Canada’s Free Speech Union has launched a petition to get rid of all our anti-democratic Human Rights Tribunals in the wake of a BC man being penalized three-quarters of a million dollars for not bending the knee to the trans madness:
February 26, 2026
Abolish all Human Rights Tribunals in Canada
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February 24, 2026
Don’t call German Chancellor Friedrich Merz anything disrespectful … or else
German law provides far more protection for the reputations of politicians than any rational country should ever do … because free citizens should always have the right to criticize their political leaders under any circumstance short of threats and physical violence. And by “disrespectful”, they mean anything as trivial as referring to the Chancellor as “Pinocchio”:
In the latest retarded case of political repression to afflict the Federal Republic of Germany, police are investigating a pensioner for the crime of associating the German Chancellor with an iconic children’s book character.
From the Heilbronner Stimme:
When … Friedrich Merz and Baden-Württemberg Minister President Winfried Kretschmann came to Heilbronn last October for the opening ceremony of the Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (IPAI), the celebrity visit occasioned discussion discussion on social media.
A post appeared on the Heilbronn Police Facebook page informing locals about a temporary flight ban enacted for security during the visit. A resident of Heilbronn responded by writing that “Pinocchio is coming to [Heilbronn].” He included a long-nosed emoji.
Three months later, at the end of January, the man could hardly believe his eyes as he received a letter from the criminal police informing him that he is now under investigation for his comment. He is suspected of committing the crime of insult as prohibited by Section 188 of the Criminal Code.
StGB §188 is the notorious “lèse-majesté” statute, which the Bundestag expanded substantially in 2021 when politicians grew tired of being criticised for suspending most of our democratic freedoms in a mad drive to exterminate a respiratory virus. As currently formulated, StGB §188 enhances penalties for “insult, malicious gossip and defamation” when the rabble direct these at “persons in political life”, and also makes these transgressions easier to prosecute. In this case, the pinched schoolmarms on the “social media team” who run the Heilbronn Police Facebook page filed a complaint with prosecutors as soon as they noticed our pensioner’s comment. Apparently it is their policy to monitor comments and cry to teacher whenever they see anything they don’t like.
Update, 25 February: 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
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
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 SwitchBill 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 practiceIt 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 mandatesData 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
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December 8, 2025
If Britain’s political leadership were trying to destroy the country, what would they have done differently?
My Canadian readers — and possibly the occasional Aussie or Kiwi — can read Spaceman Spiff‘s essay and feel it applies almost 100% to our respective nations as well:
Image from Postcards from the Abyss
Britain is a disaster. The country seems to be in terminal decline.
Not only do we see a lack of ability to turn things around we witness leaders and prominent decision makers evidently clueless about normal life and the hardships many now face.
The political and media classes best reflect this phenomenon. Their views are insular, fictional and at odds with reality. They promote unorthodox ideas that are widely derided yet their enthusiasm is evident as are their hostile responses to being challenged.
Minor comments about immigration are treated as precursors to genocide. Criticism of a biased media unwilling to report events is dismissed as conspiracy. No discussion of climate policy and its unaffordable costs is tolerated. Deviation from the establishment view means excommunication and social exile.
Those in leadership positions drive Britain’s descent into authoritarian governance. Attempts to discuss changes to society leads to extreme overreactions, including jailing noticers, something they now boast about.
Britain has become a madhouse. Our leaders are unable to think like normal people. None of them are facing reality. They seem crazy.
Or, rather, they seem neurotic.
Neurosis is everywhere
Britain has degenerated into a technocratic regime that views the public as its enemy. Normal people disgust the country’s leaders and it shows. They no longer hide their contempt.
But there is a palpable sense of fear emanating from the powerful. Their reactions to normal events paint a troubling picture of who is leading the country, particularly the political and media classes.
If the British establishment were a person we would think them mentally unstable. The qualities we see most are those of a neurotic individual, a type that is well understood.
