Category: Free Speech

“It’s Not Clear What We Are and Aren’t Allowed to Say”

(p. B1) When Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill that would punish California doctors for spreading false information about Covid-19 vaccines and treatments, he pledged that it would apply only in the most “egregious instances” of misleading patients.

It may never have the chance.

Even before the law, the nation’s first of its kind, takes effect on Jan. 1 [2023], it faces two legal challenges seeking to declare it an unconstitutional infringement of free speech. The plaintiffs include doctors who have spoken out against government and expert recommendations during the pandemic, as well as legal organizations from both sides of the political spectrum.

“Our system opts toward a presumption that speech is protected,” said Hannah Kieschnick, a lawyer for the Northern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, which submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in favor of one of the challenges, filed last month in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

That lawsuit and another, filed this month in the Eastern District of California, have become an extension of the broader cultural battle over the Covid-19 pandemic, which continues to divide Americans along stark partisan lines.

. . .

(p. B5) The plaintiffs in California have sought injunctions to block the law even before it goes into effect, arguing that it was intended to silence dissenting views.

One of them, Dr. Tracy Hoeg, a physician and epidemiologist who works in Grass Valley, near Sacramento, has written peer-reviewed studies since the pandemic began that questioned some aspects of government policies adopted to halt the spread of Covid-19.

Those studies, on the efficacy of masks for schoolchildren and the side effects of vaccines on young men, exposed her to vehement criticism on social media, she said, partly because they fell outside the scientific consensus of the moment.

She noted that the medical understanding of the coronavirus continues to evolve, and that doctors should be open to following new evidence about treatment and prevention.

“It’s going to cause this very broad self-censorship and self-silencing from physicians with their patients because it’s not clear what we are and aren’t allowed to say,” said Dr. Hoeg, one of five doctors who filed a challenge in the Eastern District. “We have no way of knowing if some new information or some new studies that come out are accepted by the California Medical Board as consensus yet.”

. . .

Dr. Jeff Barke, a physician who has treated Covid patients at his office in Newport Beach in Southern California, said the law was an attempt by the state to impose a rigid orthodoxy on the profession that would rule out experimental or untested treatments.

Those include treatments with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine that he said he had found to be effective at treating the coronavirus, despite studies suggesting otherwise. “Who determines what false information is?” he said.

. . .

“What comes next?” he said. “How I talk to patients about cancer? How I talk to patients about obesity or diabetes or asthma or any other illnesses? When they have a standard of care that they think is appropriate and they don’t want me going against their narrative, then they’ll say Barke’s spreading misinformation.”

For the full story, see:

Steven Lee Myers. “Law to Stem Medical Misinformation Is Facing a Free Speech Challenge.” The New York Times (Thursday, December 1, 2022): B1 & B5.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 30, 2022, and has the title “Is Spreading Medical Misinformation a Doctor’s Free Speech Right?”)

Lancet Editorial Praised Chinese Communists’ Covid Policy of “Restricting Public Freedoms”

(p. A17) China’s zero-Covid policies have recently come under criticism from public-health leaders—including those at the World Health Organization—who once held them up as a model for the West.

“China’s success rests largely with a strong administrative system that it can mobilise in times of threat, combined with the ready agreement of the Chinese people to obey stringent public health procedures,” the Lancet editorialized on March 7, 2020. Western countries, it added, “must abandon their fears of the negative short-term public and economic consequences that may follow from restricting public freedoms as part of more assertive infection control measures.”

That hasn’t worn well. The negative social and economic consequences of lockdowns in the West—from learning losses and destroyed small businesses to alcoholism and drug abuse—weren’t “short-term.” Nor were China’s draconian zero-Covid policies, which three years later are only slowly being eased.

For the full commentary, see:

Allysia Finley. “LIFE SCIENCE; Western Scientists Cheered On China’s Covid Repression.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Dec. 12, 2022): A17.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 11, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

Persian King Cyrus Tolerated Diversity of Religion and Culture

(p. C12) After another year that has cried out for inspiring leadership, I grasped glimmers of optimism from Matt Waters’s “King of the World,” a biography of Persian king Cyrus the Great.

