FREE SPEECH IS ENDING FAST

with some of its scariest opponents hiding in plain sight

The system can’t be wrong……Minority Report.

Note: I will be doing a special midweek and paid subscribers can enter questions below in the comments section for me to put toward our expert guest on what the Online Harms Bill will mean. If you are not yet premium — do sign up and take part.

This is a long, but important piece. Please do take the time to read it and please consider becoming a paid member.

There’s nothing like the proposed Online Harms Act to reignite my desire to make a run for the border, permanently. I actually gasped when I read it. The brazen self-interest and political pandering while rendering democracy itself moot — yet again exposes a government that should be on the way out. But still doesn’t seem to be. For the life of me friends, I just don’t understand why.

My need to leave Canada is as much about no longer understanding my fellow citizens who still support this crew as it is about fearing the jackboot march of our oh-so-caring progressive elites who will love us all right into concentration camps.

The OHA bypasses criminal code thresholds as if our rights are just one giant Monopoly board to be toyed with at the whim our our blow-dried, social media influencer Prime Minister who never saw a motorcade he didn’t love. It’s all wrapped in the fake veneer of protecting children, like so many other travesties — like trans obsessive teachers and C-19 school closures.

It proposes punishment for Canadians who have not committed a hate speech crime — but might. Some time in the future. Hello, Tom Cruise and the film, Minority Report in which suspects are arrested before crimes occur — foretold to authorities by a grotesque system employing three psychics called precogs.

Unclear who Canada’s own precogs would be but I suspect they would look very much like so-called anti-hate movement, given money by the government to constantly screech, keeping the country as divided as possible. Are these the people we want deciding what hate speech is - this hysterical hammer that thinks everything is a nail?

Precogs in Minority Report

I’ve watched in horror as America’s once revered Southern Poverty Law Centre has become the comms department for progressives and the Democratic Party. The same dynamic is at play here. Any group on the side of social justice is protected with unimpeachable credibility conferred by dutiful government apparatchiks, politicians and their handmaidens in legacy media. Anyone who questions the accuracy of their pronouncements about racism and hate — can now be arrested. And truth is no defense.

Never forget that Canada’s Anti-Hate Network is responsible in part for the miscarriage of justice involving the Coutts 4 and in the end - the Emergencies Act invocation itself.

The RCMP said they recently became aware of a small organized group within those involved in the larger Coutts border protest. It’s believed the group arrived within days of the initial group of protestors arriving at the border.

“The group was said to have a willingness to use force against the police if any attempts were made to disrupt the blockade,” RCMP said in a news release on Monday.

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network tweeted on Monday that gear seized by police at Coutts includes a plate carrier with Diagolon patches. According to the network, Diagolon is an accelerationist movement that believes a revolution is inevitable and necessary to collapse the current government system. It wants to build its ideal nation-state, which runs diagonally from Alaska through the western provinces down to Florida.

“A lot of them claim to be ex-military members and a lot of them claim to have some kind of military training. There’s very much a militia kind of vibe within the network and there have been lots of talks of weapons,” said Elizabeth Simons, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network’s deputy director.

The debunking of these claims, known as HateGate got virtually no attention from legacy media. The proposed new bill gives more power, not less to these unregulated and unaccountable organizations because they uphold the elites’ postmodern narrative of oppressor-oppressed and shape our dysfunctional political and social landscape. Why are these groups and their tactics being reviewed?

The UK is still ahead of us with journalists being investigated for misgendering on the basis of a complaint from an advocacy group, in this case Mermaids, which has subsequently been largely discredited.

Caroline Farrow said Surrey Police wants to "conduct a taped interview under caution" because of tweets posted in October.

They were made after she was on ITV's Good Morning Britain with Susie Green, whose daughter Jackie is transgender.

Back in Canada, even the Globe and Mail, except Andrew Coyne, is asking tough questions about the proposed bill.

Note the electronic tag comment below. (from the Globe)

End of Globe….

