Tag: free speech

The Struggle for and Promise of Free Speech

Censorship – the regulation, suppression, and criminalization of disfavored speech – has mounted a comeback. Government officials, social media content moderators and moguls, journalists, and professors have aligned to thwart dissemination of misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, hate speech, and harmful or offensive remarks. They applaud themselves as brave activists blazing a new path to the achievement of a truly diverse, equitable, and inclusive democracy.

Yet they are throwbacks, as Jonathan Turley shows in “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.” A distinguished George Washington University Law School professor, Turley is also an eminent columnist, television analyst, and litigator. His book provides a bracing “history of the struggle for free speech in America” and an incisive account of “the promise of free speech” in the United States and wherever basic rights and fundamental freedoms are protected. Through his winning combination of historical reconstruction, legal analysis, and philosophical exposition, Turley reveals that the arguments for regulating speech that the contemporary censorship industrial complex touts as original have a long and disreputable lineage.

In the West, which developed exemplary principles of free speech, that lineage of censorship stretches back to democratic Athens, which put Socrates to death for teaching the young to ask hard questions about virtue and justice, human nature, and the cosmos. It encompasses the early modern Star Chamber which in 16th– and 17th-century England prosecuted the crime of seditious libel – speaking ill of public officials, the laws, or the government – and the great 18th century English jurist William Blackstone who insisted on seditious libel’s criminality. And despite America’s founding promise and constitutional imperatives, government silencing of criticism of government extends throughout the nation’s history. Those who today undertake to expand the authorities’ power to determine what is and what is not fit for the public to think, say, and hear give fashionable expression to the authoritarian impulses, aims, and actions that not only have beset the West, but which also have marked most political societies throughout most of history.

American constitutional government sought to break authoritarianism’s grip. The Declaration of Independence stated that government’s primary task was to secure unalienable rights, starting with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In the original Constitution, the sovereign people protected speech by declining to delegate to Congress the power to regulate it. The First Amendment, ratified two years after the Constitution went into effect, explicitly denied Congress the power to abridge free speech. This reinforced the fundamental freedom – as stated in “Cato’s Letters,” widely read in 18th-century America – to “think what you would and speak what you thought.”

Free speech, Turley emphasizes, has two major justifications. The first is functional: Free speech undergirds the liberal education and robust public discussion that produce the informed citizenry on which a rights-protecting democracy depends. The second justification, grounded in natural rights teachings, affirms that speaking freely is inseparable from our humanity.

While both justifications are crucial to constitutional government in America, Turley stresses that the tendency to rely exclusively on the functional argument alone has proved calamitous. Protecting free speech solely because it is good for democracy invites the curtailment of this utterance or that publication on the grounds that it undermines democracy.

Free speech fortifies the other four First Amendment freedoms. Religious freedom includes the right to profess one’s faith, as well as the right not to profess other faiths or any faith at all. A free press keeps citizens knowledgeable about the news and circulates opinions and ideas. The freedoms of assembly and petition enable citizens to communicate among themselves and express their concerns to the government.

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Switzerland: The End of Free Speech

Most people in the world view Switzerland as a safe, sensible, fair and free nation. The reality is that behind its pristine veneer, it is as corrupt – if not more – than any other nation, and is becoming increasingly repressive at an alarming rate.

As many of you know, I am Swiss (from my mother’s side) and live in my home country. This has given me a certain vantage point to report on globalism, with Switzerland having been selected to host these dark institutions on our soil back in the 19th century.

Today, I wanted to draw your attention to more local news and the bleak state of free speech here.

While all eyes are on the U.K. at the moment due to their Orwellian crack down on freedom of expression — to the point of jailing people for memes and stickers — and on France as we await more information on Pavel Durov’s arrest, free speech is under unprecedented attack in Switzerland as well.

A friend of mine, who goes by the pseudonym “Barbouille” on X, has just been fined the hefty amount of CHF 4’800, approx $ 5’700 — for a tweet.