. . .

Today Cyrus is revered as a model of pragmatic, benevolent rulership.

. . .

. . . Cyrus imposed or forbade no religion, language, ethnicity, dress code or culture on his native Persians or the many other peoples he ruled. Would that this were the case for his descendants today.

For the full review, see:

Timothy Potts. “12 Months of Reading; Timothy Potts.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 10, 2021): C12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 8, 2022, and has the title “Who Read What in 2022: Thinkers and Tastemakers.”)

The book praised by Timothy Potts is:

Waters, Matt. King of the World: The Life of Cyrus the Great. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Collins and Fauci Did Not Seek Open Debate on the Great Barrington Declaration

(p. A15) The Trump Twitter ban almost pales in comparison with the speech limitations routinely enforced on discussion of climate and Covid. Instead of “hate” or “violence,” the elastic pretext for speech restriction here is “settled science.”

The essence of science was once open debate. But that’s no longer true. In a now-infamous 2020 email, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins wrote Anthony Fauci that the Great Barrington Declaration, a dissent from Covid-lockdown policy, needed “a quick and devastating published take down,” which soon appeared in the press.

For the full commentary, see:

Henninger, Daniel. “WONDER LAND; They Want to Shut You Up.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, December 15, 2022): A15.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 14, 2022, and has the title “WONDER LAND; They Want to Shut You (and 303 Creative) Up.”)

Auto Experts Are Skeptical of EVs, but Are Afraid “So They Can’t Speak Out Loudly”

(p. A1) “People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority,” Mr. Toyoda said to reporters during a visit to Thailand. “That silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend so they can’t speak out loudly.”

. . .

(p. A6) The world’s biggest auto maker has said it sees hybrids, a technology it invented with the debut of the Toyota Prius in the 1990s, as an important option when EVs remain expensive and charging infrastructure is still being built out in many parts of the world. It is also developing zero-emission vehicles powered by hydrogen.

“Because the right answer is still unclear, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to just one option,” Mr. Toyoda said. Over the past few years, Mr. Toyoda said, he has tried to convey this point to industry stakeholders, including government officials—an effort he described as tiring at times.

Global car companies have made a sharp pivot to electric vehicles within the last few years, driven in part by the success of EV-only maker Tesla Inc.

. . .

At the same time, the legacy auto makers have a much broader base of customers, including many living in rural areas and developing economies with unreliable electricity supplies.

And their gas-engine businesses are still driving the bulk of profits needed to fund the costly shift to electric vehicles, which not only requires the development of new models but also construction of new facilities and battery plants.

The infrastructure to charge electric vehicles is meanwhile still lacking in the U.S. and many other parts of the world, making owning an EV still a challenge for many types of consumers.

. . .

Ryan Gremore, an Illinois-based dealer, who owns several brand franchises, said he gets a lot of customers inquiring about EVs, in part because of limited supplies.

That might give the impression of robust demand, but it is unclear how it will materialize when inventory levels at dealerships normalize, he added. “Is there interest in electric vehicles? Yes. Is it more than 10% to 15% of our customer base? No way,” Mr. Gremore said.

Mr. Toyoda’s long-held skepticism about a fully electric future has been shared by others in the Japanese car industry, as well.

Mazda Motor Corp. executives once cautioned that whether EVs were cleaner depends largely on where the electricity is produced. They also worried that EV batteries were too big and expensive to replace gas-powered models and better suited to the types of smaller vehicles that Americans didn’t want.

For the full story, see:

River Davis and Sean McLain. “Toyota Skeptical of Going All-EV.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Dec. 19, 2022 ): A1 & A6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Dec. 18, 2022, and has the title “Toyota Chief Says ‘Silent Majority’ Has Doubts About Pursuing Only EVs.”)

Across Communist China a Sheet of Blank White Paper “Is a Symbol of Tacit Defiance”

(p. A7) In Shanghai, a vigil grew into a street protest where many held blank sheets of white paper in a symbol of tacit defiance.

. . .

. . . in a country where the authorities have very little tolerance for open dissent, many communicated through subtler methods, and among the most prominent were the blank sheets of white paper used in Shanghai, Beijing and other cities.

