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Canadian, Irish, French Government-Attempted Speech Regulations Appear Like Desperate Censorship Power Plays

BY JEFFEREY JAXEN | MARCH 12, 2024

Following in the footsteps of UKs highly controversial Online Safety Act, now law, Canadian and Irish government officials are proposing legislation that would push the boundaries to further stifle online debate.

During the COVID response, the American government chose to erect a massive, top-down censorship industrial complex pulling in key White House officials, CDC heads, and the Department of Homeland Security.

In the UK, it was all-out military psychological operations using the British Army unit’s 77th Brigade and Specialist Group Military Intelligence. Both countries turned their security apparatuses, once used against foreign enemy combatants, to target its own public domestically in an aggressive move to shape public thought and neutralize independent voices.

Now, humanity is at an inflection point. A non-stop blitzkrieg of contentious issues are affecting the lives of many. The failed COVID response taught us that open conversation and investigation is critical to unwind industry talking points, government propaganda, and scientific falsehoods.

Perhaps more important, the new public square, that is the digital age of social media, serves as a steam valve to debate valid concerns surrounding charged issues like climate change and the net zero push, open migration, vaccine safety, reckless government monetary policy, election meddling, the surgical and pharmaceutical fast track of gender-affirming care for minors, intelligence agency run ‘disclosure,’ and so much more.

Meanwhile, power centers are desperate to take all the above issues and funnel vocal detractors from the dominant narrative into one category – hate.

Over the years, governments have gleefully began attaching the ‘hate’ label onto any person, topic, or explanation that runs counter to the single, myopic version of events, ideas, information, or even historical events they deem fact – despite valid evidence proving otherwise.

Socially, the ‘it’s all hateful except for our viewpoint’ worked for corporations, governments, and legacy media operations when they enjoyed narrative control.

Those days are fleeting now and major cracks have formed upon once-settled topics. Now we see the grip tightening from the legislative angle to create more bureaucracy and new powers to punish.

Canada’s Bill C-63 enacts what’s called the Online Harms Act, amends the Criminal Code, and the Canadian Human Rights Act among other things. It also attempts to define and legislate a human emotion stating:

“hatred means the emotion that involves detestation or vilification and that is stronger than disdain or dislike”

Meanwhile, C-63 states that an “Offense motivated by hatred… under this Act or any other Act of Parliament”…carries with a penalty of “imprisonment for life.”

Other goodies written into the bill are the creation of an extrajudicial government tribunal to rule on complaints of threats, intimidation or discrimination from people who can remain anonymous. That’s right, no need to face your accuser says Canada.

If one is accused by the government’s newly-created, extrajudicial group to be “engaging or to have engaged in the discriminatory practice,” they can be ordered, as the bill states, “to pay compensation of not more than $20,000 to any victim identified” and “to pay a penalty of not more than $50,000 to the Receiver General.”

No room for abuse here. What could go wrong?

One would think this would be a one-off piece of speech-chilling legislation from a country that has lost its way under poor leadership. Yet Ireland is also attempting a similar move with mirrored legislative language.

Ireland’s Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences Bill is currently before the upper house of the Irish legislature. The Critic writes the law, if enacted, “…would usher in a dangerous new standard for state-driven censorship. The expression or possession of content or even ideas deemed “hateful” would be illegal under the law, with serious implications for everyday people…”

An opinion piece published in The Hill writes:

“As per the tentative legislation, people with “protected characteristics” which includes, inter alia, race, color, and nationality are afforded new legal protections against psychical and mentally inflicted harms, in which offenders are motivated by “hatred.””

It continues by stating:

“As such, Ireland’s police force, An Garda Síochána, will have the authority under the bill to raid the home of the possessor of such material, demand their password and seize their devices. Failure to comply could result in a year-long prison sentence.”

The reason for the sudden Orwellian about face given by Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar was that Ireland needed to “… modernise our laws against incitement to hatred and hatred in general.”

Despite the weak cover stories governments are using to capture speech and attempt to regain narrative control, a clear pattern is being seen – open debate is dangerous to the dwindling control of power centers.

The fun doesn’t stop there.

Article 18 of the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty also stipulates that all countries signed on to the power-centralizing agreement are mandated to “… combat false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation” and “inform policies on factors that hinder adherence to public health and social measures in a pandemic and trust in science and public health institutions.” 

Finally, a bill in the works in France appears to be a special gift for pharmaceutical companies. Article 4 of the bill specifically states:

Provocation, by means of repeated pressure or maneuvers, of any person suffering from a pathology to abandon or abstain from following medical treatment is punishable by one year of imprisonment and a fine of 30,000 euros. therapeutic or prophylactic, when this abandonment or abstention is presented as beneficial for the health of the person concerned whereas it is, in the state of medical knowledge, clearly likely to cause for them, taking into account the pathology of which they is affected, particularly serious consequences for their physical or psychological health. 

As written, it appears that any criticism of vaccine products, SSRIs, statins, opioids, drugs and procedures used to transition children, or just about any other product or medical practice that has debatable concerns and unsettled science surrounding it – if currently accepted in ‘medical knowledge’ – is a protected class not to be spoken ill about.

“When the provocation provided for in the first two paragraphs has been followed by effects, the penalties are increased to three years of imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros.” states the proposed French law.

The coincidental timing over the past few years of several pieces of legislation whose effect will be to essentially chill freedom of speech in the end equation must be taken seriously. The good news is that individuals at all levels of society are sounding the alarm to critically analyze and reject all attempts at overarching control over basic human rights – no matter how well packaged and intentioned they may initially seem.

March 13, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Ireland’s Media Commissioner Is Poised To Gain Substantial Authority Over Online Speech

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | December 11, 2023

Jeremy Godfrey has been named the executive chairperson of Ireland’s Media Commission, an organization tasked with overseeing social media regulation and censorship in Ireland.

