewritten to glorify Hungary, or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, where the novelist Elif Shafak, as she recalled in a Guardian Live event last week, was prosecuted for “insulting Turkishness”, her lawyer obliged to defend in court the views of her fictional characters. The Smithsonian and all who work there have an unenviable choice, one that has already been put before other great or formerly great institutions such as Columbia University: to comply with Trump’s dark demands; or to find ways to defy them.

      Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer More

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      in US Politics

      Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets | Kenan Malik

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      ‘Gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” It’s a line spoken by Walter Huston in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story about greed and moral corruption directed by his son, John Huston. That line was to have appeared on screen at the beginning of the film. It didn’t, on orders from the studio, Warner Bros. “It was all on account of the word ‘labor’,” John Huston later reflected. “That word looks dangerous in print, I guess.”It was a relatively insignificant moment in the drama of America’s postwar red scare. McCarthyism proper had still to take flight. Yet, so deep ran the fear already that a single, everyday word could create consternation in Hollywood.McCarthyism, the historian Ellen Schrecker has observed, “was a peculiarly American style of repression – nonviolent and consensual. Only two people were killed; only a few hundred went to jail.” Yet it constituted “one of the most severe episodes of political repression the United States ever experienced”.Sackings and legal sanctions created such fear that, in the words of the political philosopher Corey Robin, society was put “on lockdown”, with people so “petrified of being punished for their political beliefs” that “they drew in their political limbs”.It was not just communists who were silenced. “If someone insists that there is discrimination against Negroes in this country, or that there is an inequality of wealth,” claimed the chair of one state committee on un-American activities, “there is every reason to believe that person is a communist.” This at a time when Jim Crow still held the south in its grip. The red scare paused the civil rights movement for more than a decade and drew the teeth of union radicalism.Fear has always been a means of enforcing social order, most obviously in authoritarian states, from China to Saudi Arabia, Turkey to Russia, where repression becomes the foundation of political rule. In liberal democracies, order rests more on consensus than overt brutality. But here, too, fear plays its role. The worker’s fear of being sacked, the claimant’s of being sanctioned, the renter’s of being made homeless, the fear of the working-class mother facing a social worker or of the black teenager walking past a policeman – relations of power are also relations of fear, but fears usually so sublimated that we simply accept that that’s the way the system works.It is when consensus ruptures, when social conflict erupts, or when the authorities need to assert their power, that liberal democracies begin wielding fear more overtly as a political tool to quieten dissent or impose authority. Think of how the British state treated Irish people in the 1970s and 1980s, or miners during the great strike of 1984/85.Seventy years on from McCarthyism, America seems to be entering such a moment. Over the past month, we have seen the mass deportation to a notorious foreign jail of hundreds of people declared to be illegal immigrants and gang members, without evidence or due process; the arrest, detention and threatened deportation of foreign students, including Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Momodou Taal and Yunseo Chung, for protesting about the war in Gaza; the blacklisting of law firms representing clients of whom Donald Trump does not approve; the mass sackings of federal workers.Fear works here in two ways. The targets of repression are groups about whom it is easier to create fear, and so easier to deprive of rights and due process. Doing so then creates a wider climate of fear in which people become less willing to speak out, and not just about Palestine. Already, “whole segments of American society [are] running scared”, as one observer put it.Institutions such as universities, Schrecker concluded about the 1950s, “did not fight McCarthyism” but “contributed to it”, not only through dismissals and blacklists but also through accepting “the legitimacy of what the congressional committees and other official investigators were doing”, thereby conferring “respectability upon the most repressive elements” of the process.It’s a process repeating itself today. Earlier this month, after cancelling $400m (£310m) in federal grants and contracts, Trump made a series of demands of Columbia University, including that it change its disciplinary rules, place the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department under “academic receivership” and adopt the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism that its own lead drafter, Kenneth Stern, condemns as having been “weaponised” into “a blunt instrument to label anyone an antisemite” and to “go after pro-Palestinian speech”. Last week, Columbia capitulated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMichael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, one of the few academic leaders willing to speak out, decries “the greatest pressure put on intellectual life since the McCarthy era”, describing “anticipatory obedience” as “a form of cowardice”. Cowardice, though, has become the defining trait, most university leaders “just happy that Columbia is the whipping boy”. Columbia may be the first university in Trump’s crosshairs, but it won’t be the last. Keeping silent won’t save them.In his incendiary speech in Munich in February, the US vice-president, JD Vance, harangued European leaders to worry less about Russia than “the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values”, especially free speech. The same, it would seem, applies to America, too. Many of those who previously so vigorously upheld the importance of free speech have suddenly lost their voice or now believe that speech should be free only for those with the right kinds of views. The brazen hypocrisy of Vance, and of the fair-weather supporters of free speech, should nevertheless not lead us to ignore the fact that, from more intrusive policing of social media to greater restrictions on our ability to protest to the disciplining, even sacking, of workers holding “gender-critical views”, these are issues to which we urgently need to attend.“I live in an age of fear,” lamented the essayist and author EB White in 1947, after the New York Herald had suggested that all employees be forced to declare their political beliefs to retain their jobs. He was, he insisted, less worried “that there were communists in Hollywood” than to “read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control”. It is a perspective as vital now as it was then, and as necessary on this side of the Atlantic as in America. More