Here are some features visible in Britain’s ruling class.
Chronic anxiety and worry
A key attribute of neurosis is persistent fear or worry. Rumination is commonplace, circling around and around the same problems. There is also a tendency to overreact, with the response disproportionate to the issue at hand.
The current British regime is wracked with anxiety and worry. This defines them. They are vocal about their concerns.
We are reminded of an endless series of horrors we must attend to; systemic racism, lack of diversity, an imperial past and our cultural dominance along with our impact on the world.
One simple example illustrates the degree to which minds can become distorted by excessive worry.
James Watt perfected the steam engine in 1769 which kickstarted in the industrial revolution, changing the world forever. This would ultimately elevate most nations on earth and led eventually to the establishment of cheap abundant energy for almost everyone.
Until recently these events were viewed as an epoch-defining moment of engineering brilliance. Now this has been recast as a dark stain on Britain’s place in the world, with climate zealots keen to blame the British for all pollution caused by industrialization.
Instead of pride we now see embarrassment and even anxiety about the “damage” Britain has done to the world because it ushered in an era of cheap widespread energy for everyone.
Any rational person would understand this extreme view to be a distortion of reality and excessively negative, yet it permeates everything. Those who rule Britain are ashamed of our past. They worry about it. Only they do this, normal people are proud of our history.
[…]
Welcome to the madhouse
A system of governance driven by neurotics takes on their characteristics. Britain has become a neurotic bureaucracy; a neurocracy.
Neurotics overthink and live inside their heads. They lack the calm, detached strength needed to govern sensibly. Power structures inevitably take on these qualities.
The British government has become paranoid. Digital IDs, internet regulation, censorship. They jail normal people for social media posts. Dissenting views are increasingly punished with custodial sentences.
These are not the actions of the mentally strong. This is an embattled minority fighting reality and becoming desperate.
A gulf is opening between the rulers and the ruled. Increasingly no common ground is even conceivable as the fictions needed to maintain narratives grow. They become overtly false but are needed to feed the neurosis.
One of the things I like about the social media site formerly known as Twitter is how quickly authoritarian bullshit like this can get called out:
Update, 9 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
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:
- Suppressing Truth-Seeking Violates a Fundamental Human Impulse
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.
- Fear Becomes the Organizing Principle
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.
- Conscience Is Treated as a Threat Instead of a Gift
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.
- Dialogue Is Replaced With Dogma
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.
- Collective Identity Replaces Individual Worth
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.
- Repentance and Correction Become Impossible
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.
- The Vulnerable Are Punished First
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.
- Curiosity and Creativity Decline
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.
- Tribal Narratives Replace Shared Reality
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.
- A Culture That Punishes Dissent Is Living by Avoidance, Not Truth
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.
- Each Soul’s Journey Is Sacred — And Faith Must Be Chosen, Not Forced
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 28, 2025
Social media isn’t completely a depressing waste of time
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen reacts to a political hack who wants to impose regulations on social media that would allow him to shut down people who criticize him and other swamp creatures:
We all know what’s really going on here.
Utah senator John Curtis, and other political hacks like him, are getting their boomer asses handed to them on social media.
They long for the days of television, when they could control the narrative by having a cozy relationship with the networks, and so they could lie to you without fear of contradiction by some autist named @DataRepublican whose existence is solely defined by her full-time hobby of sniffing out lying dirtbags.
So they want to pass a bunch of laws to make the internet behave like television. To filter it all through a set of major website choke-points that they can control by threatening the corporate entities that run them.
Long, complicated, and vaguely defined liability laws are a tool to do that.
Basically what they do is allow John Curtis to put any website out of business if people say mean things about him on it, such as pointing out that he looks like some kind of deranged and malevolent goblin that just crawled out of a swamp.
The problem he has right now is that when I say stuff like that on Twitter, I’m the one who said it.
Not Twitter.
