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      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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      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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      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

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      Vance, in First Foreign Speech, Tells Europe That U.S. Will Dominate A.I.

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      Speaking in Paris at an artificial intelligence summit, the vice president gave an America First vision of the technology — with the U.S. dominating the chips, the software and the rules.Vice President JD Vance told European and Asian leaders in Paris on Tuesday that the Trump Administration was adopting an aggressive, America First approach to the race to dominate all the building blocks of artificial intelligence, and warned Europeans to dismantle regulations and get aboard with Washington.On his first foreign trip since taking office, Mr. Vance used his opening address at an A.I. summit meeting hosted by France and India to describe his vision of a coming era of American technological domination. Europe, he said, would be forced to chose between using American-designed and manufactured technology or siding with authoritarian competitors — a not-very-veiled reference to China — who would exploit the technology to their detriment.“The Trump administration will ensure that the most powerful A.I. systems are built in the U.S. with American design and manufactured chips,” he said, quickly adding that “just because we are the leader doesn’t mean we want to or need to go it alone.”But he said that for Europe to become what he clearly envisions as a junior partner, it must eliminate much of its digital regulatory structure — and much of its policing of the internet for what its governments define as disinformation.For Mr. Vance, who is on a weeklong tour that will take him next to the Munich Security Conference, Europe’s premier meeting of leaders, foreign and defense ministers and others, the speech was clearly intended as a warning shot. It largely silenced the hall in a wing of the Grand Palais in the center of Paris. Leaders accustomed to talking about “guardrails” for emerging artificial intelligence applications and “equity” to assure the technology is available and comfortable for underserved populations heard none of those phrases from Mr. Vance.He spoke only hours after President Trump put new 25 percent tariffs on foreign steel, essentially negating trade agreements with Europe and other regions. Mr. Vance’s speech, precisely composed and delivered with emphasis, seemed an indicator of the tone Mr. Trump’s national security leaders plan to take to Europe this week.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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      Books About Everyone, for Everyone

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      This is part of an Opinion series on The New York Times Communities Fund, which assists nonprofits that provide direct support to people and communities facing hardship. Donate to the fund here. .g-goldbergseriesinfo a { text-decoration: underline; color: inherit; text-decoration-thickness: 1px; text-underline-offset: 2px; } .g-goldbergseriesinfo{ position: relative; display: flex; overflow: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.125rem […] More

