short and sweet… sweet? i mean sad… stories about speech in our world…
So it seems a photographer known for publishing spoof photo books of public figures has had difficulty getting their new work featuring Donald Trump published because of the chilling effects from Donald Trump’s constant assault (bluster?) on free speech…..
*sighs*
The Story
Artist Alison Jackson has said that she chose to self-publish spoof photographs of Donald Trump as part of a protest against the potentially chilling effect a “litigious” president could have on artistic freedom.
The celebrity lookalike specialist said she was warned by her lawyers against publishing the images, some of which feature a Trump lookalike in compromising situations, and that no book publisher was prepared to release a collection of the Trump images.
Vanity Fair and the Mail Online have published some of the images. However, no publisher has shown some of the most politically sensitive pictures she has produced, including one in which a Trump character is depicted with members of the Ku Klux Klan and another where he is shown holding a rifle.
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Just the fear of getting sued, just the fact that we live in a highly litigious culture nowadays, stops people from doing a lot of lawful and nice things.
People won’t let hikers walk across their pasture to public lands because they could be sued for any number of things, people are afraid to speak their mind because a crybaby like Trump seemingly threatens to sue anybody he doesn’t like, and people plaster a million and one warning signs on every product or public venue in a sad attempt to not be sued.
Fear has very real consequences.
So do not sit there and think that Donald Trump’s threats against free speech don’t hurt people just because he’s 90% bluster and 10% bite.
Supplementary – More on Speech in a Trump World
On December 6 at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., Reason’s Nick Gillespie and Danish journalist Flemming Rose discussed “Free Speech in the Age of Trump.” That conversation, moderated by Kat Murti, is the newest Reason Podcast (subscribe at iTunes).
In 2005 while working at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, Rose commissioned and published what became known as the “Mohammed cartoons,” a dozen images of Islam’s founder. Rose quickly became the target of death threats from Islamic radicals and jihadists and at least 150 people by his count have been killed in violence related to demonstrations against the cartoons. Earlier this year, Rose was awarded The Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, given every two years by Cato, who has also hired Rose to work as an analyst based in his home country. Rose is the author of, most recently, The Tyranny of Silence, now out in paperback from Cato. (In 2014, in response to death threats against cartoonist Molly Norris, Reason held its own “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” competition.)
Source: http://reason.com/blog/2016/12/12/can-free-speech-flourish-in-the-age-of-t