This new role aligns with Ireland’s implementation of the EU’s censorship law, the Digital Services Act (DSA). The DSA mandates that online platforms with more than 45 million monthly active users prioritize the moderation of content deemed “harmful.”

According to Politico, roughly about nine months into his role as the chairman of the Media Commission, Godfrey and his assembly of specialists, currently numbering 75, are still meticulously working out the intricacies of their novel directive. Their yet to be inaugurated authority, slated for activation early next year, will count among its arsenal the ability to stipulate severe fines for speech violations.

The Commission’s powers will intersect with those of Brussels, as the two seek to unify their efforts under the world’s pioneering social media legislation which is designed to curtail the propagation of online hate speech and misinformation.

“We are striving for a mutual objective,” Godfrey told Politico. Godfrey, however, candidly admitted that how the responsibilities will be shared between the European Commission and the Irish body remains an unresolved issue and will necessitate further deliberation.

Citizens in Ireland are currently facing a dark turn when it comes to free speech. The country is facing a controversial shift in its approach to freedom of expression and speech, with proposed laws targeting so-called “hate speech.”

Under the proposed legislation, actions or materials that could incite violence or hatred based on “protected characteristics” like disability, nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or gender would be criminalized.

The bill’s scope is alarmingly extensive, penalizing not only the articulation or publication of such speech but also the mere possession of it. This could include anything from a meme on a cellphone to text messages, with non-compliance in surrendering device passwords to authorities potentially leading to a year’s imprisonment.

December 11, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Migrant-loving Western leaders are at war with their own people

By Tony Cox | RT | December 10, 2023

The ongoing ruling-class meltdown over the recent Dublin riots tells us a lot about the breadth and depth of the gulf fixed between Western governments and their citizens. It’s as if those in charge are outraged by the temerity of their subjects to cry out over the pain and death inflicted upon them by their supposed leaders.

Angry Irish citizens took to the streets, chanting “Enough is enough,” after suffering the latest consequence of mass migration: The November 23 stabbing attack in which three children and two adults were injured in central Dublin. Having failed to be heard by the policymakers who are destroying their quality of life, they burned buses, torched police cars, and clashed violently with officers.

The suspect hasn’t been identified or officially arrested. Unlike the Irish people, he’s being protected by their government, and he’s reportedly too incapacitated to be questioned by police because of injuries suffered during the stabbing spree. He has been described as a 49-year-old Algerian who was given Irish citizenship.

A media controversy erupted days after the attack when independent journalist John McGuirk reported – incorrectly – that the suspect was an Algerian migrant who had been living in Ireland, at taxpayer expense, since 2003. McGuirk referred to a man who faced a deportation order after an arrest years ago, but he was allowed to stay in the country and was later given an Irish passport. Earlier this year, he was arrested for illegal knife possession and damaging a car. He was let go by the court because of a mental health issue, according to media reports.

McGuirk was assailed by establishment mouthpiece media figures not for getting the story wrong, which wasn’t initially known, but for deciding not to withhold sensitive information from his readers. Pressed in a television interview by host Ciara Doherty on whether he “inflamed” a “hostile situation” by reporting details about the suspect’s background, he replied, “Your essential position is that you, as a journalist, sitting in that chair, should decide what information the people watching this program have, and if you decide they can’t handle it, you don’t give it to them.”

Police subsequently revealed that McGuirk had identified the wrong Algerian migrant. Although he wasn’t named in the article, the details of his background made it possible for online sleuths to identify him. Police are now protecting the man who was misidentified, according to media reports, while continuing to withhold information about the actual suspect.

McGuirk took down his erroneous article from the internet and issued a statement saying that the source who gave him false identification was a senior police official. He also cross-checked the information with a senior official in the Irish justice system before posting his story. His media outlet, Gript Media, is now investigating whether the false tip was a deliberate act of sabotage.

It would be easy to see why powerful figures in the Irish government would be pleased to have such a story misreported by an adversarial journalist. The discussion has turned to the spread of “misinformation” and the inciting of angry citizens rather than excessive immigration and poor public safety.

The situation is reminiscent of when WikiLeaks reported on emails showing that America’s Democratic National Committee had rigged the party’s 2016 presidential primaries in favor of its chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton. Rather than focusing on the scandal, legacy media outlets made the story about Clinton’s unproven claims that Russian hackers stole the emails and gave them to WikiLeaks.

The thing is, even if you knew that an adversary with ulterior motives had revealed that your spouse was cheating on you, wouldn’t you be more concerned about the infidelity than the source? The story in Ireland should be destructive immigration policies, not identifying the wrong Algerian migrant criminal.

Ironically, the distraction and misdirection in the Dublin story doesn’t really matter. The fact is that the dangerous migrant identified by McGuirk has been allowed to stay in Ireland by a government that doesn’t prioritize the safety of its own people. He didn’t perpetrate this particular assault, but he’s a criminal migrant, and if and when he commits another crime, it will be an unforced error inflicted on the Irish people by their government. The fact also remains that the real suspect is an Algerian migrant, meaning he came from a country more than 1,000 miles away that isn’t at war. If he was a legitimate refugee, Ireland wasn’t the nearest available safe haven – not by a long shot.

However, if Ireland’s leaders can help it, attention will be shifted away from the country’s migration crisis. Never mind the policies that endanger Irish citizens and diminish their quality of life. There won’t be a serious discussion, either, of why illegitimate asylum seekers and other migrants are allowed to stay in the country, even after they’ve committed crimes.

Rather than decrying the stabbing of children or confronting the policy questions raised by the rampage, Irish government officials and their media stenographers are focusing their ire on the citizens who violently demanded change, dismissing them as “emboldened racists.”