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      When Trump says he’s going to ‘protect’ women, he means ‘control’ them | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Could Republicans take away a woman’s right to a credit card?“Hello, I’d like a line of credit, please.”“Well, before we can even consider that, are you married? Are you taking a contraceptive pill? And can your husband co-sign all the paperwork so we know you have a man’s permission?”That may not be an exact rendition of an actual conversation between a woman and a US bank manager in 1970, but it’s close enough. Before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed in 1974, it was considered good business practice for banks to discriminate against women. It didn’t matter how much money she had – a woman applying for a credit card or loan could expect to be asked invasive questions by a lender and told she needed a male co-signer before getting credit. All of which severely limited a woman’s ability to build a business, buy a house or leave an abusive relationship.Then came the ECOA, which was signed into law 50 years ago on Monday. Banking didn’t magically become egalitarian after that – discriminatory lending practices are still very much an issue – but important protections were enshrined in law. A woman finally had a right to get a credit card in her own name, without a man’s signature.When things feel bleak – and things feel incredibly bleak at the moment – it is important to remember how much social progress has been made in the last few decades. Many of us take having access to a credit card for granted, but it’s a right that women had to fight long and hard for. Indeed, the ECOA was passed five years after the Apollo 11 mission. “Women literally helped put a man on the moon before they could get their own credit cards,” the fashion mogul Tory Burch wrote for Time on the 50th anniversary of the ECOA being signed.If feels fitting that such an important anniversary is so close to such an important election. While we must celebrate how far we’ve come, it’s also important to remember that progress isn’t always linear. Rights that we have taken for granted for decades can, as we saw with the overturning of Roe v Wade, be suddenly yanked away.Is there any chance that, if Donald Trump gets into power again, we might see Republicans take away a woman’s right to her own credit card? It’s certainly not impossible. Trump’s entire campaign is, after all, about taking America back. The former president has also cast himself as a paternalistic protector of women.“I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not,” Trump said at a rally on Wednesday. “I’m going to protect them.”Of course, we all know what “protect” really means in this context: it means “control”. Should he become president again, Trump and his allies seem intent on massively expanding the power of the president and eliminating hard-won freedoms. Conservative lawmakers and influencers want to control a woman’s access to reproductive healthcare. They want to control the sorts of books that get read and the type of history that gets taught. They want to control how women vote. They want to control whether a woman can get a no-fault divorce. They might not take away women’s access to credit, but they will almost certainly try to chip away at a woman’s path to financial independence.Elon Musk denies offering sperm to random acquaintancesA recent report from the New York Times alleges that he wants to build a compound to house his many children and some of their mothers. “Three mansions, three mothers, 11 children and one secretive, multibillionaire father who obsesses about declining birthrates when he isn’t overseeing one of his six companies: It is an unconventional family situation, and one that Mr Musk seems to want to make even bigger,” the Times notes. Apparently, in an effort to do this, he has been offering his sperm to friends and acquaintances. Musk has denied all this. This joins a growing list of sperm-based denials. Over the summer, he denied claims in the New York Times that he’d volunteered his sperm to help populate a colony on Mars.Martha Stewart criticises Netflix film that ‘makes me look like a lonely old lady’The businesswoman was also upset that director RJ Cutler didn’t put Snoop Dogg on the soundtrack: “He [got] some lousy classical score in there, which has nothing to do with me.”JD Vance thinks white kids are pretending to be trans so they can get into collegeLike pretty much everything the vice-presidential candidate says, this is insulting and nonsensical. Rather than having advantages conferred on them, trans people in the US are subject to dehumanizing rhetoric and laws that want to outlaw their existence. Meanwhile, it is well-documented that there are plenty of privileged children whose parents spent a lot of money so their kids could pretend to be athletes to get into college.What happened to the young girl captured in a photograph of Gaza detainees?The BBC tells the story of a young girl photographed among a group of men rounded up by Israeli forces. In her short life, Julia Abu Warda, aged three, has endured more horror than most of us could imagine.Pregnant Texas teen died after three ER visits due to medical impact of abortion banNevaeh Crain, 18, is one of at least two Texas women who have died under the state’s abortion ban.Sudan militia accused of mass killings and sexual violence as attacks escalateThe war in Sudan, which has displaced more than 14 million people, is catastrophic – particularly for girls and women. In a new report, a UN agency said that paramilitaries are preying on women and sexual violence is “rampant”. And this violence is being enabled by outside interests: many experts believe that, if it weren’t for the United Arab Emirates’ alleged involvement in the war, the crisis would already be over. The UAE, you see, is interested in Sudan’s resources. Meanwhile, the Guardian reported back in June that UK government officials have attempted to suppress criticism of the UAE for months.The week in pawtriarchyYou’ve almost certainly heard of the infinite monkey theorem: the idea that, given all the time in the world, a monkey randomly hitting keys on a typewriter would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Now, two Australian mathematicians have declared the notion im-paw-ssible. Indeed, they only found a 5% chance that a single monkey would randomly write the word “bananas” in their lifetime. Meanwhile, the Guardian notes that Shakespeare’s canon includes 884,647 words – none of them “banana”. More

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      From School Librarian to Activist: ‘The Hate Level and the Vitriol Is Unreal’

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      Amid a surge in book bans nationwide, the librarian Amanda Jones was targeted by vicious threats. So she decided to fight back.One Sunday morning two years ago, Amanda Jones, a middle school librarian in Watson, La., woke up and saw an email on her phone that left her shaking and breathless.The expletive-laced message from a stranger accused her of being a pedophile and a groomer, and concluded with a threat: “You can’t hide. We know where you work + live. You have a LARGE target on your back,” it said. “Click … Click … see you soon!”It was part of a deluge of online threats and harassment that Jones has faced since the summer of 2022, when she was one of around 20 people to speak out against book banning during a July meeting at her local public library.A fight broke out over whether the library should remove books with content that some deemed inappropriate for children. Like many librarians across the country, Jones found herself caught in a vicious battle over which books belong in libraries — a debate that has divided communities and school boards as book bans have surged in the United States.But the attacks on Jones have been particularly intense, and unrelenting, because of her response: She fought back.After commenters on social media accused her of seeking to sexualize children, Jones filed a defamation lawsuit against two men and the organization Citizens for a New Louisiana, a group that has pushed to have books that they consider erotic or sexual removed from the children’s section of libraries. She co-founded Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship, which lobbies against legislation that would place new restrictions on libraries. And she’s highlighting the threat of censorship and the pressure that librarians face in a memoir, “That Librarian,” which Bloomsbury published last month.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