His crime? Calling out the indoctrination of children being taught what LGBTQI… stands for in a classroom, under a video posted by another account on March 24, 2023.

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German Court Forces Podcasters To Delete Episode Where They Referred To Balding Trans-Identified Male As “He/Him”

A podcast episode of Hoss and Hopf had to be deleted by court order because the moderators called a trans-identified man “a man” and used male pronouns to refer to him. The podcasters may be facing potential prison time or a fine of up to €250,000.

In the controversial podcast episode, the hosts discussed the case of Laura Holstein, formerly known as Nicolas. Holstein, a balding male who now identifies as a “woman,” has made multiple headlines over the past few months related to him demanding access to female spaces. Most recently, Holstein, with the support of the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency, has been pursuing legal action against a female-only gym in Bavaria.

But the Frankfurt am Main Regional Court has now stopped in to order the censorship of the Hoss and Hopf episode related to Holstein. The hosts, Kiarash Hossainpour and Philip Hopf, have also been prohibited from referring to Holstein as a man and using male pronouns for him. 

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SHOCKING: Over 50,000 British Citizens Have Been Charged For Using “Illegal Words Or Writing”

Over the last month, the United Kingdom has been hit hard by a wave of protests following the gruesome stabbing murder of three little girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, England on July 29, 2024.

 Axel Rudakubana, a 17-year-old male and the son of Rwandan nationals, murdered these young girls in cold blood. Protests immediately popped off the next day in Southport and spread across the UK. 

The frustration expressed by protesters represents a general hostility towards the overwhelming wave of non-white immigration that has landed on Albion’s shores in the last 70 years. 

As a result of these protests, the regime of Prime Minister Keir Starmer has started to arrest people for making posts on social media that explain uncomfortable truths about the troubling demographic situation in the UK and the harsh realities of non-white crime.

Before the Southport protests kicked off, X user ~~datahazard~~ noted on March 5, that “3300 people [were] arrested in Britain last year for saying naughty words online.” 

X owner Elon Musk was surprised by these revelations which he responded to in a tweet in disbelief saying, “3300?”

~~datahazard~~ then responded with an even more revealing analysis of these prosecutions, by posting a bar chart noting that “Over 50,000 Brits in the past decade have been charged with Illegal Words or Writing (Race/Religion subset)”

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Freedom of speech is dying in the UK, Norwegian author warns

Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen, a Norwegian novelist and YouTuber, posted a short video on Sunday about UK authorities arresting people for social media posts. Bull-Hansen has been to England and Scotland many times.  “I love England and Scotland,” he said. “And it saddens to me to see what’s been going on there, especially in England.”

“I honestly don’t know what it takes, I honestly don’t know what is allowed to say over there anymore. It’s a mess and we’re going to talk a little bit about it and the problems in the UK here in this video,” he said.

“I believe in free speech,” he said. “I believe that without free speech there can be no freedom, there can be no democracy.  And free speech is, you know, it’s kind of the trademark of a good and civilised society. We must be allowed to disagree.  We must be allowed to criticise the authorities.  We must be allowed to criticise ideologies, religions and so on.”

“England, I would say, has been destroyed by immigration.  I think that’s very obvious. And we need to be able to say that,” he added.

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Media Claims Elon Musk Is A Threat To Democracy – But Is “Democracy” Even Worth Saving?

There is perhaps nothing more tiresome and embarrassing as the theatrical pearl clutching of leftist media propaganda. For three years the public had to deal with the incessant drone of media fear mongering over the covid pandemic, an event which turned out to be a nothing-burger that 99.8% of the population on average would easily survive. After the 2020 elections we have been inundated with narratives about how conservatives are a “threat to democracy” – A democracy which progressives don’t even believe in as the recent DNC coup against Joe Biden proves.

The latest evolution of the democracy narrative is that free speech (and probably Russia) is the root evil behind civil unrest in western countries. The notion of thought crime is making its way to the forefront of the establishment tool box and this suggests we are entering the next stage of authoritarianism – Open criminalization of speech.