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      in US Politics

      Deporting speakers over supposed ‘propaganda’ is a stock authoritarian move | Sarah McLaughlin

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      The dust is starting to settle on the conflicting reports emerging after immigration officers’ arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University protest leader and green card holder, last weekend – and Americans should be alarmed by the similarities to authoritarian regimes’ speech policing.The White House has confirmed the arrest took place under a law granting the secretary of state unilateral power to act when given “reasonable ground to believe” an immigrant’s “presence or activities in the United States … would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the country.The Trump administration has not been shy in asserting that Khalil’s political expression is at the root of efforts to deport him. The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, claimed Khalil distributed “pro-Hamas propaganda”. A White House officially reportedly added that the “allegation here is not that he was breaking the law”. Their actions are not about conduct, but speech.Trump himself claimed Khalil’s arrest was “the first of many to come” against students engaging in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”.Americans must ask ourselves whether we are comfortable with our government wielding its power to deport speakers for what it claims is pro-terrorist propaganda. If your answer is “yes”, you should know this method is often employed by authoritarian governments with significantly weaker national commitments to free expression than our own.In recent years, India has increasingly canceled or failed to renew the work visas of journalists in the country whose writing has challenged the government, including one whose reporting “crossed the line” and another, married to an Indian citizen, who created a “biased negative perception about India” through her journalism. Officials are also targeting the overseas citizenship of India (OCI) status, available to certain individuals of Indian origin or married to Indian citizens, while it takes aim at those it accuses of “tarnishing the image” of India.These denials serve multiple purposes: they not only diminish government critics’ ability to speak but they also limit the viewpoints that citizens of those countries can access – and warn everyone else to shut up.Similar efforts are under way elsewhere.Russia’s targeting of the press, especially after its invasion of Ukraine, has included the expulsion of foreign journalists including Politico’s Eva Hartog and El Mundo’s Xavier Colas. Hong Kong authorities refused to renew the visa of Rowena He, a scholar and Tiananmen massacre researcher, resulting in her removal from the city and her job at Chinese University of Hong Kong. Kuwait revoked citizenship from the blogger and critic Salman al-Khalidi and has since in absentia convicted him for social media posts and extradited him from Iraq. The list goes on.Governments retain significant authority over who can enter and reside within their borders. But that authority should not be used as a weapon to reflect the government’s preferred political opinions or sift out their critics. Unfortunately, in many places, it is, often on the basis of spurious national security-related claims.The question at hand today is not whether Khalil’s views are popular or beloved among American citizens or politicians. That should never be the question we ask in our most challenging questions about our speech rights. What we must ask instead is: should we approve of the use of government power to expel speakers whose political views the government loathes?Because, through its many comments about Khalil’s case, that is the question the Trump administration has undoubtedly posed to us. If constitutionally protected speech “adversarial” to the political positions of the US and allies can make Khalil eligible for deportation, this administration is ultimately threatening the authority to revoke the status of any lawful immigrants whose views it dislikes. You don’t need to hold any sympathy for Khalil’s views to see why this is an immense threat to free expression.Here in the United States, I advocate for the rights of international students originating from authoritarian regimes who study on our nation’s campuses and carry fear that research or political activity challenging their governments will create consequences at home. Now, immigrants legally in the United States on either a green card or a student visa may be forced to make some of the same calculations as those who live or work in authoritarian states abroad – but about our own government.Is it safe for me to speak my mind? Is it worth the risk? Is the government going to target me for my views?America’s immigration holding cells should not become detention centers for speech the government intends to target.