. . .

Demonstrators used the white sheets to mourn those lost — white is a common funeral color in China — and to express an anger understood implicitly by millions who have suffered under pandemic restrictions.

The display of wordless papers “means ‘we are the voiceless, but we are also powerful,’” said Hazel Liu, a 29-year-old film producer who attended the vigil along the Liangma River in Beijing on Sunday [Nov. 27, 2022].

. . .

“People have a common message,” said Xiao Qiang, a researcher on internet freedom at the University of California, Berkeley. “They know what they want to express, and authorities know too, so people don’t need to say anything. If you hold a blank sheet, then everyone knows what you mean.”

Some protesters told The New York Times that the white papers took inspiration from a Soviet-era joke, in which a dissident accosted by the police for distributing leaflets in a public square reveals the fliers to be blank. When asked, the dissident replies that there is no need for words because “everyone knows.”

. . .

Some have pushed the protests in other creative directions. A statement that appeared to have been sent by one of China’s largest stationery companies circulated online, saying that the company would suspend sales of A4 paper to “safeguard national security and stability.” The company was forced to announce on its social media account that the message was fabricated and that all operations remained normal.

The muted defiance of the protests — often innocuous on the surface — has handed the police the nebulous task of deciding what crosses the line.

For the full story, see:

Chang Che and Amy Chang Chien. “With Sly Memes and Wordless Protests, Fed-Up Chinese Test the Authorities.” The New York Times (Tuesday, November 29, 2022): A7.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 28, 2022, and has the title “Memes, Puns and Blank Sheets of Paper: China’s Creative Acts of Protest.”)

The McCarthy Era, and Right Now: Each a “Very Bad Time” for Free Speech

(p. A13) New Milford, Conn.

Old-fashioned liberalism doesn’t get much respect these days, and Nadine Strossen illustrates the point by pulling out a hat. “I have to show you this gift that somebody gave me, which is such a hoot,” she says, producing a red baseball cap that bears the slogan MAKE J.S. MILL GREAT AGAIN. “Which looks like a MAGA cap,” she adds, as if to help me narrate the scene.

As she dons it, I observe that if she walked around town in her bright-blue home state, angry onlookers would think it was a MAGA hat. “And,” she continues, “I can’t tell you how many educated friends of mine have said, ‘Who is J.S. Mill?’ So we really do have to make him great again.”

Ms. Strossen, 71, has made a career as a legal and scholarly defender of classical liberal ideals, most notably as president of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 through 2008. She brings up John Stuart Mill (1806-73), the British philosopher and parliamentarian, by way of citing his view, as she puts it, “that everything should be subject to re-examination,” including “our most cherished ideas.”

. . .

“For many decades now there’s been this asserted dichotomy or tension between equality rights and liberty,” Ms. Strossen says. “I continue to believe that they’re mutually reinforcing, that we can’t have meaningful liberty, in a meaningful sense, unless it’s equally available to everybody. . . . Every single one of us should have an equal right to choose how we express ourselves, how we communicate to somebody else, what we choose to listen to.”

She elaborates in her 2018 book, “Hate: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, Not Censorship,” and in our interview when we turn to higher education. Campus authorities frequently justify the suppression of “so-called hate speech”—Ms. Strossen is punctilious about including that dismissive qualifier—with what she calls the “false and dangerous equation between free expression and physical violence.”

“When people hear the term ‘hate speech,’ ” she says, “they usually envision the most heinous examples—a racial epithet; spitting in the face of Dr. Martin Luther King. But in fact, when you see what’s been attacked as so-called hate speech on campus, it’s opposing the idea of defund the police, opposing the idea of open borders.” Any questioning of transgender ideology or identity is cast as “denying the humanity of trans people, or transphobic.” Ms. Strossen hastens to add that “I completely support full and equal rights for trans people,” but she says critics are “raising concerns that I think deserve to be raised and deserve to be discussed.”

Ms. Strossen, herself a professor emerita at New York Law School, likens the situation on campuses to McCarthyism, “a climate of fear that leads to treating certain people with suspicion or, worse, ostracizing those people and those who try to defend them, and punishing them.”