National police chief Drew Harris blamed the riots on a “complete lunatic hooligan factor driven by far-right ideology.” Justice Minister Helen McEntee pledged tougher police tactics to quell any such revolts by the “thugs and criminals” who were using the stabbing attack to “sow division.” Kenyan-born UK politician Lilian Seenoi-Barr blamed the unrest on a small far-right minority and called the rioters an “organized terrorist group of people who want to harm immigrants.”

Prime Minister Leo Varadkar insisted that people shouldn’t connect the stabbing spree to the mass migration that is transforming Ireland’s population. The PM said the rioters couldn’t possibly have been motivated by a desire to protect their way of life; rather, they were “filled with hate, they love violence, they love chaos, and they love causing pain to others.” He also called for enhancements to Ireland’s hate-speech legislation. “We will modernize our laws against incitement to hatred and hatred in general.”

To the extent the mob was whipped up, it was whipped up by reality – the reality created by the policies of the country’s tone-deaf leaders. The influx of migrants – many of them illegitimate asylum seekers from outside war zones – has swelled Ireland’s population to 5.15 million, up 31% in the past two decades. One in five residents of Ireland isn’t Irish-born. Many young people have given up on looking for homes because of the housing crisis and crushing inflation. Rates of murder and other crimes have risen sharply.

As for the notion that people are violently angry about their collapsing quality of life, recent polling shows that 75% of Irish people believe their country is taking in too many asylum seekers. An even larger majority, 76%, agreed that it was justifiable for people to be angry when migrants were moved into their communities. Presumably, most of those citizens aren’t inclined to torch trams or burn buses, but if even one in 100 of the people who oppose what’s being done to their country are angry enough to rise up, you have a mob nearly 40,000 strong.

Not all of the rioters were motivated by real grievances. Some, for instance, took the unrest as an opportunity to loot. In any case, a strong majority of the Irish people aren’t getting what they want from policymakers. Their message isn’t being heard when they burn things, just as it was ignored when they held peaceful protests. So, what comes next?

Irish leaders have responded by demonizing their critics and criminalizing dissent. For example, Irish MMA legend Conor McGregor is reportedly among the many people being investigated for alleged “incitement to hatred.” McGregor posted on social media that the stabbing suspect was a “grave danger among us in Ireland that should never be here in the first place.” Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin denounced the fighter’s accurate comment as “absolutely disgraceful,” to which McGregor responded by calling the politician “worthless and spineless.”

McGregor doubled down on his criticism last week, saying Irish officials were trying to use him as a “scapegoat.” He added, “The truth of the many failed policies of this government, however, will never stop being the reason we have innocent children in hospital on life support after being stabbed by a deranged criminal.” The fighter even hinted on Monday about running for president.

Contrast the reaction in Dublin with how the Western ruling class treated the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020. There were scenes of police kneeling with the protestors rather than calling them extremist hooligans. Rather than calling for everyone to hush up about the racial overtones of the triggering event – the death of a black criminal, George Floyd, after a white police officer kneeled on his neck – the story was made all about racism.

Even as cities burned and dozens of people were killed, many politicians agreed with the mob’s demands to “defund the police” and “reimagine policing.” The future US vice president, Kamala Harris, promoted a fundraising campaign to bail out rioters who had been arrested during the mayhem. Nike, Google, Apple, and other big names in Corporate America pledged massive donations to “racial justice” causes.

And while inflaming the Dublin rioters by linking the crime to migration has been deemed irresponsible, inflaming the BLM mob with falsehood may even have been a government strategy. A new documentary on Floyd’s death has claimed that the original autopsy found no indication that he had died from injury to his neck; however, he was infected with Covid-19 and had fatal levels of fentanyl in his blood. A day after the medical examiner met with FBI agents, the documentary said, the autopsy was altered to suggest that Floyd had been killed by police.

The cop who was found guilty of killing Floyd, Derek Chauvin, is still serving a long sentence in prison, where he was stabbed 22 times by another inmate last month. His attacker was a former FBI informant.

Western rulers seem to base their reaction to civil unrest and violent crimes on the ideology of the perpetrators. If it aligns with the political agenda, the message is amplified and treated sympathetically. If it exposes the folly of destructive policies, it must be crushed. The BLM riots provided an opportunity for race-baiters to further divide the people and promote “reforms” that favor criminals over law-abiding citizens and non-white people over whites. The Dublin riots screamed that the people had reached their breaking point with mass migration and leaders who refused to serve the interests of their citizens.

The same criteria were on display when an election fraud protest at the US Capitol escalated into a riot in January 2021. Rioters breached the Capitol to disrupt congressional certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory. Biden reacted by calling the riot the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” More than 1,100 people have been arrested for their alleged roles in the riot. Many have received long prison sentences. One man who wasn’t even in Washington on the day of the riot – but who sent messages cheering on the breach from his Baltimore hotel room – was sentenced to 22 years in prison.

A similar approach is taken to other high-profile crimes. When a white gunman wounded four people at a Missouri Walmart last month, the FBI came out just two days later to report that the shooter may have been motivated by racist ideology. Never mind that two of his victims were white, and two were black.

And yet, more than eight months on from an incident in which a transgender shooter killed three children and three adults at a Christian elementary school in Tennessee, police are still refusing to release the “manifesto” written by the murderer. In fact, seven officers have been suspended on suspicion that they may have leaked part of the document online. In leaked pages of the manifesto, shooter Audrey Hale spoke of killing “all you little crackers” with “white privileges.” Similarly, it took seven months for police to reveal that the man who killed five people and wounded eight at a Kentucky bank wanted to inspire tougher gun control laws by killing “upper-class white people.”

The suppression of truth, the lying, and the situational outrage cannot be sustained forever. Leaders who cram down policies that destroy their countries and harm their citizens, whom they supposedly represent, cannot endlessly evade a real reckoning of their betrayals. The critics can no longer be completely silenced, no matter how aggressive the censorship efforts.