      Sarah McLaughlin is senior scholar on global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and author of the forthcoming book Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech More

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      in Elections

      Florida Mayor Threatens Cinema Over Israeli-Palestinian Film

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      The mayor of Miami Beach wants to end the lease of a group renting a city-owned property because it is screening the Academy Award-winning “No Other Land” there.The mayor of Miami Beach is seeking to oust a nonprofit art house cinema from a city-owned property for showing “No Other Land,” the Oscar-winning documentary that chronicles the Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes in Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank.The mayor, Steven Meiner, introduced a resolution to revoke the lease under which O Cinema rents the space, he announced in a newsletter this week. He described the film as “a false, one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people that is not consistent with the values of our city and residents.”Kareem Tabsch, the co-founder of O Cinema, said that the threat of losing its physical location in Miami Beach was “very grave and we take it very seriously.”“At the time, we take very seriously our responsibility as a cultural organization that presents works that are engaging and thought provoking and that foster dialogue,” he said. “And we take very seriously our responsibility to do that without interference of government.”The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, which is now co-counsel for the theater, criticized the mayor’s move, as did the makers of the film, which won the Academy Award for best documentary earlier this month but has not been acquired in the United States by a traditional distributor for either a theatrical or streaming release. Distributors in two dozen other countries had picked up the film even before it won the award.Daniel Tilley, the legal director of the Florida branch of the ACLU, said in an interview that “what’s at stake is the government’s ability to use unchecked power to punish those who dare to express views that the government disagrees with.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Julianne Moore’s freckles? How Republican bans on ‘woke’ books have reached new level

