Quotulatiousness

January 16, 2026

Rapidly declining democracy in the home of the “Mother of Parliaments”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As I’ve mentioned before, it sometimes seems that Australia, Britain, and Canada are in a three-way race to de-democratize themselves as fast as they possibly can. Here’s the free-to-cheapskates portion of Ed West‘s essay on the return of liberal authoritarianism:

“Palace of Westminster” by michaelhenley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

It’s around this time of year that various NGOs give their assessment on the state of democracy and freedom of the world. The Fraser Institute’s Human Freedom Index was published earlier in December and Freedom House’s next report will arrive in February. It was at the start of last year that Romania was downgraded to a “hybrid democracy” by another body, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), while France is now merely a flawed democracy. Sacré bleu!

What about our own beloved island, the mother of Parliaments? It will be interesting to see where Britain features in this year’s reports, and whether recent developments will impact on our rating.

Just recently, for instance, the British government postponed four mayoral elections until 2028, elections they are certain to lose. The Electoral Commission warned that it risked undermining “the legitimacy of local decision making and damaging public confidence”, while the chairwoman of the Labour Party even refused to rule out delaying the next General Election, leading Nigel Farage to accuse her of having “total contempt for democracy”.

Keir Starmer has also taken effective control of the House of Lords and will almost entirely eliminate opposition among peers by 2027, which he is able to do to the second chamber thanks to Tony Blair’s constitutional reforms. While the government extends the franchise to children, and even plans to place voting booths in schools, a clear violation of rules about politicising the education system, they’re also keen to restrict who can stand in elections.

As the i reported, Emily Darlington, Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, “is seeking to make the Electoral Commission recommend enhanced DBS checks for candidates and then publish whether or not parties have agreed to the vetting. The aim is to ensure political parties justify whether their candidates are fit for office and name and shame those who refuse to participate.”

This is troubling when one considers that DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks include not just criminal history but “non-crime hate incidents“, which may even appear on the records of people who haven’t been contacted by police. These highly-political charges are far more likely to be directed at those with Right-wing opinions.

When western European countries do things like this, I try to gauge whether this is normal by asking the question: what if Hungary did this? In most of these cases, I imagine the assessment would be that it was an assault on liberalism and democratic norms. In which case, what if Britain is undergoing the sort of “democratic backsliding” usually levelled at central European countries with conservative governments? What if Keir Starmer is actually one of these illiberal “strongmen” we read about, just not a very effective one.

There are a number of accepted symptoms of democratic backsliding, among the most commonly listed being rejection of democratic rules, a disregard for constitutional norms, attempts to use legal mechanism to sidestep democracy, which is described as “stealth authoritarianism”, denial of opponents’ legitimacy, and the tendency to characterise them as outsiders or a threat to national security; on top of this, one might consider a willingness to curtail civil liberties, restricting the power of the media, and violating freedom of speech and association. Finally, and worst of all, is the toleration or encouragement of violence against opponents.

Credit: the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago

By these broad definitions, Britain arguably meets many of these criteria (but not, most importantly, the last). There is certainly censorship, which has increased with the Online Safety Act, designed to combat “hate” as well as “misinformation”. Misinformation, of course, is everywhere, but its existence certainly provides a convenient excuse for governments to clamp down on the sort of information they dislike. The Government has also pondered banning Twitter, and while I feel that the widespread disgust at the Grok “deepfake” feature is reasonable, such a ban would completely cripple opposition, returning control of the discourse to the old media.

As for the British state’s definition of “hate”, there is a widespread belief that people motivated by hostility to mass immigration are extreme and dangerous, so the full force of the law must be used to stop them gaining support among a public who are totally guileless when it comes to absorbing information. This belief has grown more entrenched with the rise of populism, and makes western European governments increasingly sceptical of democracy itself.

It’s obvious that many people are concerned about the prospect of Nigel Farage becoming prime minister, and as the election date comes closer, and if he’s still in a position to win, the tone will become more shrill. Starmer admitted to this terror when he said, tellingly, that “If there is a Conservative government I can sleep at night. If there was a right-wing government in the United Kingdom, that would be a different proposition.”

Update, 17 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 28, 2025

It may seem petty to deny entry to EUrocrats, but it’s all they will understand

Filed under: Europe, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At first, I thought it was just another bout of Trump being deliberately petty over trivial stuff, but on reflection, it’s actually a neat way to bring home the message to the EU bureaucrats personally that they will be held responsible for their actions:

RE: Free Speech & Denying Visas to Euro Autocrats

The very most Orwellian mind game happening in the world today is the way authoritarian globalists are attempting to redefine the concept of “free speech”.

In America, “free speech” has long meant that we are free to say or write virtually anything without fear of government intervention or suppression. It is this ability to express whatever we want that makes it “free”.

The authoritarian globalists, however, have stood this on its head. They have decided that in order for their citizens to be “free”, they must be free of ever hearing or reading any speech that might offend someone or sow doubt as to government policies. To these fascists, “free speech” means GOVERNMENT MODERATED speech which somehow — through its moderation — sets people “free” from ever hearing conflicting views. As I said — straight out of Orwell.

Europe is, of course, the hotbed of this fascist redefinition of what free speech means, but we in America have only narrowly escaped this plague by electing Trump. Remember, Biden and his team were reliant on institutionally stamping out so-called “disinformation” as a means of control over the populace. We must be ever vigilant here in the USA that such thuggish government criminality never again be allowed to prosper.

I think it is very important that every citizen of the USA and the world understand the depths of depravity these people will sink to in order to control ordinary people. This is about mind control, and nothing else.

Ultimately, the value of true free speech is that it embraces the idea that we all have agency over ourselves; that we are free individuals who can and should hear conflicting views, and decide for ourselves what is true and just, and what is untrue and unjust. This is sovereignty over the self, and unfortunately Europe has never let go of the concept of serfdom, so self-sovereignty is a threat that must be stamped out.

The Trump Administration has been prescient, bold and effective in denying visas to the Eurotrash autocrats who would see free speech reduced to whatever speech unelected bureaucrats deem acceptable. I cannot commend Trump enough for the thoughtfulness and importance of that action.