How sustainable is being at war with your own people? How long can a government defy the interests of its citizens and vilify those who complain? Short of replacing the native-born population quickly enough to avert accountability, the leaders will have to answer to their subjects at some point.

The same voices that call for tamping down the rhetoric and even suppressing the facts to avoid inflaming the mob in Dublin are only inciting more escalation by dismissing the rioters as extremist, racist thugs. People whose lives are being destroyed – at their own expense, as taxpayers, and by the traitorous leaders who have a moral duty to serve their interests – will eventually find a way to be heard.

Tony Cox is a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.

December 10, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

UK nuclear site ‘leaking’ – The Guardian

Sellafield nuclear reprocessing facility November 26, 2001 in Cumbria, England © Getty Images / Graham Barclay/BWP Media/Getty Images
RT | December 5, 2023

Sellafield, regarded as the most hazardous nuclear site in Europe, has developed a leak in a massive radioactive waste silo that has prompted concerns about the facility’s safety measures, as well as potential dangers to the public and the environment, The Guardian has reported.

The two-square-mile (6km sq) plant, located in Cumbria in England’s northwest, is responsible for the storage and decommissioning of nuclear waste from nuclear weapons programs and power generation. It was previously used to generate nuclear power from 1956 to 2003.

However, the decades-old facility, Europe’s largest nuclear site, has a catalog of safety issues, the newspaper said, including asbestos and fire hazards. Perhaps more concerningly, though, are cracks in storage silos which have prompted diplomatic squabbles with affected countries, including the US, Norway and Ireland.

Damage to one silo of toxic radioactive waste has caused a leak of “potentially significant consequences,” The Guardian said on Tuesday, citing official documents seen by the outlet. It adds that the leak, which it says is likely to continue until 2050, could contaminate groundwater should the situation worsen further.

Scientists are attempting to assess the full risks of the leak using “ongoing radiological dose assessments” and statistical modeling, the newspaper added. In June, the UK’s Office for Nuclear Regulation (ORR) said in a report that the risk presented by the leak is “as low as reasonably practicable.” However, the nuclear regulator remained concerned by the full impact of the leak and at what rate, if any, it may affect groundwater.

An unnamed expert who sits on a committee that monitors Sellafield and other nuclear sites told The Guardian : “It’s hard to know if transparency is put aside because no one’s brave enough to say ‘we simply don’t know how dangerous this is – other than certainly dangerous.’”

An EU report in 2001 warned that an accident at Sellafield could be more hazardous than that of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, which exposed about five million people in Europe to radiation. Sellafield contains substantially more radioactive material than the Chernobyl facility did at the time.

Reports of Sellafield’s crumbling facade have sparked US concerns about the safety standards at the site, according to diplomatic cables seen by the publication. It has also led to complaints from the governments of both Ireland and Norway – with Oslo worried about the potential of radioactive particles being carried towards its territory by winds across the North Sea.

Health problems brought on by exposure to nuclear radiation depend on the dose but can range from nausea and vomiting to cardiovascular disease and cancer. Extremely high exposure is, in most cases, fatal.

December 5, 2023 Posted by | Environmentalism, Militarism, Nuclear Power | , , | Leave a comment

Those Who Cry “Far Right” Have No Comprehension of What Just Happened in Dublin

BY DAVID THUNDER | THE FREEDOM BLOG | November 24, 2023

You might think that a government faced with a barbaric public stabbing of schoolchildren and an unprecedented night of rioting in its capital city would extend condolences to the victims, take a deep breath, and try to figure out how a city managed to spiral out of control on its watch. But instead, Thursday’s riots in Dublin were met by a shallow, one-dimensional analysis by all of the key authorities involved: to blame the “far right.”

For example, Garda Commissioner Drew Harris blamed the violence on the streets on a “hooligan faction driven by far right ideology.” Taoiseach Leo Varadkar pledged at a news conference to “modernise our laws against incitement to hatred and hatred in general.” And Minister for Justice Helen McEntee said that a “thuggish and manipulative element” was using the earlier incident to “wreak havoc”.

The Irish government would have us believe that the most destructive riot in Dublin in living memory was not a symptom of failed governance, but the result of an ideological fringe group going on a looting spree. That is a suspiciously convenient narrative for the powers that be, for it absolves them of all responsibility for losing control of the city. By fingering a Far Right fringe, public officials can wash their hands of any role they themselves may have played in bringing the city to the brink of anarchy.

But blaming these riots on the “far right” only serves as an excuse for not engaging in serious reflection about the deeper causes of this incendiary atmosphere, and the ensuing events. These events did not come out of nowhere and cannot be simplistically reduced to the work of a fringe “far right” mob. “Far right” talk is an excuse for not thinking hard about what led up to this and how public authorities lost control of Dublin’s city centre.

Of course, any sane and sensible person would recognise that going on a looting spree and setting fire to trams and buses is an absolutely destructive, anti-social and counterproductive way to react to a horrible crime. And given that there is documentary evidence that some of the rioters used explicitly anti-immigrant rhetoric, yes, there was undeniably an element of “Far Right” sentiment at work in these riots, if, by that, we mean indiscriminate hatred and anger directed toward immigrants in general.

Nonetheless, to suggest that Thursday’s chaotic scenes can be blamed exclusively on the “Far Right” would be profoundly disingenuous. To begin with, many of the “hooligans” that joined the riots seemed at least as interested in looting shops and finding an excuse to set something on fire as in joining a political movement. Secondly, even if there were important xenophobic elements among the rioters, this does not explain how a city can be so fragile as to succumb to chaos and looting in a few hours.

The attempt to scapegoat the “Far Right” for the breakdown in public order that we saw on Thursday conveniently ignores the fact that successive Irish governments have allowed criminals to wander the streets of Dublin with relative ease. Budding criminals know they will face lenient sentences, partly because there is simply no room in Irish jails to hold them for long, leading to a “revolving door” scenario in our prisons, as pointed out five months ago by the Irish Prison Services.