. . .

On campus, she admits that things are worse than they’ve been at least since the McCarthy era—but she still tries to look on the bright side. “I am absolutely convinced that a future generation is going to look back on this time and say this is another very bad time,” she says.

For the full interview, see:

Tunku Varadarajan. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; Make Freedom of Speech Liberal Again.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Aug. 6, 2022): A13.

(Note: ellipses between paragraphs, added; ellipsis internal to paragraph, in original.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date August 5, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

The Strossen book mentioned in the interview is:

Strossen, Nadine. Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

If Apple and Google Ban Twitter from Their Phone App Stores, Musk Will Start Making Phones

Elon Musk said he would make his own smartphone if Google and Apple were to ban Twitter from their app stores.

Musk said in a tweet responding to conservative podcaster Liz Wheeler that he hopes the situation does not come to that but that he will make that decision if necessary.

“I certainly hope it does not come to that, but, yes, if there is no other choice, I will make an alternative phone,” he said.

Wheeler first proposed the idea, saying that half of the country would “happily ditch the biased, snooping iPhone and Android.”

“The man builds rockets to Mars, a silly little smartphone should be easy, right?” she tweeted.

For the full story, see:

JARED GANS. “Elon Musk says he would make his own smartphone if app stores ban Twitter.” THE HILL (Saturday, Nov. 26, 2022). URL: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3750849-elon-musk-says-he-would-make-his-own-smart-phone-if-app-stores-ban-twitter/.

Chinese Protestors Seek “Freedom” and “Rule of Law”

(p. A1) BEIJING—Protests are erupting in major cities in China over President Xi Jinping’s zero-tolerance approach to Covid-19, an unusual show of defiance in the country as the economic and social costs from snap lockdowns and other strict restrictions escalate.

. . .

(p. A8) The protests followed demonstrations on Friday [Nov. 25, 2022] in Urumqi, capital of the remote region of Xinjiang, where a deadly fire enraged residents who had struggled with lockdowns of more than 100 days. Residents flooded social media with comments suggesting that Covid restrictions contributed to a delay in putting out the fire, in which officials said 10 people died.

In Beijing, hundreds of protesters marched on Sunday night. A large police presence pinned protesters near the Liangmahe river, a popular spot for family picnics by day that is close to many foreign embassies. “Freedom,” the protesters shouted in unison.

. . .

Signs that unrest after the deadly fire in Urumqi was spreading beyond Xinjiang became apparent on Saturday [Nov. 26, 2022], when videos circulating on social media showed crowds gathering on a street in central Shanghai calling for a lifting of lockdowns. The videos were verified by Storyful, a social-media research company owned by News Corp, parent company of The Wall Street Journal.

. . .

One middle-aged Shanghai resident said he stopped by on his way home and joined the crowd in singing “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from the musical “Les Misérables” and the Chinese national anthem. A friend who grew up in Xinjiang began to cry, he said.

“[We in] Shanghai can relate to that, because we had gone through such a long lockdown,” he said, referring to more than two months of iron-fisted Covid controls imposed on the city earlier this year.

The mood intensified. Using expletives and call-and-response chanting, some protesters began to denounce both Mr. Xi and his Covid-control strategy. Another clip from the scene showed demonstrators standing across from lines of police.

The clip showed one man chanting, “The Communist Party.” Others responded, “Step down.”

“Xi Jinping,” the man shouted. “Step down,” others responded.

. . .

On Chinese social-media, users raced against censors to spread images and news of the protests, along with expressions of solidarity. “Long live the people, may the dead rest in peace,” said a message that spread widely. Others posted an image of a blank white sheet of paper—a nod to censorship—with the words “I love you, China. I love you, young people.”

The protests continued Sunday [Nov. 27, 2022], with students gathering around noon on the campus of Tsinghua University, another elite school in Beijing. Some in the crowd carried sheets of paper that were either blank or had an exclamation mark inside a red circle—the symbol that indicates an online post has been deleted—according to witness video footage shared with the Journal. The students sang songs and chanted “Democracy and rule of law!”