Arif’s own bio indicates he is a living, breathing example of someone whose reason for being is not to make Canada a better country for all but rather to dwell in the land of human rights that quash the dignity and actual rights of citizens not in those groups. People he might brand as privileged - despite their struggles. In other words he is an ideologue first and an elected member representing Canadians last. We must ask questions during every election.

From Virani’s website:

Arif has also served as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Immigration, (2015-2017) helping welcome over 50,000 Syrian refugees to Canada. He was appointed by the PM as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Heritage (2017-18), where Arif worked on Multiculturalism, restoring Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy, and co-developed with First Nations, Inuit and Metis leaders Canada’s first-ever Indigenous Languages legislation. From 2018 to 2021, Arif served as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Justice, promoting access to justice, improving legal aid funding, combating systemic barriers in the Justice System and addressing online hate.

Arif is an Ismaili Muslim, whose family roots trace back to Gujarat, India. He came to Canada in 1972 as a Ugandan Asian refugee and has spent his career prior to elected office as a constitutional litigator, advocating for human rights and access to justice. Arif has worked as an Analyst with the Canadian Human Rights Commission, an investigator at la Commission des droits de la personne in Montréal, and as an Assistant Trial Attorney prosecuting genocide at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Arif has carried his passion for equity and inclusion into his work as a Parliamentarian—he is a strong voice in the House of Commons in defence of domestic and international human rights, in the fight against systemic racism, and in his role as Chair of the Parliamentary Friends of Tibet.

Like so many other politicians whose brand is high and might morality for the downtrodden - Virani, cared so much about Rwanda’s Tutsis, but is still silent on Gaza. I guess it is not politically expedient and the ongoing starvation and horror is clearly what the elites want. As my friend CJ Hopkins said on the podcast — Gaza is a flex by the Davos crowd to show us all how far they will go with violence when they want to. Why is Arif, a Muslim and a minister, allowing the obliteration of civilians? Even Biden toadies likes Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria - a huge Biden supporter have had enough.

When Hamas launched its gruesome terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, President Biden made a decision based on conviction and calculation. He announced his complete solidarity with the country. Biden must have calculated that the only way to have any influence on Israel would be to hug it close, show real empathy, send it the arms it needed and thus earn Israel’s trust to shape its response. It was a thought-through strategy, but it has failed almost completely.

The rats are leaving a sinking ship and this is code for it is OK to say so, now. 100 thousands dead and seriously wounded. Famine taking hold and no military or strategic victory in sight except saving Netanyahu’s political life which will end as soon as the fighting does. Many smart people should have said what Zakaria is saying now. But they didn’t. It was too dangerous for many and others are too cognitively ill —crippled, with heads full of ideology.

In our New Normal, blowing children up is fine. But questioning trans ideology might get you thrown in jail. Imagine the horrors that will be perpetrated by the new bill on political opponents or even just citizens who disagree with the Liberal’s ideologically-driven playbook. My friend Meghan Murphy, who fights trans woo woo in the name of women’s rights would be languishing in a cell somewhere for what she might say next month and I would be in leg irons over my criticism of Israel, as certainly someone would complain that I am anti semitic. The proposed snitch lines proffered in the bill would be on fire. Here is a great summation from John Carpay of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms:A new army of Digital Safety Commission bureaucrats will enforce new restrictions on speech, with the federal cabinet having the power to set out what penalties apply to what offences.

The Online Harms Act would add section 810.012 to the Criminal Code, empowering a complainant to assert to a provincial court that they “fear” that someone will promote genocide, hatred or antisemitism. If the judge believes that there are “reasonable grounds” to justify the fear, the court can immediately require the accused citizen to do any or all of the following: wear an ankle bracelet; obey a curfew and stay at home; abstain from alcohol, drugs, or both; provide bodily substances (e.g. blood, urine) to confirm abstinence from drugs or alcohol; refrain from communicating with certain designated persons; not go to certain places; and surrender her or his legally owned and legally required firearms.