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      When the actor Julianne Moore learned her children’s book, Freckleface Strawberry, a tale of a girl who learns to stop hating her freckles, had been targeted for a potential ban at all schools serving US military families, she took to Instagram, posting that it was a “great shock” to discover the story had been “banned by the Trump Administration”.Moore had seen a memo that circulated last week revealing that tens of thousands of American children studying in about 160 Pentagon schools both in the US and around the world had had all access to library books suspended for a week, while officials conducted a “compliance review” to hunt out any books “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics”.Although whether Moore’s book would be selected for “further review” or banned entirely remains unclear, the episode brought into stark relief that the movement to ban books in the US – which has been bubbling up for several years, mostly in individual states – had reached a whole new level: the federal one.Donald Trump’s re-election, and his subsequent crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, has many campaigners fearing that the Pentagon move to scrub its libraries of anything it opposes ideologically could be the first of a series of broad attempts to eliminate any discussions of race, LGBTQ+ issues, diversity and historical education from public schools.The Trump administration has scoffed at the idea that it is banning books, and last month it instructed the Department of Education to end its investigations into the matter, referring to bans as a “hoax”. Indeed, many deny that banning books is censorship at all – a disconnect that stems not just from the historical context of book banning, but from a semantic dispute over what it means to “ban” something.In the early 20th century, books such as Ulysses by James Joyce and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck were banned due to “moral concerns”.Likewise, the red scare of the 1950s saw increased censorship of materials perceived as sympathetic to communism, while the 1980s saw attacks against books dealing with race and sexuality, such as The Color Purple by Alice Walker, which was nearly banned two years after its release in 1984 after a parent petitioned against its use in an Oakland, California, classroom.The difference today, however, is that instead of coming primarily from conservative community organizers, the book banning movement is now coming from government – school boards, local governments and now, with the Pentagon move, even the federal government, increasingly working in lockstep.The modern wave of book bans could be said to have started with a backlash against The 1619 Project, a journalistic anthology by Nikole Hannah-Jones published by the New York Times. The project aimed to reframe US history by centering the contributions of Black Americans, but conservative politicians – including Trump – claimed it taught students to “hate their own country”.View image in fullscreenIn response, Republican lawmakers moved to ban the work in schools, marking the beginning of an intensified campaign against so-called “anti-American” literature.According to PEN America, a non-profit dedicated to defending free expression in literature, more than 10,000 book bans occurred in public schools during the 2023-2024 school year. Books that address racism, gender and history were disproportionately targeted.“The whole principle of public education is that it is not supposed to be dictated by particular ideologies that aim to censor what other people can learn and access in schools,” Jonathan Friedman, the managing director for US free expression programs at PEN America, said.Rightwing politicians, however, have increasingly used book banning as a rallying cry, portraying certain books as tools of “indoctrination” – failing to note the irony that indoctrination is the process of carefully limiting ideas, like banning books.One key figure has been the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. He has echoed Trump’s dismissal of book bans as a “hoax”, and spearheaded multiple attempts to reshape education to reflect only conservative values, including the Stop Woke Act, which restricts discussions on systemic racism, and the Parental Rights in Education Act, widely known as the “don’t say gay” law, which limits discussions of gender identity and sexuality in classrooms.Banned titles in Florida schools now include Beloved and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Normal People by Sally Rooney, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.What DeSantis and other rightwingers often say is that these efforts don’t truly constitute “bans” because they only remove books from schools, rather than totally outlawing them from being bought in the US, and therefore don’t encroach on free speech. John Chrastka, the executive director and founder of EveryLibrary, argued that this is faulty reasoning.“The private marketplace is protected by the first amendment in ways that the government is not beholden to,” he said. “The idea that because a book is still available for sale means that it’s not being banned outright is only the difference between a framework that was in place prior to the 1950s” and today.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe noted that Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was first published in 1928 in Europe, was banned in the US for several years before finally getting its American publication in 1959 in what was a watershed affirmation of the right to free speech. Realizing that the first amendment prevented them from blocking the book from US bookstores, critics turned their attention to libraries instead, a grayer area in terms of constitutional protections.DeSantis and other rightwing politicians have taken the lesson: if the constitution prevents you from banning a book from being bought or sold in Florida, the next best thing is to ban it from the places most people would have the easiest access to it – schools and libraries.“It doesn’t add up,” Chrastka added, “the idea that a teenager in a state where it’s impossible for them to get to an independent bookstore because they don’t exist any more somehow has enough liberty to buy the book when the school library is blocked from having it available for them.”Another key distinction is between banning books from classroom curriculum versus removing them from school libraries – which, unlike classrooms, are historically protected spaces for free access to ideas.“What you read for a class supports the curriculum,” says Chrastka, whereas “the school library is supposed to support independent reading. One of them is required reading and the other one isn’t, but [the reading material] is meant to be available.”The landmark supreme court case Island Trees School District v Pico in 1982, when a school board in New York removed books from its libraries it deemed “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy”, established that school boards cannot restrict the availability of books in their libraries simply because they don’t like or agree with the content.Critics contend the new wave of book bans, although not yet about preventing sales at bookshops, fails to meet the intended purpose of libraries: to preserve and provide a variety of ideas and information that may not be readily or equally accessible to everyone.Now, many fear that once certain books are established as unacceptable in schools, the censorship could spread to colleges, bookstores and eventually nationwide bans. Even if that does not happen, experts say one of the most reliable ways to ensure ideas are suppressed is to dismantle the education system, making Trump’s repeatedly stated goal of eliminating the Department of Education a particular concern.“The vast majority of the budget for the Department of Education and the laws and regulations that make sure that the department is functional go to help students succeed and protect students who are otherwise vulnerable,” said Chrastka.With the education system having been chipped away at for decades with budgets cuts, low literacy rates and high dropout rates, book bans only make it weaker.“What we need in this country is for students to feel supported and to find their own identities, and reading is a core component of that,” Chrastka said. “Let’s let the kids discover themselves and discover their own path forward in the process.” More

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      Censoring Games

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      What China’s influence over Marvel Rivals reveals about censorship.Marvel Rivals is one of the biggest video games in the world. Since its launch in December, more than 40 million people have signed up to fight one another as comic book heroes like Iron Man and Wolverine.But when players used the game’s text chat to talk with teammates and opponents, they noticed something: Certain phrases, including “free Hong Kong” and “Tiananmen Square,” were not allowed.While Marvel Rivals is based on an iconic American franchise, it was developed by a Chinese company, NetEase Games. It has become the latest example of Chinese censorship creeping into media that Americans consume.You can’t type “free Tibet,” “free Xinjiang,” “Uyghur camps,” “Taiwan is a country” or “1989” (the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre) in the chat. You can type “America is a dictatorship” but not “China is a dictatorship.” Even memes aren’t spared. “Winnie the Pooh” is banned, because people have compared China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to the cartoon bear.The restrictions are largely confined to China-related topics. You can type “free Palestine,” “free Kashmir” and “free Crimea.”Why does all of this matter? Video games are not just sources of entertainment; they are also social platforms. Every day, hundreds of millions of children and adults log on to games like Fortnite, World of Warcraft and, yes, Marvel Rivals to play together and hang out. For many young people, these games are as social as Facebook or X.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More