In a world where almost all humans are linked by essentially the same communications platform, only one world leader is truly standing for free speech: Donald Trump. And I thank him for it. We all should — even the TDS sufferers.

For a relevant example, Dries Van Langenhove:

Update, 29 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 24, 2025

The real agenda

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Karl Harrison makes a case for fighting against the key element of the federal government’s all-encompassing drive to control the lives of Canadians because it’s the one that will enable all the other controls to operate:

All Canadians should read this carefully:

“They are flooding Parliament with distraction bills so the public is overwhelmed and cannot see the one bill that makes the entire system possible. More than a dozen federal bills are advancing simultaneously — each attacking a different pillar of Canadian freedom but S206 is the key. They fall into clear clusters:

Bills attacking due process and court rights.
Bill S-206 — Administrative Monetary Penalties (the central pillar) enables penalties without hearings, judges, trials, or common-law protections.
Bill C-63 — Online Harms Act. Undefined “harm”, digital speech penalties, CRTC enforcement authority.
Bill C-27 — Digital Charter Act. Creates federal AI regulators empowered to issue compliance orders without court oversight.
Bill C-52 — Beneficial Ownership Transparency. Expands federal surveillance and administrative enforcement.

Bills attacking parliamentary supremacy (power shift to agencies).
Bill C-26 — Critical Cyber Systems Act. Sweeping regulation by order-in-council, bypassing Parliament.
Bill C-11 — Online Streaming Act. Gives the CRTC unprecedented control over content curation and digital reach.
Bill C-18 — Online News Act. Allows federal regulators to determine access to, and compensation for, digital journalism.

Bills attacking property rights.
Bill C-234 — Agricultural Fuel Restrictions. Expands federal control over farm operations and production.
Bill S-241 — Jane Goodall Act. Sweeping biosafety authority over wildlife, land, and private property.
Bill C-49 — Atlantic Accord Amendments. Expands federal control over offshore land, climate restrictions, and energy development.

Bills attacking freedom of speech and assembly
Bill C-63 — Online Harms Act. Criminalizes undefined “harm”, empowers bureaucrats to judge speech.
Bill C-261 — Misleading Communications Act. Penalties for “misleading” speech — undefined and discretionary.
Bill C-70 — Foreign Interference Act. Mass surveillance powers with vague thresholds.

Bill attacking religion freedom.
Bill C-9 — “Harmful Conduct” Redefinition. Allows the state to regulate spiritual beliefs and pastoral work under “harm”.

The critical pattern. Different bills, different sectors and different rights being attacked. But here is the truth: Every single one of these bills depends on ONE central enforcement pillar, and that pillar is:
Bill S-206 — The Administrative Penalty Switch

Bill S-206, the hub of the entire system, gives federal departments the power to issue penalties without:
▪︎ a hearing
▪︎ a judge
▪︎ a trial
▪︎ due process
▪︎ common-law protections
▪︎ judicial review in practice

It turns federal agencies into their own courts — investigator, prosecutor, judge, and enforcer. No democracy on Earth should tolerate this.

This is the enforcement engine behind:
▪︎ Digital ID
▪︎ CBDCs
▪︎ Carbon allowances
▪︎ Biosafety / One Health rules
▪︎ Smart-meter penalties
▪︎ Travel scoring
▪︎ Online speech controls
▪︎ Zoning & land-use mandates

Data alone cannot control a population. They need the power to punish. S-206 provides it. Remove the keystone → the arch collapses.

Why scatter us with other bills? Because if Canadians focus on S-206, the agenda dies The distraction bills serve one purpose:
▪︎ to scatter attention and exhaust the public.
▪︎ to keep citizens debating side issues
▪︎ to hide the enforcement bill under noise
▪︎ to make resistance impossible to organize
▪︎ to create outrage fatigue
This is how large control systems are built — through distraction around the edges while the core is slipped into place.

What are they building – and why S-206 is the core. Here is the architecture of the planned digital-governance system:
▪︎ Digital ID → who you are
▪︎ CBDCs → what you buy
▪︎ Carbon scoring → how you move & heat your home

December 18, 2025

“You can still hunt”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Canadian federal government is working diligently (well, “diligently” by civil service standards) to disarm Canadians, and have been doing so for decades now. Rather than cracking down on criminal use of firearms, which would be difficult, they concentrate their efforts on literally the most law-abiding group of Canadian citizens — legal gun owners … because it’s easy, safe, and gets them lots and lots of friendly media coverage from the equally anti-gun Canadian media (few of whom even know any gun owners personally).

One of the constant replies when legal gun owners protest against yet another gun grab or tightened legal restriction is along the lines of “this doesn’t affect you: you can still hunt” … but hunting is only a part of Canadian gun ownership, and not the largest part. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Gun Owners of Canada explains why “you can still hunt” is neither helpful nor constructive in the larger conversation:

We keep hearing the same tired line:

“You can still hunt.”

But that’s not what this is about.

That phrase exists because it’s simple, relatable, and politically convenient for people who don’t understand Canada’s firearm laws or their history. If you do understand them, you’re in the minority.

For most Canadian firearm owners, shooting has never been just about hunting. Yes, we hunt — but the bulk of our time is spent at the range, participating in recreational and competitive target shooting. That’s where families gather, skills are learned, friendships are built, and the next generation is introduced to safe, responsible firearm ownership.

Sport shooters are the backbone of the firearms community and the industry that supports it. We shoot year-round, we buy ammunition regularly, and we keep ranges and retailers alive. Many hunters will bring the same box of ammo to camp year after year. Both matter — but they are not the same.

Over the past six years, lawful firearms have been prohibited, replaced, and then prohibited again. Models that once brought families together at the range can no longer be used. That experience — one many of us grew up with — is increasingly out of reach for our kids.

This admin grew up at the range with parents and grandparents deeply involved in Canadian shooting sports. That’s where lifelong relationships were formed. Many of those people don’t hunt at all — but they are responsible, licensed, community-minded Canadians.