People feel less safe in Dublin city than ever before, and there is a widespread belief that criminals in Dublin can act with impunity, or else will not suffer a prison sentence proportionate to their crimes. The government most certainly must answer for failing to address this problem over the years. This failure most certainly cannot be blamed on “far right” ideology.

Thirdly, while there is no excuse for attacking police officers or setting vehicles alight, the Irish government has undoubtedly paved the way for these riots by refusing to listen to its citizens for years. Ireland’s political establishment has consistently been dismissive toward reasonable concerns about its immigration and refugee policies, reducing them to the rantings of a “Far Right” fringe. This has created an atmosphere of pent-up resentment and frustration, and it was only a matter of time before this frustration erupted onto the streets.

Many aspects of Ireland’s immigration policies strike people as profoundly unfair and destructive, including allowing very large numbers of asylum-seekers to avail of free or cheap housing on the taxpayer’s dime while Irish citizens are frozen out of the housing market; and flooding local communities with large numbers of refugees with no prior consultation whatsoever. In response to complaints, the Irish government has just doubled down, and given us more of the same “open door” immigration policies.

So when a city is taken over by thugs for a night, we should be less worried about whether there were “far right” elements among them, and more worried about why they felt they could openly engage in this level of brazen violence and destruction and get away with it; and how the atmosphere in Dublin become so tense and angry that a single stabbing incident, however unspeakable, could spark riots on a level we have not seen in generations.

December 2, 2023 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Ireland’s Educator Minister says Ireland will introduce a “legally binding” statutory online code for “disinformation” removal

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | November 30, 2023

Simon Harris, Ireland’s Education Minister, has raised alarms about what he suggests is the rampant spread of “disinformation” on social media, describing it as a significant threat to democracy.

His concerns mirror those of Tánaiste Micheál Martin, particularly in light of the recent Dublin riots, where social media has been blamed for spreading “hate,” a notion that the government in Ireland is using as an excuse to call for more censorship online.

The riots, characterized by violence and destruction, followed a stabbing by an immigrant citizen outside a north city center school, injuring three children and a woman.

Harris, in his statement, specifically criticized Elon Musk’s X for its failure to censor certain speech.

On RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Harris expressed his full agreement with the Tánaiste.

“I think there is a very serious issue, not just in this country, but in western democracies now in relation to social media platforms, which I use, which I appreciate and which have great value – but also when wrongly used having an ability to spread disinformation and undermine democracy,” Harris said.

According to The Journal, he said that by early next year “there will be a ‘legally binding’ statutory online code in relation to the removal of information that is deemed to be disinformation.”

As many politicians often do, Harris attempted to suggest that he supports free speech while calling for the censorship of “disinformation.”
From the report:

“The Minister said he would ‘absolutely defend’ the right to free speech, adding ‘it’s the cornerstone of all democracy.’

“What we’re talking about here is the spread of disinformation and the spread of hatred. And I simply wouldn’t be, nor would I wish to, but I wouldn’t be allowed to in this studio. The social media platform is a form of media, it is a media platform and therefore I think there are real legitimate questions around the rules that apply online,” he said.

December 1, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Comparing Coverage: Dublin riots vs Black Lives Matter

By Gavin O’Reilly | OffGuardian | November 30, 2023

Last Thursday afternoon, news would spread throughout Ireland of a horrific knife attack on three young schoolchildren and their teacher outside a Gaelscoil (Irish-language school) in Dublin city centre. At the time of writing, the youngest of the victims, a five year old girl, remains gravely ill in hospital.

With it soon emerging that the suspect was an immigrant who had previously been served a deportation order in 2003, tensions that had been building across the country over the past year in response to the immigration policy of Leinster House, which has seen large amounts of male migrants placed into wildly unsuitable locations such as an inner city office block and a children’s school, would come to a head. Calls for a protest in Dublin later that night would rapidly spread throughout social media.

Such protests have become a mainstay across Ireland over the past year, with the government of WEF ‘Young Global Leader’ Leo Varadkar labelling protesters as ‘’far-right’’ and carrying out surveillance of organisers in response, a strategy that has served only to exacerbate tensions even further.

Last year in Canada, under the rule of fellow WEF ‘Young Global Leader’ Justin Trudeau, a similar response would take place to the Freedom Convoy, a protest movement launched by Canadian truckers following the decision to mandate jab passports for drivers returning from the US, the largest land-border in the world and a key component of the Canadian economy.

Just as open borders policies serve the interests of the global elites that the WEF represents, via the undermining of national sovereignty and the devaluing of labour, jab passports served their interests by acting as conditioning for the introduction of an eventual mandatory digital ID, which in line with the Great Reset initiative would allow the government-corporate alliance to have an unprecedented level of control over its citizens’ finances in a cashless society.

The fraught tensions that had spurred on Thursday’s planned protest however, would seemingly attract an opportunistic element, one that had engaged in looting and the burning of vehicles in Dublin on the night.

Unsavoury scenes, though it cannot be understated that, in terms of magnitude, they are a universe apart from the stabbing of children.

The establishment media however, did not hold the same view; with the unrest that swept Dublin dominating newspaper headlines alongside accusations that it had been “organised by the far-right”, the brutal attack on the children and their teacher being consigned to a mere afterthought.

Security Minister for the southern Irish state, Helen McEntee announced that legislation would be fast tracked to introduce Facial Recognition Technology – another key component of the Great Reset – in response to the riots, and it was announced that MMA star Conor McGregor was being investigated for ‘’inciting hate’’ over a post on X that he had sent the night BEFORE the stabbings.

A lockstep response of condemnation, though one that lies in stark contrast to the response towards the riots that swept the United States following the death of George Floyd in May 2020, for which a minutes silence was held in the southern Irish Parliament, something that has so far not occurred for the victims of last Thursday’s mass-stabbing.