There’s nothing he can do to me. Because even if I get hit by a unmarked sedan tomorrow in a totally unrelated accident, there’s a million more people like me who are only too happy to point out that John Curtis looks like a deranged and malevolent goblin that just crawled out of a swamp.
So he wants legal tools to punish Twitter for what I said.
So how does he go about that? What is a deranged and malevolent goblin, with a “business management” degree, and a history of changing political parties when convenient, to do?
Why, muddy the waters with vague platitudes about “safety”, of course.
Except we’ve heard that song before, and we’re not interested. So let us laugh at him, remind him that he looks like a deranged and malevolent goblin that just crawled out of a swamp, and mock until he goes back to doing what he normally does, which is shilling for the “Fairness For High Skilled Immigrants Act”.
And then we can eventually replace him with someone who cares about fairness to actual fucking Americans.
Update, 29 November: 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 20, 2025
Our free-speech documentary has been cancelled! | A London cinema has banned Think Before You Post
spiked
Published 19 Nov 2025Our 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.
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November 8, 2025
October 18, 2025
Remembering GamerGate
We’ve lived through such a tumultuous decade that it’s sometimes difficult to remember what things were like in the “before times”. On Substack chat, John Carter linked to this essay by Billionaire Psycho which helps refresh memories about one of the seminal events that kicked off the political and social chaos of the last decade:
GamerGate is maybe the most important event of the past 20 years which never receives mainstream media coverage. Lomez will be publishing an in-depth history of GamerGate, to serve as an official record going forward, and that’s crucial as part of building a foundation for a new culture — fighting the narrative war over how history is remembered, how history is interpreted, what events are recognized as significant and influential moments in culture, and how Western identity is defined.
GamerGate was only possible because a generation of incompetent Leftists inherited an empire built on propaganda that came without a legible instruction manual. Leftists forgot how to run their imperial machine. Video games sedated young white men, funneling their energy into a simulation of achievement, an illusory power fantasy of digital significance. Leftists forgot that porn, video games, movies, junk food, and other passive consumption activities primarily existed to prevent young white men from doing anything useful with their lives. And this zone of sedation was viewed as another industry to conquer so that DEI activists could bully the video game industry into providing overproduced elites with fake jobs.
This event was important for several reasons.
GamerGate exposed American Sharia laws. It unveiled the shibboleths, religious taboos, and blasphemy codes which were considered more important than Constitutional protections on “free speech”. A gulf emerged between written laws, and selective enforcement.
GamerGate was maybe the first time in 50 years that Leftists suffered a real, measurable defeat.
It functioned as a generational awakening: a catalyst that activated a decentralized army of shytpoasters, bloggers, podcasters, streamers, journalists, and RW activists.
It mapped out in real-time the architecture and OODA loop of the Leftist hivemind, providing empirical data on how the swarm intelligence perceives, coordinates, reacts, propagates … and suffers damage.
It educated critics of the hegemonic monoculture that rules the Global American Empire.
But I think the most important aspect of GamerGate was that it disproved the narrative illusion that everyone more or less accepted as conventional wisdom, the bedrock of the uniparty worldview. Before GamerGate, it was taken as a self-evident fact that America was a capitalist country, and that all of the evil in the world was caused by Wall Street corporations chasing “shareholder value” and advancing “the profit-motive”. Capitalism and racism were the invisible demons which could be used as scapegoats for anything bad that ever happened at any point and at any place in American society.
Leftism could do anything it wanted, no matter how dumb, destructive, intrusive, or evil — and then blame capitalism and racism for the consequences.
This illusion was shattered by GamerGate.
[…]
There’s one important thing that’s been lost since GamerGate (GG) and the Meme War of 2016, which is the adolescent fun, transgressive irreverence, and juvenile sense of humor which once characterized the RW youth. There was a brief window when video game enthusiasts believed they could meme their way to victory (they did), win a landslide election (they did), and reverse imperial decline (they didn’t). Ten years have passed since then. Countless accounts have been banned, doxxed, deplatformed, debanked. Dissidents have been prosecuted and imprisoned. The presidency of 2016 was stalled out and subverted, the election of 2020 was stolen, the election of 2024 almost ended in an assassination on live television. Covid lockdowns crashed the economy and trapped everyone in their homes, while Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioted outside in the name of George Floyd.