So when restrictions strip away lawful, safe activities while violent criminals face little consequence, don’t expect silence — or gratitude.

This isn’t about hunting.

It’s about what’s been taken, who it’s been taken from, and who’s expected to quietly accept it.

Don’t accept it. Get involved. It’s not like there aren’t enough advocacy groups to join and political avenues to get involved in.

For my own part, I no longer have the resources to do any shooting, but I was always interested in target shooting, not hunting. It was fun, and isn’t that what your hobbies should be for? Back when I sometimes travelled on business, I used to envy my American co-workers who had legal access to a plethora of shooting ranges and a much-less restrictive licensing regime. Every chance I got to go out to the range and try new-to-me rifles and pistols was like an adult version of a trip to the candy store. The one time I was nearly shot, ironically, was on a military target range when I was in the army reserves … an idiot (who out-ranked me) had a misfire with his submachine gun and turned away from the target towards me as the round fired. Fortunately, the bullet went in a safe-ish direction and nobody was hurt.

Update, 19 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 5, 2025

Censorship and “cancel culture” are symptoms of a cultural sickness

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

A guest post at Woke Watch Canada by C.C. Harvey lays out the evidence that our culture — and most of the western world — is struggling with a spiritual sickness and that arbitrary cancellations and formal censorship of dissenting views are symptoms of that ailment:

When a society begins to suppress intellectual and spiritual searching and dreaming — by punishing speech, regulating thought, discouraging questions, denying the existence of spiritual reality — it is not only a political decline, but a sign of deep unwellness.

Where populations lose respect for liberty of conscience, inquiry, and discourse, society becomes nasty and brutish. Truth-seeking, spiritual health, and peace are inexorably linked. Across formerly open, stable, safe western societies, censorship and repression have been rising as safety, cohesion, and quality of civic life decline.

We must resist cancel culture and speech codes for the following reasons:

  1. Suppressing Truth-Seeking Violates a Fundamental Human Impulse

    2. Across religious and knowledge traditions, truth-seeking is expressed as a moral duty. When authorities obstruct honest questioning, they interfere with something built into the human spirit.

  2. Fear Becomes the Organizing Principle

    3. Where dissent is forbidden, fear takes the place of reason. Fear diminishes moral clarity, discourages integrity, and pushes people toward silence rather than responsibility. A fearful society cannot become a virtuous society.

  3. Conscience Is Treated as a Threat Instead of a Gift

    4. In every major tradition — religious or philosophical — conscience is seen as a source of moral insight. When institutions punish people for following their conscience, they reveal a belief that the individual soul has no intrinsic worth, only value as a compliant unit.

  4. Dialogue Is Replaced With Dogma

    5. Healthy societies debate, persuade, and refine ideas through open conversation. Unhealthy ones replace discussion with mandatory narratives and speech codes. Leaders who fear questions fear the truth those questions might uncover. Dogma can be secular or religious. It is ideologically rigid, generally not truth-seeking.

  5. Collective Identity Replaces Individual Worth

    6. Authoritarian systems elevate the group above the person: the party, the ideology, the movement, the “community”. When people are valued only as members of a group rather than as individuals, conscience becomes irrelevant and conformity becomes the main civic expectation. This is materialism, and denial of spiritual reality.

  6. Repentance and Correction Become Impossible

    7. A culture that silences criticism cannot correct its own errors. Without the freedom to point out problems, there can be no course correction, no growth, and no accountability. Mistakes multiply because they are protected by enforced silence.

  7. The Vulnerable Are Punished First

    8. Censorship and ideological enforcement nearly always fall hardest on those with the least power — dissidents, researchers, students, teachers, and ordinary citizens. When moral pressure is used to intimidate rather than uplift, society reveals a deeply inverted understanding of justice.

  8. Curiosity and Creativity Decline

    9. When questions become dangerous, people stop asking. When our human body, spirit, and intellect work in tandem without fear, we are capable of incredible scientific, artistic, and intellectual discovery and achievement. A society that punishes inquiry slowly starves itself of spirit in the form of innovation and insight.

  9. Tribal Narratives Replace Shared Reality

    10. When open debate disappears, competing ideological factions manufacture their own “truths”. Without a shared standard for evidence or meaning, society fragments into groups that can no longer communicate across boundaries. This is a recipe for distrust, polarization, and alienation … in dogmatically religious societies: a recipe for holy war and violent oppression.

  10. A Culture That Punishes Dissent Is Living by Avoidance, Not Truth

    11. Suppressing dissent is always a sign that an ideology cannot withstand scrutiny. Societies that silence critics pretend confidence but are insecure. The greater the fear of open conversation, diverse thought, and public debate, the greater the underlying instability and spiritual decay.

  11. Each Soul’s Journey Is Sacred — And Faith Must Be Chosen, Not Forced

    12. Across traditions, genuine belief is understood as something voluntary:

    • Love and faith cannot be coerced.
    • Insight cannot be mandated.
    • Moral understanding cannot be imposed through fear.

A society that tries to control belief tries to destroy the inner space where thought, reflection, and integrity develop. Coerced belief is not belief; it is compliance. An individual’s free relationship with God is sacred. No human rightfully owns another’s body, mind, or soul.

Update, 7 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

November 29, 2025

QotD: Are there no prisons? Are there no asylums?

Filed under: Government, Health, Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When the Trump administration proposed imprisoning homeless people who don’t voluntarily go to shelters, and the predictable howls of outrage arose, I remembered the most interesting fact I’ve ever learned about imprisonment rates.

The US is often pilloried for having a high level of imprisonment per capita relative to other countries. The US is also quite unusual in having shut down most of its insane asylums many decades ago.

My perspective on these facts changed a great deal when I learned that if you aggregate rates of imprisonment with rates of commitment to mental institutions, the US stops looking like an outlier.

The low-level mentally ill didn’t go away when we closed the asylums. Nor did they magically become more able to function in society when we pushed them out the doors. Instead, they now land in our prisons.

Another implication of all this is that it’s not “structural racism” or any other specific evil that gives the US high imprisonment rates. It’s an inevitable consequence of the social decision to make it very difficult to involuntarily commit people to asylums.