In other words: a citizen who has not committed any crime can be subjected to court-ordered restrictions on her liberty, just because someone fears that she might commit a “speech” crime in future. A person’s failure to agree to these restrictions could result in a prison term up to two years.

For the existing Criminal Code offence of advocating for genocide, the Online Harms Act would raise the maximum penalty from five years in jail to life imprisonment.

When pro-Palestinian demonstrators chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” are they advocating for the genocide of Jews? Some say yes, others say no. Estonia, Germany, and the Czech Republic have designated this phrase to be criminal speech. The Dutch Supreme Court said the phrase is OK. A man in Calgary was charged by police for using this phrase, but the charges were later stayed. Do we really want government to use its coercive powers to decide whether polemical political slogans are actually calls for genocide, and then punish citizens accordingly? Considering the inherent difficulty and subjectivity in determining whether or not a person actually “advocated for genocide,” the punishment of a five-year prison term is already an adequate deterrent for the crime of speaking the wrong words.

The Online Harms Act would give the Canadian Human Rights Commission new powers to prosecute and punish offensive but non-criminal speech by Canadians if, in the subjective opinion of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, they deem someone’s statement to be “hateful.”

The Online Harms Act will provide endless opportunities for a new army of deeply offended busybodies to file thousands of complaints, including anonymous complaints, against their ideological opponents or other fellow citizens. Those found guilty by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal can be required to pay as much as $50,000 to the government, plus up to $20,000 to the person designated as the victim of the speech crime. The victim need not demonstrate having suffered any loss or damage, other than feeling offended by the alleged “hate.”

All of the above will have a massive chilling effect on free expression by Canadians. Many citizens will self-censor to avoid being prosecuted by the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Canadians who practice courage by continuing to exercise their Charter-protected freedom of expression will see many of their opinions removed from the internet by the operators of social media websites and platforms, as these operators will seek to avoid running afoul of Mr. Trudeau’s new regulations, which will be enforced by the Digital Safety Commission.

So how did we get here? A new Substack by Alex Berenson includes this gem. (I include Canadians as very likely represented in these numbers.)

A majority of Americans - and an overwhelming number of Democrats - no longer support First Amendment protections for free speech.

The government should restrict “false” information online, even if doing so blocks people from “publishing or accessing information,” 55 percent of Americans said in a large poll released Thursday. Only 42 percent disagreed.

The antipathy to free speech represents a sea change in attitudes in just five years. It is driven by a powerful new hostility to First Amendment rights on the left.

In an identically worded poll five years ago, Democrats and Republicans favored free speech online by roughly 3 to 2 margins. Today, Republicans still favor the First Amendment by about that much. But Democrats have turned against it by even more.

Here a trip down memory lane with Bret Weinstein is required. In 2017, Bret stood tall against a student-driven Lord of the Flies attack on free speech and academic liberty at Evergreen College, in Washington State where he was a professor. The school had become a hotbed of irrational and extremely dangerous cult-like thinking around anti-racism and other pet projects of the postmodern academic era.

Watch this video of what happened to Bret Weinstein at that school. Here he is calmly trying to be heard while the kids burn him at the stake.

The students had taken over the school and turned it into a sort of radical social justice insane asylum. Weinstein was targeted for pushing back against a silly edict by a student group that would have removed all white people from campus for a day. The stand he took ended his career there and totally changed his life. Now — people like those educated at Evergreen during this dark period are advising leaders on the left and admitted social justice warrior, Minister Virani has been marinating in this kind of thinking for decades. He boasts about it. Bret’s warning below was prescient and applies perfectly to where Canada finds itself now.

I keep being invited to talk about free speech on college campuses and every time I’m invited I make the same point: that this isn’t about free speech and this is only tangentially about college campuses. This is about a breakdown in the basic logic of civilization, and it’s spreading. College campuses may be the first dramatic battle but of course this is going to find its way into the courts; it’s already found its way into the tech sector. It’s going to find its way to the highest level of governance if we aren’t careful, and it actually does jeopardize the ability of civilization to continue to function.

