When Sportsnet fired Canadian hockey and media personality Don Cherry in November 2019 for his bigoted remarks on Coach's Corner, we heard the usual right-wing complaint chorus about the suppression of free speech by the liberal left.

A favored method of censorship nowadays is said to be "de-platforming," or denying those you disagree with a platform to speak. This is also called "cancel culture." Most recently, a group of around 150 prominent intellectuals signed a "Letter on Justice and Open Debate" in Harper's magazine, setting off a firestorm of debate about the limits of free speech on the left.

In reality, though, cancel culture is (at best) a marginal activity on the left. By and large, progressives still believe in reasoned debate.

This article refers to experience in Canada, but it has its counterpart in many other countries as well.

A crowd swelled along the line of police tape on Friday afternoon as rain fell near where a man was fatally shot by Detroit police.

"Say his name," the crowd yelled, before responding to their own demand: "Hakim Littleton."


Police Chief James Craig had already come to the scene to give the police account of what happened. He said the now-slain man had tried to shoot at officers about 12:30 p.m. near San Juan Drive and W. McNichols Road in the Bagley neighborhood of Detroit. Police returned the gunfire, fatally striking 20-year-old Littleton.

In the hours that followed, loved ones and protesters discounted Craig's statements. They began counting Littleton among the Black people disproportionately killed by police in the U.S., the names they've been chanting for over a month amid protests following the death of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis.

In Detroit on Friday, police in riot gear and protesters clashed, police arrested several organizers, and the remaining protesters marched.

With the crowd still on the move about 7:30 p.m., Craig held a news conference at Detroit Public Safety Headquarters downtown and played police footage of the shooting.

A still frame from an officer's body-worn camera appears to show Littleton with his armed raised and a blast of smoke — gunfire — aimed right at an officer's head.

PragerU's Will Witt interviews Dr. Jeffrey Barke on why Covid-19 cases are rising, but the fatality rate is dropping. The average age of new cases is 31 — fatality is so low for that age group that it's hard to even calculate. Dr. Barke also discusses the faulty reasoning of the 'flatten the curve' strategies and the reality of herd immunity.

Congrats to the PR team of Chutzpah, Cheek, and Insolence who scored big with the work they appear to have done for atheist Lawrence Krauss. The cosmologist has now emerged, earlier than anticipated, from under a major #MeToo cloud that resulted in his forced departure from his university and temporary disappearance from a role as a public figure. He "retired" from Arizona State in May of last year.

Time flies. Here he is today in the Wall Street Journal decrying, "The Ideological Corruption of Science."

Fascinating. According to the thesaurus, some antonyms of "corruption" include decency, goodness, honesty, honor, and purity. That's right, Lawrence Krauss of all people is now lecturing us about the importance of...decency, goodness, honesty, honor, and purity. This is the same Krauss who palled around with the late Jeffrey Epstein of blessed memory, opining that Epstein was innocent based on scientific considerations. He cited "empirical evidence" on the point:

As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I've never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.

Human rights group say that several governments have used NSO's Pegasus software to monitor activists and journalists
Activists claim that Pegasus software was used by Riyadh to spy on Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi before his death

A court in Tel Aviv has rejected a ruling to order Israel to revoke the export license of the NSO Group, the country's largest surveillance company, whose software has reportedly been used by governments to spy on dissidents and human rights activists.

Judge Rachel Lavi Barkai ruled that Amnesty International and 30 human rights activists, who had filed the petition against Israel's defence and foreign ministries, had failed to provide evidence that NSO's Pegasus software was used to spy on activists from the UK-based NGO.

Pro-NYPD marchers clashed with Black Lives Matter protesters as a "Back the Blue" rally took an ugly turn in Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon.

Hundreds of pro-cop marchers screamed vile curses at around 50 BLM counter-protesters as the rally kicked off at Bay Ridge Parkway and 13th Ave. in Dyker Heights, a predominately white neighborhood.

As BLM protesters chanted "Black Lives Matter!" those in the pro-cop group screamed, "Go suck a big black d---!"

"Not in this neighborhood!" one pro-cop marcher yelled out.