The Guardian in the UK is fully onboard with this development. The media outlet is on the warpath against Elon Musk and X (formerly known as Twitter) after Musk defied European and UK officials and their demands for censorship. In an article titled ‘Inciting Rioters In Britain Was A Test Run For Elon Musk. Just See What He Plans For America’, the platform launches into a tirade of delusional progressive talking points, a word salad designed to distract from the reality that what they are actually calling for is the death of free speech.

The Guardian argues:

“…Back in the golden days of 2020, tech platforms, still reeling from a public backlash, had at least to look as if they gave a shit. Twitter employed 4,000-plus people in “trust and safety”, tasked with getting dangerous content off its platform and sniffing out foreign influence operations.”

“In Britain, the canary has sung. This summer we have witnessed something new and unprecedented. The billionaire owner of a tech platform publicly confronting an elected leader and using his platform to undermine his authority and incite violence. Britain’s 2024 summer riots were Elon Musk’s trial balloon…”

“The presidential election is three months away. What if the billionaire contests the result? What if he decides democracy is overrated…?”

“…What Musk – the new self-appointed Lord of Misrule – has done is to rip off the mask. He’s shown that you don’t even have to pretend to care. In Musk’s world, trust is mistrust and safety is censorship. His goal is chaos. And it’s coming.”

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“It’s Not OK Any More”: UK Free Speech Crack-Down Targets “Extremist Ideologies”

The crackdown on free speech continues in the United Kingdom as officials use recent rioting to justify a roundup of citizens who they view as “pushing harmful and hateful beliefs.”

The government is ramping up arrests of those with “extremist ideologies” in the latest wave of arrests. 

The crackdown includes those accused of misogynist views.

In my book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss how difficult it is to get a free people to give up freedoms. They have to be afraid, very afraid.

For that reason, governments tend to attack free speech during periods of public anger or fear.

That pattern is playing out, yet again, in the United Kingdom.

The recent anti-immigration riots have given officials a renewed opportunity to use anti-free speech laws to target those with opposing views.

For years, I have been writing about the decline of free speech in the United Kingdom and the steady stream of arrests.

A man was convicted for sending a tweet while drunk referring to dead soldiers.

Another was arrested for an anti-police t-shirt. 

Another was arrested for calling the Irish boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend a “leprechaun.”

Yet another was arrested for singing “Kung Fu Fighting.” 

A teenager was arrested for protesting outside of a Scientology center with a sign calling the religion a “cult.”

Last year, Nicholas Brock, 52, was convicted of a thought crime in Maidenhead, Berkshire.

The neo-Nazi was given a four-year sentence for what the court called his “toxic ideology” based on the contents of the home he shared with his mother in Maidenhead, Berkshire.

While most of us find Brock’s views repellent and hateful, they were confined to his head and his room.

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Farage and Musk don’t care about free speech. And Israel really is a terrorist state

In the space of just one week there has been a massive, almost Orwellian crackdown on free speech, with a number of arrests made. Not in North Korea or China but in the USA and UK. Barely days after former UN weapons inspector and social media tsar Scott Ritter had his house raided by FBI officers looking for evidence that he was actually working for America’s enemies we witnessed the arrest and detention of a young British journalist called Richard Medhurst who, when arriving at Heathrow airport from overseas, was escorted off a plane and held on terrorism charges. And then remarkably, Elon Musk, a billionaire who owns X and claims to be a champion of free speech shuts down the account of Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef – which is followed by rumours on social media that the next polemic commentator to get the chop will be the YouTube talk show hosted by Judge Andrew Napolitano.

What’s going on? What do these individuals all have in common? Clearly their uncompromised stance against Israel is the issue here and we have to assume that either the Zionist State has cracked the whip and wants this baptism of criticism and scorn to stop or the initiative comes exclusively from the deep state itself in the U.S., with London ever grateful to play the role of diminutive pooch in the handbag. But the crackdown is unprecedented and really bears witness to a fear many in the west have had for some time, which is that most of these countries are parodies of democracy. Some even go further and claim, like Youssef, that western countries’ governments are controlled by Israel. Far-fetched? Less so, given the arrests and cancels in recent days.