For the full story, see:

Lingling Wei, Brian Spegele and Wenxin Fan. “Protests Spread in Challenge To Xi’s Regime.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Nov. 28, 2022): A1 & A8.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed dates, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov. 28, 2022, and has the title “Chinese Protests Spread Over Government’s Covid Restrictions.” Where the versions differ, the quotes above follow the more detailed online version.)

Toyota Pressured to “Dial Back” Its Defense of Hybrids as a Practical Bridge to EVs

(p. B2) Mr. Toyoda, Toyota’s chief, has been one of the industry’s most prominent voices of caution about EVs. He has questioned whether the vehicles are as environmentally friendly as advertised and expressed doubt that consumers want them.

Toyota has said it believes hybrids can reduce carbon emissions while the battery supply chains and charging networks necessary to support big fleets of EVs are built globally over the coming decades. Hybrid cars—which made up nearly 30% of Toyota and Lexus global shipments for the most recent quarter—are helping the auto maker meet tightening emissions rules in markets like Europe.

Demand for hybrids also helped Toyota reach a record operating profit of ¥3 trillion, equivalent to $21 billion, for the fiscal year ended in March. Its stock price on the Tokyo Stock Exchange has held up reasonably well, down 9% this year, while other auto makers have suffered steeper declines.

Mr. Toyoda has been trying to understand why some investors and environmental groups remain unconvinced about the company’s electrification strategy.

. . .

People at Toyota said company executives have been advised by public-relations specialists and others in the company to dial back negative comments about EVs and instead highlight their benefits as well as Toyota’s extensive investments in the technology.

Sage Advisory Services, an investment management firm in Austin, Texas, that holds Toyota bonds, said it has sensed a shift in rhetoric.

Sage Advisory had approached the car maker last year with concerns about its EV stance, to which Toyota responded with its usual arguments, including about hybrid cars, said Sage Vice President Emma Harper. She said the points made sense to her but were hard for the general public to grasp.

More recently, she said, Toyota has “flipped over and they’ve felt the change in the tide and how consumers and politicians and other stakeholders are feeling about the transition away from fossil-fuel cars.”

For the full story, see:

River Davis. “Toyota Aims to Face Critics of Its EV Policies.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Sept. 26, 2022): B1-B2.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date September 25, 2022, and has the title “Toyota Softens Toward Critics of Its EV Push.” Where the versions differ, the quotes above follow the more detailed online version.)

“If Pro Is the Opposite of Con, Is Progress the Opposite of Congress?”

(p. B12) Gallagher, who became one of the most recognizable comedians of the 1980s for an outrageous act that always concluded with him smashing a watermelon with a sledgehammer, died on Friday [Nov. 11, 2022] at his home in Palm Springs, Calif.

. . .

In 1987, United Press International reported that researchers at Loma Linda University in Southern California studying laughter took blood samples from 10 medical students while they watched Mr. Gallagher in action. Not only did they laugh uproariously; their white blood cells increased. The comedian, the scientists said, appeared to have boosted the subjects’ immune systems.

. . .

Much of Mr. Gallagher’s humor was based on wordplay. (“I don’t know why they say you have a baby. The baby has you.” “If pro is the opposite of con, is progress the opposite of Congress?”) But he also prided himself on being outrageous and even offensive, defying political correctness. (Deaf people, he said, should be required to live near airports.) Many people, especially in his later years, felt his jokes about racial groups, gay people and women crossed a line.

“Look around — see any Mexicans?” he said during one 2010 show. “They’ll be here later for the cleanup.”

In 2011, Mr. Gallagher was a guest on his fellow comedian Marc Maron’s podcast but walked out when Mr. Maron asked him about this and similar jokes. Some critics agreed that his act had gone too far. But he never toned it down.

For the full obituary, see:

Douglas Martin. “Gallagher, 76, Who Smashed Watermelons With a Sledgehammer, Dies.” The New York Times (Saturday, November 12, 2022): B12.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Nov. 14, 2022, and has the title “Gallagher, Watermelon-Smashing Comedian, Is Dead at 76.”)