I’m not going to argue today about whether that decision should be reversed. I have an opinion about that, but this post is about facts and consequences, not value claims or what “should” be.

Let’s return to the homeless. It is now common knowledge that homeless people are almost never simply poor or down on their luck. Almost all have serious issues with mental illness or drug addiction, or both. Many refuse to go to shelters because they don’t want to — or are not capable of — complying with a homeless shelter’s behavioral restrictions.

While I don’t have firsthand knowledge or controlled studies to back me up, it seems obvious that the shelters are acting as a filter — the least damaged and most functional homeless go to them, leaving the crazies to inhabit the streets.

Thus, throwing homeless people who won’t go to shelters in prison is an exact functional equivalent of involuntary commitment to a mental asylum.

My question for people who object to imprisoning the mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless is: what do you propose we do instead? Are we prepared to reopen the asylums and lower the bar for involuntary commitment?

I don’t think there’s a third alternative anymore. Donald Trump, whatever his other failings might be, has an acute sense of the zeitgeist; popular tolerance for having the streets of our cities inhabited by crazy people is collapsing. It turns out we can only tolerate so many news stories about naked screaming nut-jobs on the subway.

I’m not going to propose an answer to the question I just raised, because I’m conflicted about it myself. My goal is to start people thinking about the right question, which is a very large one.

What is the humane way to treat people who are too damaged or broken to be functional members of society, and who inflict large costs on others if they’re not separated from society?

If it’s not prisons or asylums, what are we going to do? And given how ineffective psychiatric treatment is at anything beyond management of symptoms, is “prison” vs. “asylum” even a meaningful distinction?

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-08-13.

November 20, 2025

Our free-speech documentary has been cancelled! | A London cinema has banned Think Before You Post

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

spiked
Published 19 Nov 2025

Our new documentary, Think Before You Post, about the rise of the British speech police, was due to have its premiere in London next week. Last night, the venue got in contact to say it would be cancelling our booking, because the event does not align with its “values”.

Here, spiked‘s Tom Slater tells all.

We are working flat-out to find a new venue for the same night. So if you bought tickets, do bear with us. But if we can’t find somewhere else in time, we’ll refund everyone and postpone it for a later date. If you’d like a refund now anyway, get in touch and we’ll process it.

At least they’re proving our point …

About spiked:

Founded in 2000, spiked was a pioneer of 21st-century journalism – the first online-only political magazine in the UK.

Now edited by Tom Slater, spiked reaches millions around the world with hard-hitting articles, incisive essays and a growing roster of podcasts and videos.

November 17, 2025

The US Supreme Court considers whether Trump’s tariffs are legal

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Thanks to the staggering incompetence (and/or deliberate provocation for domestic political advantage) of the Carney government’s dealings with President Donald Trump, the current case before the Supreme Court is of significant interest to those of us on the north side of the US-Canadian border. On his Substack, David Friedman discusses the issues before the court:

There are three things wrong with Trump’s tariffs. The first is that they cannot be expected to provide the benefits claimed, can be expected to make both the US and its trading partners poorer; the arguments offered for them depend on not understanding the economics of trade. For an explanation of why that is true, see an earlier post.

The fact that the tariffs make us poorer may be the most important thing wrong with them but it is irrelevant to the Supreme Court; nothing in the Constitution requires the president to do his job well. The questions relevant to the Court are whether what Trump is doing was authorized by past Congressional legislation and whether it was constitutional for Congress to authorize it.

What Counts As An Emergency?

Tariffs are under the authority of Congress, not the president.1 Trump’s justification for setting them himself is congressional legislation, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

    (a) Any authority granted to the President by section 1702 of this title may be exercised to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.

    (b) The authorities granted to the President by section 1702 of this title may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose. (IEEPA, 50 U.S. Code § 1701, emphasis mine)

Trump declared that his Worldwide Reciprocal Tariffs were intended to deal with the US trade deficit.2 Whether the deficit is a threat and whether tariffs are a good way to deal with it are questions for economists3 but whether it is unusual is relevant to judges, since if it is not the IEEPA does not apply.

[…]

The Court on Trial

Delegating to the president the power to impose tariffs, a power explicitly given to Congress in the Constitution, is a major question. Under doctrine proclaimed by this court that means that the legislation claimed to delegate that power must be read narrowly. On a narrow reading, on anything but a very broad reading, the legislation fails to apply to President Trump’s tariffs for two independent reasons:

    It only grants power in an emergency, which under the language of the Act neither the trade deficit nor the illegal drug problem is; the deficit has existed since 1970, the War on Drugs was proclaimed in 1971.

    The powers granted to the president in the Act do not include the power to impose tariffs.

If the six conservative justices believe in the principles they claim, the administration will lose the case 9-0.

  1. The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises … To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations … (U.S Constitution, Article I, Section 8).
  2. “I found that conditions reflected in large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States that has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States. I declared a national emergency with respect to that threat, and to deal with that threat, I imposed additional ad valorem duties that I deemed necessary and appropriate.” (Executive Order July 31, 2025).
  3. The answers are no and no.

November 16, 2025

3D printing and firearms

Filed under: Liberty, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR discusses a recent user notification from one of the 3D printer companies to their users:

I’m told that 3D printed gun parts are far more sophisticated than this Liberator from 2013, but I’m sure nobody would actually do that, right? It would draw the attention of various government agencies for sure.

The recent flap about FlashForge attempting to forbid its customers from printing gun parts means it’s time for another reminder about technological risk.

Their weasel-worded climb-down carefully avoids stating that they never collect data on what you print. They only say they don’t collect data during your prints. The wording is so careful that I think we can conclude they do in fact ship telemetry on your print jobs when g-code arrives at the printer, immediately before printing.

So I repeat a warning I’ve given previously: never buy a 3D printer that requires an internet connection to function. And, always assume that if the printer’s firmware isn’t open-source, it is written to spy on you and could at any time prevent you from printing disapproved objects.