To understand why, one must look at the wider political context at the time of George Floyd’s death.

Four days prior to the footage of Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck going viral, Joe Biden, the then-Democrat candidate for that years US Presidential election, infamously declared that whoever voted for the incumbent Donald Trump over him ‘’Ain’t black’’ in an attempt to garner support amongst the black community of the United States for his Presidential campaign. A PR disaster, and one that confirmed he was in need of the black vote in order to guarantee an electoral victory.

Thus, the death of George Floyd was weaponised to guarantee such a result, with violent riots sweeping the United States in the aftermath. In contrast to the one night of looting and arson that took place in Dublin however, the mainstream media would provide cover for the months-long unrest in the US, with corporate outlet CNN notoriously describing it as ‘’fiery but mostly peaceful’’ at one stage.

Key to this was the involvement of George Soros, a significant donor to both the Democrat Party and the Black Lives Matter organisation via his Open Society Foundations, a globalist support-network that has sponsored colour revolutions from as far afield as Ukraine and China.

It is also why last week’s night of unrest in Dublin, carried out amidst a wider political context of opposition to globalist policies in Ireland, came in for far more media condemnation than the months of BLM-led riots that took place in the United States in 2020.

Gavin O’Reilly is an Irish Republican activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism; he was a writer for the American Herald Tribune from January 2018 up until their seizure by the FBI in 2021, with his work also appearing on The Duran, Al-Masdar, MintPress News, Global Research and SouthFront. He can be reached through Twitter and Facebook and supported on Patreon.

December 1, 2023 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

Main National TV Station Pumps INSANE Propaganda

Ivor Cummins | November 20, 2023

Our National main TV station just aired an INSANE piece of WEF/UN-style propaganda – it’s a parody of itself! Nonetheless I have a great time taking it down hardcore ;-) Please share widely – you can download vid here too, to share elsewhere: https://we.tl/t-ul4uOAkqMg

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November 28, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | | Leave a comment

Ireland’s most popular party wants Israeli ambassador expelled

RT | November 4, 2023

Israeli ambassador Dana Erlich “should no longer enjoy diplomatic status in Ireland,” Sinn Fein party leader Mary Lou McDonald said on Friday. McDonald’s party, which has deep historical ties to the Palestinian cause, has repeatedly condemned Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

“[The Israel Defence Forces] are engaged in a ferocious military offensive against a civilian population; breaking international law by targeting civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure, forcing mass population displacement and cutting off vital supplies of water, food, medicines and fuel,” McDonald told reporters.

Erlich’s presence in Ireland has become “untenable,” McDonald continued, adding that the ambassador should “no longer enjoy diplomatic status in Ireland while Israel refuses the imperative for ceasefires and as the suffering and death toll grow.”

Earlier on Friday, McDonald discussed the conflict with diplomats from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Morocco, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Israel’s embassy in Dublin criticized the Sinn Fein leader for not inviting Erlich to the meeting, accusing her of “only [seeking] to isolate Israel, rather than offer a forum for constructive engagement.”

“To exclude Israel from such a forum is quite telling of Sinn Fein’s position on the conflict,” the embassy said in a statement.

Sinn Fein is Ireland’s most popular political party, with a 13-point lead on its closest rival, the centrist Fine Gael. Sinn Fein is excluded from power, however, by a coalition agreement between Fine Gael and historical rivals Fianna Fail, as well as the Green Party.

As the former political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Sinn Fein’s support for the Palestinian cause is long-standing. The party’s supporters, particularly in Northern Ireland, view their own struggle against British colonialism as analogous to the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation. While the IRA has laid down its arms, Sinn Fein has remained in contact with Hamas; former party leader Gerry Adams met with Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza in 2009, while McDonald hosted an online conference with the militant group’s foreign relations head, Dr Basem Naim, in 2020.

Sinn Fein “will never rule out meeting or talking to anybody, because that doesn’t serve any purpose” in securing peace in the Middle East, the party’s foreign affairs spokesman, Matt Carthy, said last month.

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar has adopted a more neutral stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict, declaring on Friday that Israel “has a right to defend itself [and] has the right to go after Hamas, so they can not do this again.” Varadkar also condemned Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7 attack, stating that it “isn’t just self-defense, it resembles something more approaching revenge.”

Ireland voted last month for a UN resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and opposed a now-scrapped EU plan to suspend aid payments to the enclave. However, Varadkar told reporters on Friday that he is “not sure [the Israelis] listen very closely to what we have to say, quite frankly.”

November 4, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

No Jab, No Education? Big Pharma’s influence on Irish and British schools

By Gavin O’Reilly | OffGuardian | October 5, 2023

Last Thursday it was announced that the southern Irish state would roll out Flu jabs to all schoolchildren under its jurisdiction, despite the fact that children are an age group at absolute minute risk of becoming seriously ill from seasonal illnesses such as Flu and colds.

This comes less than three months after an effectively identical announcement was made by the British government, regarding the rollout of the Flu jab to upwards of three million children in English schools.

A similar announcement was made by the British government in October 2019, however that plan was scrapped due to lack of supplies.

AstraZeneca, the manufacturer of the nasal-spray that was to be given to schoolchildren in England, blamed this on a hold-up of an analysis of that year’s Flu season by the WHO, which was to be then given to pharmaceutical firms in order to determine how many products were to be developed.

The timing of this announcement in 2019, and the new announcements that Flu jabs would be rolled out to schoolchildren in Ireland and Britain, arouses suspicion.

On the 18th of October 2019, the same day it was announced that plans had been scrapped to provide schoolchildren in England with Flu jabs, Event 201 was held in New York. Organised by John Hopkins University, in conjunction with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum, Event 201 was a simulation exercise which envisaged a coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe, the effects of which could only be mitigated by even greater integration between the public and private sector worldwide, including giving social media outlets sweeping powers to deal with what the exercise termed ‘disinformation’ amidst the hypothetical pandemic .