At some point, it stopped being fun, and the contest turned into a forever war.
Comedy turned serious.
But it should be remembered that in the aftermath of GamerGate, humor and a playful, childish energy fueled the engine of RW victories. That’s the secret ingredient.
Samizdat is the key to winning.
Always remember to keep having fun, and keep laughing, because our enemies are ridiculous.
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October 9, 2025
Britain is only a few steps further than Canada in the war on free speech
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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October 6, 2025
“Hate speech” bans work perfectly to eliminate mean words and mean thoughts … and the rivers will run uphill
I have to assume that the headline captures the mentality of the people who call for more “hate speech” legislation, because the real world evidence clearly fails to support the notion. Many well-meaning people want the government to have the power to suppress speech they don’t like, never thinking that a different government could use the same laws to quash opinions they support. In the National Post, Chris Selley argues that the last way to achieve reconciliation with First Nations would be to ban “residential school denial”:
Two years ago, I ruefully predicted that Canada’s new law purporting to outlaw Holocaust denial would likely lead to a law purporting to outlaw “denying” the impact of the residential school system. That hasn’t happened yet, but we are well on our way.
The Liberals recently announced plans to table legislation that would purportedly outlaw displaying the Nazi or Hamas flags or symbols of other hate movements, and that has only intensified calls for that law outlawing “residential school denialism”, or indeed denying Canada’s “genocide” against Indigenous peoples.
“What is the difference between Holocaust Denialism and Residential School Denialism? I suggest there is no difference at all,” author Michelle Good wrote in the Toronto Star Tuesday on the occasion of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. “The inclusion of Holocaust Denialism in the criminal code is obviously to prevent the denial of the Jewish genocide of World War II. Therefore, after clearly illustrating that the residential school system was genocidal in nature and intent, it is difficult to find any reason whatever that Residential School Denialism should not be criminalized as well.”
I say these two new and proposed new laws would “purportedly outlaw” atrocity-denialism and hate symbols because they aren’t outright bans on the speech in question. Rather, to fall foul of them, you have to use your argument, flag or symbol to “wilfully promote hatred” against the group in question. It was and is already illegal to wilfully promote hatred against a religious or ethnic group — albeit with some huge caveats, more on which in a moment.
At some point in the future, should the Liberals remain in power — and perhaps even if they don’t — the government is likely to knuckle under to the calls for censorship of certain residential-school opinions. It’s just not worth the political blowback to object, or so one can imagine a backroom strategist reasoning. They would probably introduce the new law just in time for the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. If police are willing to enforce these laws, there’s little reason to believe Crown prosecutors would be interested in pursuing the cases. That, in turn, would only frustrate the people who see value in this censorship, and would likely lead to ever-stronger laws … that themselves likely wouldn’t be enforced.
This is not good lawmaking, and it’s a chilling argument when the simple act of pointing out how many bodies have actually been discovered on former residential school sites is widely considered a form of “denialism”.
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September 26, 2025
John Carter revisits the cancellation debate
As part of a much longer essay, covering a lot more ground, John Carter considers the pro and con arguments for the much-cancelled right to fully indulge in cancelling figures on the left in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination and the widespread celebration of the murder by leftists:
Talking heads on network television are whining that it’s getting out of hand, while abruptly unemployed leftists take to GoFundMe to beg for support.
The purge has started, and yes, thank you, I’m feeling quite vindicated right now.