Yet if it is all about making the accusations against Israel more round-edged, one has to ask the questions whether the decision was wise or foolhardy and taken at what level?

The genocide Israel carries out can’t be covered up or extinguished by the history books, even if those tomes are written by the victors, as Churchill once said.

Britain and the U.S. are complicit in it and will have to face the consequences for it one day. Both the ICJ and the ICC tribunals in the Netherlands are collecting evidence on a daily basis leaving many stunned by the rank desperation and stupidity of this Kristallnacht stunt both by the deep state and by Elon Musk.

The three guilty were commentators and journalists who are hell-bent on saying or reporting the truth, no matter how unpalatable it may be. We can assume in the case of the young journalist Medhurst that instructions to scare him with the Heathrow stunt were probably instructions from Langley which UK cops happily obliged to execute.

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After CrowdStrike Computer Catastrophe, Will Kamala-Microsoft Alliance Inflict Blue Screen of Death on Free Speech?


It is a testament to how utterly extraordinary the past couple weeks have been that the Microsoft-CrowdStrike computer catastrophe was not even the second most important story in the news cycle. On Friday, July 19th, the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike implemented a botched update that crashed Microsoft devices on which it was installed, ultimately inflicting the dreaded “blue screen of death” on over 8.5 million devices worldwide. Banks, businesses, hospitals, and airlines were hit particularly hard, and to this day, some of these institutions are having difficulty restoring functionality to their systems.

Video compilations such as the one below offer arresting images to give the reader a sense of just how globally catastrophic the Microsoft-CrowdStrike crash really was. It was a bit like what people imagined the Y2K scare would have been in the year 2000.

What kind of sense can we make of this? And who is at fault? Given that the botched update in question was implemented by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, a great deal of responsibility would seem to lie there. Readers might be familiar with Russiagate-stained CrowdStrike, as it was the cybersecurity firm the DNC hired to investigate the alleged “hack” of its servers leading to the exposure of highly incriminating and embarrassing emails during the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The recent CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage raises additional troubling questions in light of this history, which others have explored.

For now, we would like to turn the spotlight on Microsoft. As a simple matter of security, Microsoft holds a fair share of the blame for Friday’s catastrophe. Microsoft enables Crowdstrike’s software to exist within the most sensitive layer of its devices, and one would think a tech behemoth such as Microsoft would have stop-gaps and redundancies in place to prevent such global outages from occurring in their systems. A more troubling and important aspect the Crowd-Strike-Microsoft collapse draws attention to, however, is the utter ubiquitousness of Microsoft’s systems globally. A 2021 study revealed that Microsoft’s systems have achieved a whopping 85 percent of market share in public sector software, with an especially acute concentration in the Pentagon.

Elon Musk bemoaned the effect of the Microsoft-Crowdstrike crash on the global automotive supply chain and took to X to express his displeasure with Microsoft in characteristically suggestive and memetic fashion.

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Stabbings to Show Trials: 9 Simple Steps to Criminalize Free Speech

In the wake of the Southport attack and ensuing riots, we wrote that the agenda had become clear – it was about attacking free speech.

Little did we suspect how quickly they would move, and how brazenly authoritarian they would become, culminating in quite literal show trials for facebook posts.

All while the so-called “liberals” are applauding and spouting phrases they don’t realise they’ve been hypnotised into believing through endless repetition.

“Tolerating intolerance just leads to more intolerance in the end.”
“Free speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences”
“It was never an absolute right”

If it wasn’t obvious from the outset, it’s quite clear now that this entire situation has been a contrivance.

As it turns out it was a masterfully played hand that has perfectly set up the template for other governments who may want to crackdown on free expression in the future.

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