Oh, and never trust FlashForge again or buy their products, no matter how much groveling they do. After this, it’s safest to assume that anything they say about respecting the privacy and autonomy of their customers will be a lie. Hear that, @ff3dprinters
?

We need to make a public example of FlashForge. Other vendors need to hear that shit like this will not be tolerated, that attempting to constrain what their customers print will do them permanent and irreversible damage.

It’s possible that this was merely a blunder on FlashForge’s court, and the attempts they’ve made so far to recover are compounding blunders, but they have sincerely repented of trying to control their customers. That’s too bad; in order to create the right incentives bearing on the future behavior of other vendors, we must show no mercy. We must make them hurt – ideally, to the point of being driven out of business.

And really these warnings apply to all “smart” devices, not just 3D printers. Unless you can audit the source code, the only safe assumption to make is that the firmware is spyware, controlware, and malware.

Device vendors need to know that we do not forgive, and will not forget.

In response, Hopalong Ginsberg posted this helpful item:

November 8, 2025

Think Before You Post | How the UK fell to a sinister new form of censorship

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

spiked
Published 27 Oct 2025

“Think before you post.” Those were the words screamed out by government social-media accounts, threatening to lock up people for “hate speech”, as riots swept the United Kingdom in the summer of 2024. To those who hadn’t been paying attention, it offered a stark insight into a supposedly liberal, democratic nation that had come to police speech as much as, sometimes even more so, than actual violence. Inciting racial hatred, inciting religious hatred, “grossly offensive” online communications – over the past 60 years or so, Britain has written one new speech crime after another into its statute books. And it has led to a situation in which at least 30 people a day are now arrested in England and Wales for social-media posts. This is a documentary about some of those speech criminals. What we found out was even more chilling than the headlines would have you believe. Featuring: Maxie Allen, Rosalind Levine, Toby Young, Allison Pearson, Luke Gittos and Jamie Michael.

November 3, 2025

The BC government “has been doing everything in its power to have Aboriginal title triumph across B.C.”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A Fraser Institute commentary by Bruce Pardy addresses the role of the NDP government of British Columbia in undermining the established laws on land title in the province among other actions to the advantage of First Nations bands and to the definite disadvantage of ordinary British Columbians:

Recently, British Columbia Attorney General Niki Sharma said that fee simple title in private property is superior to Aboriginal title. She’s a day late and a dollar short. In fact, her NDP government, led by Premier David Eby, has been doing everything in its power to have Aboriginal title triumph across B.C.

A B.C. Supreme Court judge has granted several First Nations a portion of a 1,846-acre land claim on Lulu Island. B.C. Supreme Court

A few days earlier, the City of Richmond sent out a letter to more than 125 property owners warning them that the security of their land is in doubt. “For those whose property is in the area outlined in black,” the letter reads, “the Court has declared aboriginal title to your property which may compromise the status and validity of your ownership … The entire area outlined in green has been claimed on appeal by the Cowichan First Nations.”

The Richmond letter is a consequence of a recent decision of the B.C. Supreme Court, which awarded Aboriginal title over 800 acres of land in Richmond to the Cowichan First Nation. Wherever Aboriginal title is found to exist, said the court, it is a “prior and senior right” to other property interests, whether the land is public or private.

It is finally dawning on British Columbians that obsequious devotion to reconciliation is putting their land at risk. Sharma claimed that B.C. was pursuing multiple grounds of appeal, but that makes her a hypocrite. Her government did not robustly defend in court against the Cowichan claim. And in a dozen other ways, the Eby government has sought to put title and control of B.C. into Aboriginal hands.

In early 2024, it proposed to amend the province’s Land Act, which governs the use of Crown land in B.C. It planned to give B.C.’s hundreds of First Nations a veto over mining, hydro projects, farming, forestry, docks and communication towers. The government tried to consult quietly, but the backlash was immediate. It withdrew the proposals, promising to be more transparent. But it did not shelve its objectives or its plans. And did not deliver on its promise. Instead, it sought to make agreements over specific territories with specific Aboriginal groups, often negotiated covertly and announced after the fact.

In April 2024, the Eby government recognized Aboriginal title to Haida Gwaii, the archipelago on Canada’s West Coast. Around 5,000 people live on Haida Gwaii. About half are Haida, who voted overwhelmingly in favour of the deal. But non-Haida residents had no say. The Haida agreement says private property will be honoured, but private property is incompatible with Aboriginal title, which is communal. If Haida Gwaii really is subject to Aboriginal title, then no one can own parts of it privately.

Update: I forgot to include the URL to Mr. Pardy’s article … fixed now.

October 17, 2025

Civilizational collapse is … female

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo addresses the unpalatable contention that female power leads to civilizational disaster:

Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix

Multiple surveys (see, for example, with thanks to James Nuzzo, here, here, here, here, here and here) suggest that when women hold power, they pursue typically feminine preferences and policies. Female-led institutions become more oriented to social justice than objective truth. Feelings matter above facts, context above law, and victimhood above expertise.

Protecting and promoting the allegedly vulnerable — through censorship, shaming, coercion, or lawbreaking/lawfare — becomes a greater priority than excellence or impartiality. Truth-tellers find themselves cancelled, Nobel prize winners reduced to tears, laws and policies applied unequally, white men accused and vilified, criminals cossetted, mental illnesses affirmed, and destructive policies embraced. No one who has paid attention over the past 20 years can be surprised by the findings.

Moreover, our ability to discuss this feminine revolution in values is hampered by the very logic of the revolution, as I will show. Both women and men, deeply disinclined to “harm” women, fail to confront the problem adequately.

Two discussions of the subject — an essay by two social psychologists at Quillette and, more recently, a conference speech by a feisty conservative woman — draw a line under the seeming inevitability of the west’s collapse. Even faced with that alarming prospect, most pundits cannot bear to imagine an alternative to the female-led assault on our core institutions.

Cheering on Women’s Empowerment

A 2022 article in Quillette, “Sex and the Academy“, provides a stark illustration of my thesis. The subtitle rules out the very conclusion the data supports, with the authors emphasizing that “The inclusion of women in higher education is a great achievement for Western liberal societies. How is this changing academic culture?”