Repeating myself is boring, so I’m not going to rehash the arguments in favour of turning cancellation against the left. Suffice to say, they have it coming. It’s also worth pointing out that there’s an important distinction to be made between getting a labourer fired because he made the OK sign, and removing a medical professional who openly celebrates the death of a man for having opinions shared by half the country. Can a bloody-minded leftist doctor be trusted to give medical care to a Trump voter, when he’s on the record as advocating the execution of Trump voters? The doctor should certainly be allowed to say what he pleases, and he should have the same right to use a social media account as anyone else, but he probably shouldn’t be allowed to practice medicine.
But I don’t want to rehash that. Instead, I want to focus back in on human water fountain women as an exemplar of that choir of liars suddenly singing hymns to the sacred practice of freedom of speech. People would be shocked by this self-serving mendacity if long experience had not accustomed them to it.
We aren’t shocked because we’ve seen this before, repeatedly. The left screamed about the spontaneous unguided tour of the capitol on J6 as an insurrection and an unforgivable attack on our democracy, conveniently forgetting that the Weather Underground were bombing federal facilities, including the Capitol, back in the 70s, or that the state capitol of Wisconsin was occupied by protesters in 2011 … or that they’d attacked the White House in 2020 … to say nothing of the nation-wide Burning Looting and Murdering they committed in the wake of Floyd’s fentanyl overdose.
The curious phenomenon of leftist narrative blindness was repeatedly demonstrated during the COVID years, in which the entire professional-managerial caste would switch from one narrative to its opposite like a school of fish, confidently proclaiming on one day what they had denounced as anti-scientific misinformation just the day before.
Sure enough, in the wake of Kirk’s murder, with his blood still on the ground and their gleeful cries ringing in the world’s ears, the left went on an immediate disinformation counter-offensive. They adopted the narrative that Tyler Robinson was a right-wing groyper – an online follower of Nick Fuentes – who had assassinated Kirk for not being based enough, or for supporting Israel, or something. It was for lying about this that Kimmel was pulled off the air. The evidence for Robinson’s right-wing sympathies were that he’d been raised in a conservative Mormon household by a police officer father, and that he’d dressed up as a gopnik once or something. Robinson’s live-in relationship with a troon, the Antifa slogans he’d carved into the bullet casings, and his friends and family attesting to his left-wing radicalization were waved away. This is what abusive narcissists do: “I didn’t do the thing you just saw me do to you, and anyhow you deserved it”. Sure enough, as I wrote this, another leftist sniper attacked an ICE facility in Dallas; sure enough, leftists immediately began insisting that he couldn’t possibly have been a leftist, this time on the grounds that the shooter inscribed “Anti-ICE” rather than “Fuck ICE” on his bullets.
The left also tried to change the conversation to the supposed problem of right-wing violence. Professional-looking infographics flooded onto social media, pushed by Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, Ilhan Omar, and the Economist.
Ilhan Omar (note that the data are from the ADL).
The infographics make it look like there’s an epidemic of right-wing political violence being waged against a peaceful, tolerant, and defenceless left. This is of course nonsense. Every time someone dug into their data, it turned out that they were basically doing this:
It isn’t even necessary to subject the datasets to close scrutiny. Look at the Economist graphic. See that little black rectangle in 2020? The Economist would have you believe that there was practically no left-wing political violence at all in 2020, which as everyone remembers was a fiery but mostly peaceful year. The Economist dataset turns out to have been curated by an Antifa activist, by the way, which I suppose makes the Economist an affiliate of an international terrorist organization, now.
Now, you can say “they’re just lying”, and yes, quite a few of them know exactly what they’re doing.
[…]
In a lot of cases, however, calling them “liars” isn’t quite accurate. Lying implies conscious deception. If you’ve talked to these people, which I know you have to the point where you have post-traumatic stress disorder, you know that they seem to really believe the things they say. It does not matter in the slightest if they contradict the thing they said yesterday. They apparently have no memory of their previous statements. Their present belief is always entirely sincere. It does not matter if observable reality is in stark contradiction to their belief. They have lost the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, with the result that they routinely mistake their own pop culture propaganda for reality.
