Went to pull up a 2021 Vox article about deplatforming conservatives — and this is the promo banner they're currently running at the top of their website. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/RSSf1wkNwA

— Nate Hochman (@njhochman) September 23, 2025

How are all the left wing and liberal posters who uncritically shared this piece-of-crap XKCD comic feeling now? The time to have a strong defence of free speech was when it was inconvenient, not now when you’re on the receiving end of the ‘consequences’. pic.twitter.com/ReJN3pGsoe

— Simon Biddle (@simonbiddle) September 18, 2025

The irony that it has been covered up! #Banksy #FreeBritain #FreeSpeech https://t.co/fGbXI490Ug pic.twitter.com/qDoz0A85si

— Kaz Quinn #PinkPatriot #UTK (@KarenQuinn1973) September 8, 2025

William Nelson Morgan, a 69-year-old retiree with no criminal history, is the oldest anti-mass migration English riot arrestee to be convicted so far.

He was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison for refusing to disperse and holding a stick at a library riot in… pic.twitter.com/Vhnmm86D7R

— Andy Ngô ️‍ (@MrAndyNgo) August 10, 2024

Heinrich Heine’s Poem “The German Censors”

————————————–.”

Face it, America: you’re just too stupid to listen to Jordan Peterson and RFK Jr. talking about COVID vaccines. Your elite Corporate Overlords, the snot-nosed millennials with the piercings, tattoos, and the gender uncertainty, recently fresh out of college, recognize the need for themselves to do the big thinking for you. It simply wouldn’t be right for both sides of the argument to come your way, you might be confused and come down on he wrong side, poor hapless schmucks that you are. That’s why they’re working on those self-driving cars for you!

In the old America, now gone, businessmen (like Sinclair Lewis’s famous character) were timid and cautious about taking public positions on political matters or pubic controversies, recognizing that some of their customers would inevitably occupy positions on both sides of any such divide. They were afraid to come out on one side or the other for fear of losing half their business.

But today, there are all these natural electronic monopolies, Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and PayPal, and there are these gigantic legacy corporate entities, like Disney and Target and Anheuser-Busch and the Los Angeles Dodgers. If good old George Babbitt came out for Prohibition, for instance, the loose-livers and hard drinkers could, and would, just go right down the road to some other realtor. Today’s big businesses have gotten out of the habit of worrying about staying on their customers’ good sides. On the contrary, they feel entitled to tell you what to think.

NBS News:

YouTube said Monday that it had removed a video of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaking with podcast host Jordan Peterson for spreading what the company said was vaccine misinformation. …

YouTube’s policies against hosting false medical information are long-standing.

“We removed a video from the Jordan Peterson channel for violating YouTube’s general vaccine misinformation policy, which prohibits content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities,” YouTube said Monday in a statement.

“The reason no one will talk to you is there is no professional benefit to saying interesting or controversial things.”

HT: The Anonymous Professor.

Our politics has changed. Our ruling establishment has changed. The leadership of our institutions has changed. And entirely everywhere for the worse.

The media, of course, used to be biased, but the bias was unconscious back then. Today, it is calculated, deliberate, and ruthless.

The American establishment was Country Club Republican, liberal but with some moderation and common sense. The establishment today is a Marxist devoutedly treasonous clerisy that hates the rest of America and that has every inclination to impose its positions by force. The liberals have been purged.

Patrick Maines discusses what has happened to Free Speech.

Of the several unwelcome revelations in the past six years, the most politically significant is that liberalism as a political philosophy is dead.

Oh, there may still be some individuals who identify with it, but for the most part they are old, retired, or cowed into silence by the howling mobs of progressives, the “woke,” and the identitarian left.

And how do we know this? We know it by the collapse of colleges and universities as places of open debate and inquiry. And we know it by the abandonment of any kind of honest and principled journalism by the vast majority of the legacy and social media. For decades these two institutions, the press and the academy, have been the white hot center of American liberalism, and their metamorphosis into woke and progressive fortresses signals the end of it.

How else to explain the spectacle of acceptance, if not the promotion, of censoring, shadow banning, and cancelling? Or the spread of CRT concepts in education from elementary school to college? Or the hostility shown toward Elon Musk’s stated goal of reinstating free speech on Twitter? Or the thuggish and uniform media lies regarding stories like the origin of COVID-19 and authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop?

You don’t have to admire or share the philosophy to know that liberalism is, or was, popularly likened to virtues like tolerance and broad-mindedness. But none of the examples above reflect any of those qualities. Just the opposite.

In the summer of 2020, Harper’s magazine published an open letter signed by 150 or so people, most of whom would then have been regarded as liberals. In it, the signers made clear their dismay over the attacks on freedom of speech:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture; an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.

More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

At the time of its publication the letter looked like it might be the beginning of a powerful liberal backlash against the illiberal machinations of progressives and the like. In hindsight it looks like the last gasp of an exhausted stock.

RTWT

The reptiles and invertebrates running places like Yale today are burdened with inherited commitments to Free Speech dating back to a different time. At Yale, they have not quite nerved themselves up to the point of repudiating the Woodward Report, they only ignore it in practice then obfuscate and pay a little hypocritical lip service to Free Expression that they no longer support. They gave a good citizenship award to one of the Shrieking Students who hounded the master of Silliman College out of office because his wife defended free choice of Halloween costume. Open and frank repudiation of every kind of free speech and expression is just around the corner.