The “great achievement”, as it turns out, will almost certainly be a lethal one.

The article was written by two academics, Cory Clark and Bo Winegard, both PhDs in social psychology. Winegard, a male scholar, had an unfortunate run-in with academic orthodoxy that led to his loss of employment; Clark, a female scholar, has a secure academic position. Both authors express enthusiasm for the takeover of academia by women even as they point out its damaging consequences. Neither one advocates any form of resistance, no matter how mild, to feminine academia’s assault on truth.

Summarizing the results of many surveys, Clark and Winegard demonstrate that while a majority of men favor free speech and the advancement of knowledge over emotional comfort, a majority of women prefer conformity, safety, and the protection of victim groups’ feelings. Not all women are indifferent to the traditional underpinnings of western civilization (and not all men support those underpinnings), but the general trends are clear.

Women are significantly more likely than men to support the cancellation of controversial speakers or the suppression of controversial research.

Women also tend to favor the existence of snitch lines to report people who cause offence. Women are more supportive than men of diversity quotas that exclude white men from consideration for prizes, positions, and promotions. (It would be interesting to know how many white women support diversity quotas that exclude white women from consideration for prizes, positions, and promotions.)

[…]

Asserting that both sides are pursuing worthy goals, the authors downplay the shock value of the findings, which show that women are, overall, less interested in truth and accuracy than men are. Imagine assessing such a finding as anything but catastrophic. Imagine calling the disregard for truth moral.

In place of truth, women value a utopian ideology that they perceive — usually without any consistency or adherence to fact, but nonetheless granted by Clark and Winegard — as “morally desirable”. But morally desirable for whom, and to what end? The use of the phrase, a misnomer, demonstrates how thoroughly the authors themselves are in thrall to the corrosive feminine culture they examine.

There is nothing moral (or generally desirable) about the suppression of truth-seeking research when it conflicts — or is perceived to conflict — with an allegedly emancipatory social goal. There is nothing morally desirable or indeed “protective” about shouting down an academic speaker because of the alleged harm of the speech. Naturally, social justice proponents would be outraged if their speeches were shouted down or their research blocked and censored.

I saw a link to this Helen Andrews article which seems to go well with Janice Fiamengo’s article linked above describing the “Great Feminization”:

… Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?

[…]

The substance fits, too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.

The most relevant differences are not about individuals but about groups. In my experience, individuals are unique and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day, but groups of men and women display consistent differences. Which makes sense, if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages.

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.

Bari Weiss, in her letter of resignation from The New York Times, described how colleagues referred to her in internal Slack messages as a racist, a Nazi, and a bigot and—this is the most feminine part—”colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.” Weiss once asked a colleague at the Times opinion desk to get coffee with her. This journalist, a biracial woman who wrote frequently about race, refused to meet. This was a failure to meet the standards of basic professionalism, obviously. It was also very feminine.

Men tend to be better at compartmentalizing than women, and wokeness was in many ways a society-wide failure to compartmentalize. Traditionally, an individual doctor might have opinions on the political issues of the day but he would regard it as his professional duty to keep those opinions out of the examination room. Now that medicine has become more feminized, doctors wear pins and lanyards expressing views on controversial issues from gay rights to Gaza. They even bring the credibility of their profession to bear on political fads, as when doctors said Black Lives Matter protests could continue in violation of Covid lockdowns because racism was a public health emergency.

[…]

The Great Feminization is truly unprecedented. Other civilizations have given women the vote, granted them property rights, or let them inherit the thrones of empires. No civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses. Even where women do not hold the top spots, women set the tone in these organizations, such that a male CEO must operate within the limits set by his human resources VP. We assume that these institutions will continue to function under these completely novel circumstances. But what are our grounds for that assumption?

The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?

If the Great Feminization poses a threat to civilization, the question becomes whether there is anything we can do about it. The answer depends on why you think it occurred in the first place. There are many people who think the Great Feminization is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Women were finally given a chance to compete with men, and it turned out they were just better. That is why there are so many women in our newsrooms, running our political parties, and managing our corporations.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter comments on Helen Andrews’ article:

One thing Helen misses in this otherwise excellent analysis is the role played by prestige. Cancel culture was enabled by the unique circumstance of women weaponizing the prestige of freshly feminized legacy institutions. So long as those institutions retained their prestige, what the people who ran them said really mattered.

Unfortunately for the ladies (but luckily for civilization), this is self-limiting, because prestige is fundamentally an emergent property of masculine competence hierarchies. We see this demonstrated whenever a profession becomes coded as women’s work: its prestige immediately crashes. Feminists have complained about this for years, though of course they misunderstand the mechanism (prestige is a component of male sexual attractiveness, but not of female, and this is biologically hard-wired).

This prestige collapse is now affecting essentially every coopted, feminized institution — universities, news media, publishing houses, movie studios, large corporations, various government agencies, hospitals, courts, churches, all of them wield far less cultural power than they did even a few years ago. The only people who really care what these legacy institutions say are the women who took them over. To everyone else, the angry sounds they make are nothing more than background noise.

This is probably the main reason for the vibe shift. Once the prestige of feminized institutions declined below a certain threshold, their ability to enforce social consensus began to evaporate.

It’s also probably no accident that the Trump administration seems to care a lot more about what the anons of the Online Right say than it does about the opinion of the universities or the news media. All the intelligent young men got pushed out of the institutions, and those ionized particles of free male energy then began to self-assemble online into an ad hoc competence hierarchy where prestige is measured by clout rather than professional degrees, job titles, or institutional affiliations. The anon swarm is entirely informal, meaning that its outcomes are not amenable to antidiscrimination legislation or to procedural manipulation; you can screw with the algo all you want but you can’t actually force people to care what women say just because they’re women (thereby placing women into the position of openly trading in thirst, which gets them attention but certainly doesn’t mean that anyone has to pretend to take them seriously).