…… So we have to fight this. And don’t get the sense that this is just about college campuses or kids overreacting, because that ain’t what this is. It’s far more important than that.

My gut tells me we are in bigger trouble, happening more quickly than I thought possible. It’s become clear that Twitter/X under Elon Musk is nearly as censorious as it was under Jack Dorsey but in a sense, worse because it pretends to be a free speech platform. I was prepared to give Elon the benefit of the doubt but no more.

Writing this is a dangerous act as Twitter/X is nearly mandatory now for building a podcast audience and a sustainable business. It’s not just that Elon retaliates, but the site has become a kind of high school smoking pit with Musk in the role of the Fonz directing how we should think. More on this later.

I was so hopeful when Elon worked with Matt Taibbi and others to reveal the TwitterFiles, exposing corruption of the old Twitter site by Big Pharma, public health apparatchiks, compromised universities like Stanford and the American government. Matt’s expose, reported with others is one of the most important acts of journalism in recent memory. A triumph.

The corruption and censorship exposed was worse than I could ever have imagined. The night that Jay Bhattacharya had it confirmed that he’d been shadow-banned on the platform (secretly hidden from view) — as I am now — exposed something fowl in America. Jay and I texted that night and it was a relief to know that honesty was finally alive and well on Twitter - after years of subterfuge and lies.

One of the most honourable people I know was finally fully restored to the public square, sadly, too late to save many of those who were harmed by lockdowns. I had a documentary crew in Santa Clara with Jay when he got the call. We recorded a podcast right after.

But we’ve come a long way from that night when it looked like the cavalry was coming in the shape of an odd, but kindly-seeming billionaire making all the right freedom of speech noises. But sadly the new Twitter is nearly as bad as the old. But sneakier.

It’s becoming clear that Twitter/X boosts accounts that align with advertiser preferences and hides the ones that don’t. Really big, but controversial players, like Greenwald and Carlson are left alone because their presence confers legitimacy to the free speech fake out.

Here is an oldy but goody that shows how quickly powerful Conservative accounts were able to curry favour with Musk over censored posts.

Take note that one of the most high profile Musk supporters — someone reaping money and profile by sucking up - is not a journalists, or a thinker of any note or stature at all. Ian Miles Cheong is a random dude, who Tweets about American culture from Malaysia - hot takes all day long. He is is a troll but wields ridiculous amounts of power on Twitter thanks to his undying devotion to Elon. And cashing in on the culture war.

Now Joe Rogan will also be posting his show there. Twitter/X maintains the veneer of a free speech platform while attacking that notion at its very core. Few people speak out because Elon is cultivating his power while cultists on the site like Cheong, genuflect, hoping for that all-important Musk retweet that can massively increase followers and dollars. I gravely fear where this is going.

Meanwhile, Ireland has drawn up perhaps the most regressive censorship law in modern memory. Germany is busy atoning for Nazism by behaving toward civil liberties and speech like, well, Nazis. The EU wants to jail people who incite violence through speech that 1984-type bureaucrats will define. You know, the same ones who chased Covid-zero and vaccine hegemony. Did they all get together in Davos secretly and decide to roll this out?

To me the most dangerous threat is the co-opting of the free speech absolutist crowd, of which I am a proud member. I feel like I woke up one day and everyone had gone crazy. Israel and its military operations are now always above reproach in the minds of many commentators, including Bari Weiss and Douglas Murray who built their lucrative brands on the importance of free speech. Both now decry and stamp out any questions about Israel’s military response and both repeat the many phoney stories driving support for it. Beheaded babies, burned babies and others are still being recycled, thought long ago debunked.