In what can only be described as an outstanding coincidence, less than a month later, the world’s first case of the alleged ‘COVID-19’ virus was discovered in Wuhan, the capital city of China’s central Hubei province. In even further coincidence, Wuhan was home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based NGO with links to the Gates Foundation, was conducting research on the transmission of coronaviruses from bats to humans, using funds granted by Anthony Fauci’s  National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Several months later in March 2020, the WHO, an organisation with a history of corruption and undisclosed ties to pharmaceutical giants, announced the official beginning of the ‘COVID-19 Pandemic’. What followed next was unprecedented.

Vast swathes of society were closed down across the world, ostensibly to protect the sick and vulnerable from an alleged virus, the mortality rate of which made it no more dangerous than the seasonal illnesses which coincidentally disappeared for two years in all countries following WHO procedures, only to be ‘replaced’ by a ‘virus’ with the exact same symptoms.

In reality, lockdowns would do far more to flatten small businesses than to save lives, with the dependency on corporate outlets created as a result of these measures leading to the upwards transfer of more than $1tn in wealth.

In yet another coincidence, this example of governments and the private sector working in lockstep bore a striking similarity to what was outlined in Event 201, and also aligned perfectly with the WEF’s Great Reset initiative, launched in June 2020, which again reiterated that the only way to mitigate the effects of the ‘Covid Pandemic’ was to give the corporate class even greater sway over public life worldwide.

One of the key facets of the Great Reset is the introduction of a Digital ID, one which would give the government-corporate alliance an authoritarian level of control over its citizens should it be made mandatory, which during the ‘Covid Pandemic’, is effectively what happened.

Following the announcement of the ‘Covid Vaccine’ on the first business day after the 2020 US Presidential election (again, more coincidental timing), 2021 would see multiple countries around the world introduce legislation requiring their citizens to have been jabbed before they could participate in everyday life. To implement this, the standard practice was to place a QR code on their smartphone once they had been jabbed, one which would grant them access to restaurants, bars, gyms and other amenities prohibited to those who had chosen to not take part in a global medical experiment.

Essentially, this was a dry-run for the rollout of a mandatory digital ID, using an alleged ‘Pandemic’ as the pretext.

The introduction of jab passports however, would lead to a worldwide protest movement in defence of human rights. In response, the corporate media would begin a demonization campaign against these protesters, labelling them as ‘far-right’, and WEF-aligned governments would launch a brutal crackdown; perhaps most notably in Canada, where the government of WEF ‘Young Global Leader’ Justin Trudeau would attack demonstrators with teargas and mounted Horses, and freeze their bank accounts using emergency legislation.

The impact of this global protest movement likely played a part in the sudden collapse of the ‘Pandemic’ media narrative in early 2022, shortly after the WEF’s Davos Agenda virtual event. The Russian operation that began in Ukraine shortly after, following almost nine years of western provocations, would serve as a convenient cover story by the mainstream media for the global inflation caused by lockdown measures.

However, with lockstep announcements that Britain, under the rule of WEF member Rishi Sunak, and the southern Irish state, overseen by WEF ‘Young Global Leader’ Leo Varadkar, will be rolling out a product to schoolchildren, for an illness that poses an absolute miniscule risk to their age group, it may only be a matter of time until the ‘Pandemic’ narrative is repeated for schoolchildren in both countries, with it being made mandatory for them to have a Flu jab before they are granted an education.

Gavin O’Reilly is an Irish Republican activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism; he was a writer for the American Herald Tribune from January 2018 up until their seizure by the FBI in 2021, with his work also appearing on The Duran, Al-Masdar, MintPress News, Global Research and SouthFront. He can be reached through Twitter and Facebook and supported on Patreon.

October 5, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Why I Blew Up My Life to Campaign Against Gender Identity Ideology

BY DR HELEN JOYCE | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

This is the text of a speech Dr. Helen Joyce gave at Ireland Uncensored, a one-day conference in Dublin on September 16th to rally opposition to the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, a new law that will impose more speech restrictions in Ireland than anywhere else in Europe. The conference was organised by Free Speech Ireland and Gript.

Five years ago, I was working as the Economist’s International editor. One fateful day in 2017, the editor asked me: “Why do kids keep coming home and say, ‘Such and such is trans’?” I replied that I didn’t know, but would look into it. Though I had no idea about that at the time, that conversation changed my life.

I ended up writing an article about it – an only semi-satisfactory article, because it was so hard to get a handle on what people were talking about. Many potential interviewees I reached out to either didn’t reply or brushed me off with platitudes. They seemed to think I was doing something very wrong simply by asking obvious questions – the sorts of questions journalists ask of all sorts of people, all the time. Basics like: what does ‘trans’ mean? What is ‘transition’? Do people feel better afterwards? Why do some people say they ‘feel like’ members of the opposite sex? And the big one: should those feelings give them licence to use facilities restricted to that sex?

The difficulty of getting facts, the science-denial that was universal among proponents of ‘trans rights’ and the circularity of their core mantra, namely that ‘trans women are women’ all kept bothering me. I became seriously concerned that grave harms were being done in the name of this ideology: harms to women, who were losing single-sex spaces, services and sports; children, who were being taught that one’s sex is a matter of feelings; and lesbians, who were being pressured to include men who identified as women in their dating pools.

I started thinking about writing a book about it. By now I knew that women were losing jobs and facing death threats for expressing the slightest scepticism about so-called ‘trans inclusion’. But I worried I wasn’t the right person – and if I’m honest also about the toll it would take.