That they do not even seem to notice when they contradict themselves suggests a void of self-awareness. This is the origin of the NPC meme, which depicts leftists as Non-Player Characters, effectively no more than computer programs that emulate human behaviour. When the meme first began to spread a few years ago, there was a purge of Twitter accounts that posted it. The NPC meme cut leftists to the quick because they instinctively recognized – as everyone did – the truth in it. Leftists complained that the NPC meme was dehumanizing, which is actually perfectly correct. An NPC is not really human.
We see evidence for this NPC absence of self-awareness everywhere. A self-aware person who had spent a decade viciously persecuting anyone who publicly contradicted leftist orthodoxy would understand that an appeal to freedom of speech once they themselves were persecuted for their words would garner mockery rather than sympathy. A clever Machiavellian would therefore preface their entreaties with expressions of contrition for their past behaviour, however insincere. Not one of them has done this, which makes it less likely that their attempt to appeal to freedom of speech is mere calculated cynicism. It is instead as though they themselves are not aware of their own previous actions.
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September 24, 2025
QotD: The political divisions of humanity
… the various divisions between human beings — communists vs. fascists vs. loyal American patriots — we have lived with all our lives are less important, less fundamental, than the basic one that Heinlein identified: “The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire”. Call the first group authoritarians or feudalists and the second, generic libertarians.
The first time, in the history of Western Civilization, that this became an issue, was the Renaissance/Reformation. Information suddenly came flooding, unbidden, into Europe, from North Africa, through Galileo’s telescope, out of Gutenberg’s printing press, and a dozen other undesirable, unlicensed, and deplorable sources. It must have been a nightmare for the aristocrats who considered themselves to be in charge, the kings and barons and bishops and bullies. They struggled in vain to get it back under control. They got the Church to condemn it. They intimidated and tortured its emissaries when they could. They invented universities to get a handle on it, a collar around its neck, but it was a lost cause. In just a couple of centuries (compared to the previous 500 generations), people — ordinary people; who the hell did they think they were? — came to know too much for the good of Authority.
And they soon proved it, in the American Revolution, which told 10,000 years of kings to go to hell, and the French Revolution, which cut to the chase and removed their overly-pampered heads. I have actually seen the blade. Many other revolutions followed, worldwide, and people began to learn, slowly and awkwardly, to live their own lives. The one good thing to come out of the brutal and deceitful Russian Revolution was the ultimately individualistic philosophy of refugee Ayn Rand.
Otherwise, it was a naked attempt by the authoritarians, the feudalists, to regain control of the masses that the Czar had clumsily let slip through his overly-manicured fingers. Whenever human beings have clashed over whether their lives should be controlled by others or not, it has almost certainly been a matter of who gets to be the next king, baron, bishop, commissar, etc., a battle between liberated entities and those who would restore feudalism.
L. Neil Smith, “The Deep State”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-04-14.
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September 8, 2025
“Down with this sort of thing!”
In the free-to-cheapskates part of Ed West’s post on the Graham Linehan case in Britain, he identifies one of the reasons that Linehan’s Father Ted became so popular in the country it was situated in:
I don’t think I’d seen a “down with this sort of thing” placard in the flesh since I watched the Protest the Pope march back in September 2010. Those were the heady days of New Atheism, before the movement evolved into something more explicitly progressive.
The sign references an episode of the 1990s comedy Father Ted, in which the protagonist and his dim-witted sidekick Fr Dougal are forced to protest the screening of a blasphemous new film called The Passion of Saint Tibulus. Among the many catchphrases popularised by the comedy, back in 2010 this one suggested an ironic and gently mocking attitude to religion; that it was ridiculous, rather than evil.
This week, outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court in Marylebone Road, the sign appeared in a rather different context, carried by supporters of Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan as he faced charges of harassment and criminal damage in an ongoing trial, following an incident at last year’s Battle of Ideas involving a young transgender activist.
