All posts tagged: speech

Trump’s verdict speech fact-checked: what he said and whether it’s true | Donald Trump

Trump’s verdict speech fact-checked: what he said and whether it’s true | Donald Trump

Published by skeptic

Donald Trump delivered a rambling, incoherent speech laden with falsehoods and conspiracy theories from the atrium of Trump Tower, a day after the former president was convicted of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in his hush-money criminal trial. Here is a fact check of some of the things he said on Friday – and why they weren’t true. Trump claims the Joe Biden White House was behind his prosecution Donald Trump claimed that the judge presiding over his hush-money case, Juan Merchan, and the court was in “total conjunction with the White House and the DoJ [Department of Justice]”. There is no evidence whatsoever supporting this claim. “This is all done by Biden and his people,” the former president said during a speech on Friday at Trump Tower. The accusation that Biden was behind the prosecution does not line up with the case’s facts. The elected district attorney of Manhattan, Alvin Bragg, brought the case against Trump. Bragg is a state official who does not report to the federal government. Biden does not …

Outrage Over a Catholic Commencement Speech at a Catholic College – OpentheWord.org

Outrage Over a Catholic Commencement Speech at a Catholic College – OpentheWord.org

Published by skeptic

Harrison Butker, Field goal kicker for the Kansas City ChiefsCredit: Airman 1st Class William Lunn, Wikipedia, Public Domain By Dr. Michael Brown While a petition calling for the firing of Harrison Butker, one of the greatest placekickers in the NFL, has gained more than 100,000 signatures, sales of his jersey are skyrocketing. Why all the controversy?  This past Sunday, Butker, who plays for the Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs and is a traditional Catholic, delivered the commencement speech at Benedictine College, a highly-ranked, private, liberal arts, traditional Catholic school. What did he actually say in his speech? Why the outrage, on one hand, and the support, on the other hand? He referenced “the COVID fiasco” and stated that, “Bad policies and poor leadership have negatively impacted major life issues. Things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values and media all stem from the pervasiveness of disorder.” Butker was pulling no punches. But he was just getting started.  He said, “Our own nation is led by a …

what are students’ free speech rights and what can universities do?

what are students’ free speech rights and what can universities do?

Published by skeptic

Students expressing solidarity with Palestinians and protesting Israel’s war in Gaza have set up encampments on campuses around the UK. Around 15 encampments have emerged in Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Warwick Manchester and others. They’ve also emerged in other countries including France and Ireland. Broadly, students are calling for transparency over and divestment from universities’ financial links with Israeli companies (particularly those involved in the arms industry). They are demanding university leaders cut ties with Israeli universities, increase resources (including scholarships for Palestinian students and make long-term commitments relating to the rebuilding of higher education in Palestine. The encampments follow similar action at more than 140 universities in the US. There, scenes of police arresting protesters have sparked intense debate about when (if ever) it is permissible to limit the free expression of students. Read more: US student Gaza protests: five things that have been missed Universities have a difficult balance to strike between protecting student speech rights and ensuring campus safety. In the US, public universities (as “arms of government”) are prevented from interfering with …

In Victory Day speech, Putin accuses West of ‘distorting history’ – POLITICO

In Victory Day speech, Putin accuses West of ‘distorting history’ – POLITICO

Published by skeptic

“Today we see how they’re trying to distort the truth about WWII. It interferes with those who are used to building their essentially colonial policy based on hypocrisy and lies,” the freshly (re)inaugurated president told the assembled crowd, according to the Russian press. The Red Army was part of a much broader allied coalition including the U.S., the U.K., Poland, France, Canada and others. Soviet Victory Day, commemorated a day later than the day marked by the other allies, also signals the beginning of the USSR’s half-century occupation of most of Central and Eastern Europe, mass deportations to Siberia and forced collectivization of local economies. Although Russia was only a part of the USSR, today’s Russia has tried to monopolize the Soviet victory as its own, and Putin uses the memory of the war to buttress Russian nationalism. That extends to tarring opponents of his regime as “Nazis.” “Revanchism, abuse of history, and an attempt to justify the current Nazi followers is part of an overall policy of the Western elites to stoke new regional …

Why removing protections on social media – in the name of free speech – is bad for peacebuilding

Why removing protections on social media – in the name of free speech – is bad for peacebuilding

Published by skeptic

On May 16 the world will mark the UN International Day of Living Together in Peace. It is a rallying call for people to listen respectfully to others and promote tolerance and understanding. Perhaps someone should tell tech entrepreneurs Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. The online platforms they head up – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X – have become synonymous with fake news, hate speech, misinformation and other online harms. Social media has been widely blamed for destabilising democracies and fomenting civil unrest in Europe and North America. In July 2023, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, proposed restricting access to online platforms in order to quell rioting. This is a far cry from 2009, when Facebook proudly claimed it had created “friendships” between seemingly irredeemably rival groups: Sunni and Shia Muslims, Muslims and Jews, Pakistanis and Indians, Greeks and Turks, conservatives and liberals. “Peace on Facebook” was a classic example of what social scientist Nicholas John refers to as “social media bullshit”. Such PR blurb is designed to convince the public these tech companies are a force …