"The problems are in your neighborhood! Go fix where you live!" another pro-cop marcher screamed at the racially-mixed group of BLM protesters.

"F--- blue lives! That s--- don't matter," a BLM protester fired back.

At one point, participants on both sides started throwing fists.

I recently ran across a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer that lays out four racist words and phrases that should be banished from the English language. It begins like this:

Steel yourself, brave reader, here they are:

Peanut gallery
Eenie meenie miney moe
Gyp
No can do

The same grammarian who authored the piece had previously confronted the "deeply racist connotation" of the word "thug," noting that president Donald Trump "wasn't the least bit bashful" when calling Minneapolis rioters "thugs" in a tweet, despite the word's obvious bigoted history. In 2015, President Barack Obama referred to Baltimore rioters as "thugs" as well. He likely did so because "thug" — defined as a "violent person, especially a criminal" — is a good way to describe rioters. It's true that not everyone in a riot engages in wanton violent criminality. Some participants are merely "looters" — defined as "people who steal goods during a riot." That word is also allegedly imbued with racist conations, according to the executive editor of the Los Angeles Times and others.

Attempting to dictate what words we can use is another way to exert power over how we think. Few people, rightly, would have a problem with referring to the Charlottesville Nazis as "thugs." Only the "protester" who tears down a Ulysses S. Grant statue or participates in an Antifa riot is spared the indignity of being properly defined.

Here lies an anonymous statement from an A&E consultant in a major hospital in Surrey, in relation to the criminal gagging of all levels of NHS staff, who have been threatened that they will lose their jobs if the speak out about the COVID-1984 scamdemic.

"I am a consultant at a major , regional hospital in Surrey. By major you can take that to indicate that we have an A&E department. I had agreed to give an interview to an anti lockdown activist in which I would have revealed my identity. I have since changed my mind and only feel able to give an anonymous statement. I have changed my mind simply because that all staff , no matter what grade, at all hospitals have been warned that if they give any media interviews at all or make any statements to either the Main Stream Press or smaller, independent press /social media we may, immediately be suspended without pay. I have a family, dependents and I simply cant do it to them. I therefore can not reveal my identity at this time but wish to state as follows:

In my opinion, and that of many of my colleagues, there has been no Covid Pandemic, certainly not in the Surrey region and I have heard from other colleagues this picture is the same throughout the country. Our hospital would normally expect to see around 350,000 out patients a year. Around 95,000 patients are admitted to hospital in a normal year and we would expect to see around a similar figure, perhaps 100,000 patients pass through our A&E department. In the months from March to June (inclusive) we would normally expect to see 100,000 out patients, around 30,000 patients admitted to hospital and perhaps 30,000 pass through A&E. This year (and these figures are almost impossible to get hold of) we are over 95% down on all those numbers. In effect, the hospital has been pretty much empty for that entire period.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested over the weekend that the crime surge in New York City is likely because struggling residents are forced to shoplift in order to "feed their child."

In a virtual town hall meeting she hosted Thursday, some clips of which were shared by The Hill, the 30-year-old Democratic congresswoman was asked about the troubling uptick in violent crimes overtaking the city.

"Do we think this has to do with the fact that there's record unemployment in the United States right now?" she responded. "The fact that people are at a level of economic desperation that we have not seen since the Great Recession?"

"Maybe this has to do with the fact that people aren't paying their rent and are scared to pay their rent and so they go out, and they need to feed their child and they don't have money," Ocasio-Cortez continued, "so they feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry."

California Governor Gavin Newsom has kicked off a storm of criticism with a new statewide shutdown order, mandating that bars and restaurants, among other businesses, halt indoor operations amid a surge in coronavirus infections.

Announced at a press conference on Monday, the new order requires that bars across California shut down altogether, while restaurants, movie theaters, zoos, museums and a number of other establishments must suspend all business activities indoors. In a number of counties on the state's "monitoring list," gyms, places of worship, salons, malls and other facilities deemed non-critical have also been forced to close down under the new rule.

"We've made this point on multiple occasions and that is, we're moving back into a modification mode of our original stay-at-home order," Newsom told reporters on Monday in explaining the mandate, adding that Covid-19 "continues to be a deadly disease."