Linehan had been bailed before trial, allowing him to travel to the United States to work on a new comedy project. When he arrived back at Heathrow on Monday, however, he was arrested by five armed police officers over three tweets he had posted back in April. The situation was as absurd and surreal as anything that had emerged from the writer’s fertile imagination.
As Linehan described it on his substack: “When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. I couldn’t help myself. ‘Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists’. The officers gave no reaction and this was the theme throughout most of the day. Among the rank-and-file, there was a sort of polite bafflement. Entirely professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about.”
The incident is embarrassing to Britain as it faces increasing scrutiny in the US for its poor record on free speech, especially over the Lucy Connolly case. It was unfortunate timing that this arrest happened just as Nigel Farage was heading in the other direction to talk about this very issue in Washington. But Linehan’s ordeal is also part of a much longer and sadder story about the perils of the political meeting the personal.
Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan had worked on The Fast Show before renowned comedy producer Geoffrey Perkins had taken to one of their ideas, about a group of priests stuck on a remote Irish island, proposing that it be written as a six-part sitcom. It was brilliant, and hugely loved, and in its timing was significant.
Conor Fitzgerald wrote of Father Ted that, while well-loved in Britain, in Ireland it is more like “the national sitcom, a piece of light entertainment that nevertheless Says Something Meaningful About Us”. It also appeared at a crucial time in history.
Not only was Father Ted one of the few successful TV representations of Ireland, it was made during Ireland’s version of the Swinging Sixties, our flux decade of the Nineties. The accelerating collapse of the Church and the exposure of longstanding political corruption coincided with the dawn of the Celtic Tiger years, lending peripheral Ireland a sense of self-conscious modernity. It was a unique national turning point, where our 19th-century past seemed to co-exist with our 21st-century future. In reflecting this upheaval, Father Ted has become not just a social historical document, but a portent of where Ireland stands today.
When Ted was broadcast, the Church was formally still one of the central pillars of Irish life, but its authority rang hollow. Priests often felt like administrators of a vanished country. And on remote Craggy, Ted, Dougal and Jack mirror this directly. All good sitcoms feature characters who are trapped, but Ted is doubly so: first on his island; and second in an institution people are coming to see as irrelevant. He is still an essential member of the community, more than just a ceremonial functionary for weddings and funerals. But it’s just not clear what the essential thing he does is anymore, beyond being a common reference point that deserves token respect.
Ted and Ted therefore stand at a crossroads, and capture the more fundamental social change in Ireland at this time: the collapse in respect for older establishment hierarchies generally.
Those establishment hierarchies collapsed across the West in the late 20th century, first in more secularised nations such as Britain and France and later, and more quickly, in places like Ireland and Spain where the Catholic Church still held on.
The Church lost its power to patrol its taboos, without which it became a sitting duck for satirists; the Passion of St Tibulus was influenced by the protest against Life of Brian, successfully banned in Ireland until 1987. As a teenager, Linehan had to join a film club to watch it, but such censorship was disappearing everywhere.
Father Ted was a work of genius, employing a surreal style of humour that has often been characteristic of Linehan and Mathews, and later seen in their under-appreciated sketch show Big Train – including the brilliantly bizarre sketch in which Beatles producer George Martin is kidnapped by Hezbollah.
The clerical comedy bequeathed numerous catchphrases. “I hear you’re a racist now, Father”, which features in an episode where Fr Ted is wrongly accused of anti-Chinese prejudice, is still a popular meme. Likewise, “These are small, but the ones out there are far away“, Ted’s explanation of perspective to his idiotic housemate, is still used to mock the gormless.
The show was also charming, and its treatment of religion was far from vicious. Rather than being a vitriolic attack on Church authority, Father Ted poked gentle fun at the absurdity of the old order, a kind of mockery which is perhaps a more dangerous threat to a belief system that relies on awe and fear. It was innocent, and many years later Linehan said he would find writing Father Ted much harder in light of the abuse scandal.
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