Court bans Glory to Hong Kong protest song prompting further fears for free speech | Hong Kong

Court bans Glory to Hong Kong protest song prompting further fears for free speech | Hong Kong

Published by skeptic

Hong Kong has demanded a protest song that was made popular during pro-democracy demonstrations in the territory be removed from the internet, in the wake of a court ruling which banned it. In its judgment on Wednesday, the court of appeal described the song Glory to Hong Kong as a “weapon” to incite violent protests in 2019. The ruling comes amid what critics say is an erosion in Hong Kong’s rule of law and individual rights which has seen scores of opposition democrats jailed and liberal media outlets shut down. The Hong Kong government’s first attempt to get an official injunction for the anthem was refused by the high court last year in a surprise ruling, which said a ban could have a “chilling effect” on innocent third parties. But in overturning that decision, appeal judge Jeremy Poon wrote on Wednesday that the composer of the song had “intended it to be a ‘weapon’ and so it had become”. “It had been used as an impetus to propel the violent protests plaguing Hong Kong since …

Vladimir Putin’s ‘nervous’ speech as he’s sworn in as Russian President | World | News

Vladimir Putin’s ‘nervous’ speech as he’s sworn in as Russian President | World | News

Published by skeptic

She says he vacillated through multiple states during the heavily choreographed performance, during which he was pictured in his office looking at his papers before walking along the Kremlin’s long corridors, pausing at one point to look at a painting, on the way to his inauguration. His guard of honor waited in the sleet and rain for hours, in temperatures hovering just above freezing, while Putin made the brief journey to the Grand Kremlin Palace in his Auras limousine. James says the former KGB officer, 71, went “from humble during the religious ceremony to smiling and more buoyant as he walked past the crowds, although the ending of the non-verbal narrative saw him in his most familiar display recently as he made his speech: that of aggressive arousal as he spoke of ‘Our plans will make us stronger’ and that ‘Together we will win.’” Russia continues to gain ground in eastern Ukraine two years in, but President Volodymyr Zelensky has recently avoided a fresh attempt on his life by two Russian operatives who planned to …

4 Takeaways From Biden’s Speech on Antisemitism at the Capitol | National News

4 Takeaways From Biden’s Speech on Antisemitism at the Capitol | National News

Published by skeptic

President Joe Biden denounced what he characterized as a “ferocious surge” of antisemitism across the U.S. and reiterated his strong support of Israel in a speech at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday. “This ancient hatred of Jews didn’t begin with the Holocaust,” Biden said in a keynote address for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance commemoration. “It didn’t end with the Holocaust, either.” The speech, held annually to memorialize the 6 million jews killed during the Holocaust, comes during a time of heightened political tensions surrounding the Israel-Hamas war, with pro-Palestinian protests roiling the country’s campuses and the president’s own party divided over his response to Israel’s conduct. Before the speech, several people addressed the audience, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York. War in Israel and Gaza “We remember what happened then and now,” said Johnson, a Republican who has been a vocal critic of the college protests. “Today we are witnessing American universities quickly becoming hostile places for Jewish students and faculty. …

Gaza protesters face speech restraints and legal consequences

Gaza protesters face speech restraints and legal consequences

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In the weeks since protests against Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip began on U.S. college campuses, the number of people facing arrest has soared into the thousands. Police from New York City to Los Angeles have been breaking up protest encampments, sometimes violently, and rounding up demonstrators. In the United States, where the right to publicly criticize the government and the right to assemble to protest its policies are both enshrined in the Constitution, the dispersal of protests is a sensitive subject. But while federal law guarantees freedom of speech, that freedom is not unfettered. FILE – The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., right, accompanied by Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, center, is booked by city police Lt. D.H. Lackey in Montgomery, Alabama, on Feb. 23, 1956. Choosing civil disobedience Over the centuries, federal courts have established that some restrictions on speech, particularly related to the “time, place and manner” in which it is delivered, are legally permissible. Dating to at least the Civil Rights Movement, members of protest movements in the U.S. have often …

‘I thought it was a speech by Kurt Vonnegut’: Baz Luhrmann on making Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) | Culture

‘I thought it was a speech by Kurt Vonnegut’: Baz Luhrmann on making Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) | Culture

Published by skeptic

Baz Luhrmann, director and song producer In 1997, my music supervisor Anton Monsted and I decided to make a charity album with remixes of songs from my films. I was working on a new version of Rozalla’s rave banger Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good) that, for Romeo + Juliet, we had turned into an ecclesiastical song with vocals from Quindon Tarver and King’s College Choir. Around this time, a graduation speech apparently by Kurt Vonnegut offering life advice was spreading on a new invention called the world wide web. It was what we would now call viral – but it was also a hoax. Some kid had taken a column by a smart, respected columnist called Mary Schmich, who wrote for the Chicago Tribune, and instead credited it to the Slaughterhouse-Five author. We thought it would make a great spoken word song. We found a voiceover artist, Lee Perry, to impersonate an imagined Vonnegut and spent a great deal of time getting it right, so that it felt naturally spoken and rhythmic. A big skincare …