Other big names who early out of the gate supported Israel’s unregulated and unrestrained releasing of the hounds on a captive population haven’t retracted in the face of obvious war crimes. They are just silent now while evidence mounts of an historic moral and geopolitical human disaster. I’ve been told by two indy journalists they agree with my reporting — but stay silent in order to keep working for certain platforms. Self-censorship is perhaps the most insidious kind. Secret, like a Twitter shadow ban. Even Piers Morgan seems to have changed course and is asking hard questions and not demanding a denouncement of Hamas on every show.

Back to Twitter/X which is beginning to mimic a Black Mirror episode. People who deny the ongoing censorship and continue to play to Elon’s ego, get boosted and make no mistake, that can mean big dollars flowing directly and indirectly. Attaining a high profile on Twitter/X is like a Chinese social credit score and an ATM all rolled into one. Games must be played and they are not honest ones. Nor are they good for democracy, not to mention our mental health. Take a minute and watch this Black Mirror episode send up our social media rankings.

I confess this piece is driven in part by my frustration at my ongoing depersonization on Twitter/X which began pre-Elon after I tried to promote my show with CBC whistleblower, Marianne Klowak. I was threatened with banishment if I didn’t take the Tweet down, so I obeyed and tried to promote the show elsewhere. I wasn’t kicked off but my account never recovered, not even after obvious appeals to Caesar/Elon. My follower count died. And engagement disappeared.

Understand that in the world of podcasting, Twitter/X is a huge audience optimizer. Without it, we struggle. Plus, follower counts tell important guests if you are worth their time and effort. Now this massively important platform is in the hands of a man who rewards his fans but hides and deplatforms his critics - a cross between Marie Antoinette and a digital William Randolph Hearst.

When I was first benched by the old regime, I had been at war with all social media on behalf of a multitude of C-19 dissidents who were deplatformed and slagged every time they tried to speak the truth. It was harrowing to watch such remarkable people, with perfect credentials being treated with casual disdain by the overwrought and silly tech bros in charge of the algorithms as they took orders from the biosecurity state. Their bosses at Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere believed censorship was profitable and stupidly, maybe even a public service.

People I have championed in the past agreed to send Elon a message on my behalf but still nothing. CJ Hopkins and even Matt Taibbi are under the same kind of sneaky bans — even now.

I understood deeply that everytime the truth about vaccines, or the harms of lockdowns and school closures were censored — people would die. And they did. The censorship on behalf of Big Pharma and the West’s foolish leaders was as fatal as a shot through the heart. But people forget that now. All is forgiven.

Recently, Elon was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize as a free speech champion. This is the man who cynically stood with Netanyahu to appease advertisers, as the Israeli prime minister’s bombers obliterated trapped women and children. It is all so very 1984.

Speech suppression is occurring on a website whose brand is free speech. The silenced person doesn’t know their tweets are not being seen until slowly over a period of weeks and months, with no follower growth and dropping engagement, someone will email or DM and ask: are you still on here? I never see your posts anymore.

Taibbi is still nearly unfindable on X now because Musk is angry that he publishes on Substack — a site Musk sees as a competitor because of a newish feature called Notes. I thought Matt was gone completely — but no, he is just being hidden because Musk is having a tantrum. Recently, Taibbi exposed the tender underbelly of Musk by publishing a text exchange that made my blood run cold.

You are dead to me. The response from a man who controls perhaps the most important information platform in the world. A hissy fit. Childish digital foot-stomping aimed at a dedicated and brilliant reporter who helped burnish Elon’s credibility. Grifters and fools are rewarded and take centre stage now while honourable people with a contribution to make are sidelined by Elon’s ego.

So, be not fooled by crabby billionaires or social justice warrior politicians who want to shut us up in order to keep us down. We are on our own. Choose your information portals wisely. Stand up for actual, objective truth, no matter how unpleasant. Free speech is often offensive. This will be a long, lonely, ride and we must dislodge dishonest leaders and fake heroes from our windscreen — like insects impeding our view.

Note: I will be embarking on a new project, involving news and information curation for my supporters and followers. Watch this space.