All that’s happened so far is that people’s attention has been redirected away from crazy woke females and towards the influencers of the online right. The fever has broken but society is a long way from recovered. The institutions are still under the control of crazy woke females, and this is extremely bad, especially because they are – for biological reasons related to childlessness — only going to get crazier as time goes on. Fortunately no one really cares what they say anymore, so as they throw tantrums as the institutions are reclaimed over the next decade or so, their protests won’t register as anything but irrelevant toddler noise.

October 12, 2025

Restricting activism from the bench

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

As we’ve seen far too many times in Canadian courts, when judges become politically active, they can produce far worse situations than the politicians who cynics might say are specialists in that discipline. British judges, however, are still well ahead of their Canadian counterparts:

Until judges are replaced by robots, we will have to accept the reality of activist judges. Even the most august patriarch of the bench cannot wholly escape his innate human biases. And so perhaps there was something in Robert Jenrick’s speech at this week’s Conservative Party Conference, in which he announced that, if elected, the Tories would empower the Lord Chancellor to appoint judges and more carefully scrutinise their political activities.

Those who have supported the ideological capture of our major institutions were understandably furious. The New Statesman claimed that Jenrick had “declared war on the judiciary”. But then, the New Statesman is an activist publication which can make no serious claim to impartiality or sound journalistic standards. (Those in any doubt about its mendacity should take the time to read about its shameful treatment of Roger Scruton.)

The problem of an activist judiciary is currently preoccupying the White House, given that a number of federal judges have attempted to block executive policies or have issued nationwide injunctions. Trump himself was convicted on thirty-four felony counts by a judge who had made small political donations to Democratic-aligned causes. It seems clear that given these circumstances he ought to have recused himself. The entire case, of course, was an example of the law being twisted for politically partisan ends. (The best overview is by the senior legal analyst for CNN, Elie Honig, which can be read here.) Little wonder that Trump now appears to be seeking revenge through the courts.

In the UK, there have been a number of revelations of judges tied to political causes whose claim to impartiality seems shaky at best. During his speech, Jenrick spoke of those judges who have been associated with pro-immigration campaign groups and have “spent their whole careers fighting to keep illegal migrants in this country”. Many commentators have observed a generalised bias toward asylum applications, sometimes to an absurd extent. Who could possibly forget the Albanian criminal whose deportation was halted by an immigration tribunal on the grounds that his ten-year-old son did not like foreign chicken nuggets?

Leaving such outliers aside, most of us will have noticed patently ideological remarks occasionally uttered by judges during sentencing. In the Lucy Connolly case, the judge explicitly expressed his support for the creed of DEI before sentencing her to 31 months in prison for an offensive and hastily deleted post on social media. “It is a strength of our society that it is both diverse and inclusive”, he said. It couldn’t be much clearer than that.

That lawfare has become a major weapon in the settling of political disputes should trouble us all. Judges are not accountable to the electorate, and so any suggestion that they are exercising power for their own political ends is bound to be interpreted as a threat to democracy. Inevitably, Jenrick’s criticism of activist judges, and his call for them to be removed, has led to some commentators assuming that he would prefer judges who simply acted according to the government’s bidding. That way lies tyranny.

October 11, 2025

Crossing the line between “justice” and “persecution”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At The Intrepid Viking, Roxanne Halverson notes just how determined the Canadian justice system was to inflict the most pre-trial punishment as possible on Tamara Lich and Chris Barber for their leadership role in the Freedom Convoy:

Tamara Lich and Chris Barber
Photos from The Intrepid Viking

The convoy leaders, Lich and Barber, […] finally learned their fate in an Ottawa courtroom on October 7th, 2025, almost four years since the trucks first rolled into the capital, and over two years since their trial began on September 5, 2023. Rather than the unwarranted and what can only be described as vindictive prison terms sought by the Crown, Justice Heather Perkins-McVey instead sentenced them both to conditional non-custodial sentences of 18 months. A decision, one can be sure, the Crown is not pleased with and one that is nothing short of humiliating given it falls farther short from the seven and eight year terms they argued for than they could have possibly imagined.

[…]

But Lich and Barber have indeed suffered. Both have been put through the legal grist mill of what now serves as Canada’s justice system since they day they were put into handcuffs and arrested on February 17/18, 2022. Barber was released on a bail bond of $100,000 after a night in jail with his wife acting as surety, meaning she would forfeit that amount if he breached his bail conditions. Under those conditions he was required to leave Ottawa within 24 hours of his release and depart Ontario in 72 hours, no longer support the Freedom Convoy and cease contact with fellow organizers. Breach of these conditions could also have landed him back in jail. His business and personal finances were also frozen for three months as part of the government’s illegal actions under the Emergencies Act. And now, to further try and impair and punish him financially the Crown prosecutors on this case are still attempting to seize and destroy his truck and livelihood, Big Red, which became a symbol of the Freedom Convoy. That matter is expected to be settled by Justice Perkins-McVey in court in November of 2025.

Lich, after her arrest spent a total of 49 days in jail before she was even convicted of any offence. Denied bail after her initial arrest in February, she spent 19 days in remand custody in an Ottawa jail because a judge deemed it was “necessary for the protection and safety of the public“. She was finally released on March 7, 2022 after an Ontario Superior Court Justice overturned the lower court’s outlandish ruling.

The vindictive nature of the first Crown prosecutor on their case, Moiz Karimjee, soon came to light when Lich was announced the winner of the George Jonas Freedom Award in May of 2022. He petitioned to have her bail revoked, arguing that being a recipient of the award was a breach of her bail conditions. Justice Kevin Phillips disagreed and amended provisions of her bail to allow her to attend the award dinner in Toronto, but still prohibited her from communicating with “certain” individuals at the dinner unless in the presence of legal counsel.

Karimjee, seemingly obsessed with seeing her back in jail, accused Lich of another alleged bail breach after she attended the award dinner when video evidence later surfaced of her having a brief congratulatory interaction with Tom Marazzo a Freedom Convoy organizer she was prohibited from interacting with. As a result, on June 27 Karimjee dispatched two Ottawa homicide detectives, yes homicide detectives, to her home in Medicine Hat to put the diminutive grandmother in shackles and fly her back to Ottawa and throw her back in jail. She was finally released following another bail hearing, in which Karimjee made every effort to keep her behind bars, but justice prevailed and she was released from custody on July 27, 2022.

Lich’s lawyer Lawrence Greenspon was highly critical of Karimjee’s actions stating, “This is the third time the crown has tried to incarcerate Ms. Lich, this time for a three-second interaction, and a photo. The prosecutorial response to this far exceeds the severity of the alleged breach“. Further remarking on the situation, Greenspon added, “Had there been a proper investigation before Tamara Lich was arrested, shackled, hauled halfway across the country and then kept in jail for 30 days, they would have realized that her then-counsel were present at the time and therefore these charges should never have been laid“.

And like Barber, and many other convoy protesters, Lich’s bank accounts were also frozen by the government under the Emergencies Act for a period of three weeks.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Eve Chipiuk posted:

Read it and weep, snowflakes. The lies are exposed, the facts don’t lie, and people across the world can see the truth.

The question remains: when will you stop lying to yourself and others, and start thanking your fellow citizens for fighting for your freedom?

“Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, organizers of the most successful protest in Canadian history, kept their cool, kept the peace and brought national unity, patriotism and common sense back to Canada after the pandemic – this, despite the sustained efforts of the most aggressively controlling, divisive government the nation has ever had. They achieved this under intense pressure and at great personal cost.

They’re national heroes, and the persecution waged against them is destroying trust in the Canadian judicial system, though the judge involved does not seem to realize it. Justice Perkins-McVey said in court that if she discharged the defendants, it would “undermine confidence in the administration of justice”.

But it’s quite the opposite …

There was another ironic moment at the sentencing. The judge announced, “Politics has no place inside this courtroom” – yet the trial has been widely viewed as nothing more than the political vengeance of Doug Ford and the Ontario government.

If it weren’t for politics, Lich and Barber would never have been arrested, let alone put through jail time, solitary confinement, loss of employment, years of drawn-out, costly legal proceedings, onerous bail conditions and emotional strain …

This means the public is paying twice – once as taxpayers, with money intended to pursue real criminals wasted on a political vendetta – and once again, voluntarily, to support the brave people who stood up to ask for an end to lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

This is the same public that already gave $24 million to the truckers to help them go to Ottawa and protest vaccine mandates and lockdowns: $24 million that never reached them, because politicians colluded with fundraising sites and banks to freeze the money, debank the protestors and doxx the donors, all without a court order. No criminal charges have been laid in Canada, to this writer’s knowledge, against the perpetrators of these deeds, though they damaged national institutions far more than any protest ever could.

Justice Perkins-McVey is right to be concerned about confidence in the administration of justice. Many Canadians share her concern. Sadly, her handling of this case has done little to dispel their fears.”

October 9, 2025

Britain is only a few steps further than Canada in the war on free speech

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Peter Menzies looks at the worsening situation for freedom of speech and freedom of expression in Britain, noting that what’s happening over in Blighty is our immediate future with current Liberal bills before Parliament to give government bureaucrats more power to silence us:

Everyone may know, for instance, that Kimmel got suspended by ABC for a week following statements made in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. But not a lot of people consuming Canadian media know that in the U.K., comedians weren’t just getting one-week suspensions. Nope. Last month they were getting arrested.

Right-wing icon Katie Hopkins, best known for her Batshit Bonkers Britain clips and Silly Cow tour, hadn’t been charged at the time of writing, but was arrested and, as they say in Blighty, “interviewed under caution”. Previously, Graham Linehan was arrested upon his return from the United States by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport. At issue were posts he had made on X in April.

“If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space,” one Linehan post declared, “he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

Currently on bail, Linehan returns to court on Oct. 29. The charges are harassment, criminal damage and suspicion of inciting hatred.

The merits of the cases can be debated, but my point today is that when it comes to digital policy and policing you, and the internet, Canadians and their media should be paying a lot more attention to the U.K.

Because it is there that the true illiberalism of modern Western so-called liberalism is most menacingly embraced. Even prior to the U.K.’s Online Safety Act coming into effect, pre-existing British legislation had been used to, for instance, convict six retired police officers for making comments “deemed to be offensive” within their private WhatsApp chat group. Following the Southport mass stabbing murders of little girls, at least two women with no prior history with police were given prison sentences — one for 15 months for a Facebook post calling for a mosque to be blown up, another 31 months for a tweet calling for hotels full of migrants to be burned. While their comments were certainly worthy of vigorous condemnation, the intervention of the state into private, closed conversations and the involvement of police, courts and the penal system has taken matters in the U.K. to a level inconsistent with liberal traditions.

Now that the Online Safety Act has supplemented those laws, hundreds of people have been arrested and dozens so far convicted for social media posts. The government calls the act a “new set of laws that protect children and adults online” in much the same way Justin Trudeau explained Canada’s own Online Harms Act. It’s all about “safety”.

Online Harms may have died when Parliament was prorogued last winter, but a successor is anticipated and, given Prime Minister Mark Carney’s obvious Anglophilia, it’s easy to speculate — fear is a better word — that he is taking inspiration from the Brits. After all, up until a few months ago, he was one of them.

Fighting back in the U.K. is, among others, Lord Toby Young, the Conservative peer, associate editor of The Spectator and founder of the Free Speech Union, which now has a Canadian branch featuring, among others, journalist Jonathan Kay. Young has protested that criminalizing disinformation hands governments the power to determine truth. Nevertheless, while Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has muttered that maybe the police have more important things to do, he shows — despite the meteoric rise in the polls of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party — no inclination to order a digital retreat.

In fact, Starmer just doubled down with the introduction of legislation imposing mandatory digital IDs. A petition opposing it and the potential to enable mass surveillance and state control has already gathered close to three million signatures.

There’s a good chance the Canadian Free Speech Union will be similarly engaged in the years ahead. The Trudeau government’s instincts when it came to digital legislation were not as extreme as Britain’s. And there are very real differences in the legal structure of free-speech rights in Canada and the U.K. — we have the Charter, and the British don’t. So our laws would be enacted and enforced differently here than they can be the the U.K.

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