And then, in late 2018, I met a group of detransitioners. A half-dozen young women, all of whom now identified as women, and as lesbian. All had been gender non-conforming in childhood; most had suffered mental-health issues, including anxiety, bulimia and self-harm. Doctors had diagnosed them with gender dysphoria (a fancy word for distress), and given them testosterone, which left them with permanently lowered voices, thick facial and body hair and distressing changes to their genitals. Some had had double mastectomies; one, at age 21, had had her uterus and ovaries removed.

That night, for the first time, I articulated the thought I’d been circling around for months: “They’re sterilising gay kids.” My hesitations vanished. As a journalist, you’re supposed to run towards the news. A scandal that is being suppressed for political convenience isn’t the sort of story you should ignore.

Well, I wrote my book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (recently reissued as Trans: Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women’s Rights). And although my career at the Economist continued to flourish, I became increasingly convinced that the book alone wasn’t enough. I moved to work with Sex Matters, a non-profit human-rights campaign group co-founded by Maya Forstater, who lost her job at an American think-tank, the Center for Global Development, after tweeting about her concerns about ‘gender self-ID’ – the policy of allowing people to change their legal records to reflect the sex they want to be, rather than the sex they actually are.

I now believe that ‘gender-identity ideology’ – the claim that self-defined gender should trump sex when it comes to classifying humans – is far from the liberal, kind approach it is portrayed as. Indeed, it is quite the opposite: part of a generation-defining threat to liberalism and indeed rationalism; and also deeply cruel.

You can imagine that given that I think this, after years of thinking about it, I regard it as my moral duty to say so, as loudly as possible, as often as possible, in front of as many people as possible.

This is an ideology that is harmful to women, because women’s ability to play a full part in public life requires us to be able to draw boundaries, on occasion, that exclude men. That’s all men. Including the men who wish they weren’t men, and the men who think they’re not men, and the men who identify as women.

It’s harmful to children, because children believe what adults tell them. The idea that you can really be a member of the opposite sex is a seductive one for quite a lot of them. Disproportionately the ones who are going to grow up gay, the ones who have autistic-spectrum disorders, the anxious or self-harming or depressed ones, the ones who are being abused.

And it’s harmful to gay people for two reasons. The first is that without a meaningful definition of sex, there cannot be sexual orientation. What does it mean to be same-sex attracted, if ‘sex’ is a matter of self-identification? The second is that gay adults are disproportionately likely to have been gender non-conforming in early youth. Now those children are being told that their atypicality makes them ‘really’ members of the opposite sex. This lie starts some of them on a pathway towards cross-sex hormones, genital surgery – and eventual sterility.

All of what I’ve said till now is deeply unpopular speech with some people. Because it punctures dearly held beliefs about people’s identities, some of whom experience what I say as unkind, even hateful. I don’t revel in being unkind, still less ‘hateful’. I’m not someone who seeks controversy for its own sake. But neither do I shy away from it. And on this subject I speak to prevent harm, and to prevent unkindness.

What happens if you base public policy on substituting subjective, self-declared gender identity for the objective material reality of sex?

For women, it means men in rape crisis centres, rapists in women’s prisons, men winning women’s sporting prizes.

Barbie Kardashian – a man who was recently jailed for four and a half years for threatening to torture, rape and murder his own mother, and who is “legally female” and universally called a woman in Ireland’s self-satisfied, corporatist mainstream media – was until recently held in Ireland’s sole women-only prison in Limerick. He is being moved to a men’s prison only because the staff in Limerick don’t feel safe having to handle him – no one seems to give a toss about the female inmates.

For children, this ideology means telling them lies about their bodies and the material reality of being a member of this evolved mammalian species. This creates mental distress and confusion. We’re telling them that if they don’t fit into the pink or blue box designated for their own sex, they should declare they are the opposite sex so they can fit back in. This is the very opposite of progressive. It’s cruel.

As for gay people, once sex becomes a matter of self-identification, so does sexual orientation. It’s lesbians who bear the brunt of it: lesbian friends tell me that a quarter to a third of the profiles on lesbian dating apps are now of men, and that if they make it clear in their own profiles that they will only consider partners who are really female, as opposed to pretend-female, they are banned for ‘hate’.

———

There is no material reality to the notion of gender identity; it’s a belief that a minority of people have about themselves, given life by utterances and nothing else. A person declares their gender, declares their pronouns, and everyone else is supposed to ignore the evidence of their own senses, their own understanding of the nature of humans, and accept that ‘people are who they say they are’.

So it is no coincidence that the draconian, Orwellian, Hate Crime Bill Ireland is considering enshrines within it a circular, non-reality-based definition of ‘gender’ or ‘gender identity’:

‘Gender’ means the gender of a person or the gender which a person expresses as the person’s preferred gender or with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female.

This is tautology – circular gobbledegook. It’s not a definition at all.

As for hate, I know what it feels like to be its target. I’ve experienced serious death threats, some from men who identify as women who have serious criminal records, and who express their threats in gruesome, sexualised, personalised ways. On September 11th in Manchester, as I walked peacefully along the road after a teach-in on equality and human-rights law, I was followed by masked, flag-waving protesters shouting the usual idiotic slogans, with the addition of “Fuck Helen Joyce, my body my choice” and “There are many, any more of us than you”.

It makes some sense to call that hateful – though to be clear, I don’t think we need any new laws to handle this, just better policing. It’s a public-order offence. Me saying that men are men, that no man can become or be a woman, that a man who ‘feels like a woman’ is having an entirely male experience, albeit an atypical one – that’s not. Those statements are not just true, but in some situations essential to say in order to uphold other people’s human rights.

Irish legislators are considering passing a law that will criminalise ‘hate’ –undefined. Which protects ‘gender’, defined circularly – that is, undefined.

This law could criminalise mere possession of the book I blew up my life to write. There’s a ‘safety clause’ that excuses works of scientific or artistic merit – but please. The people who call me a Nazi, genocidal, antisemitic, racist, homophobic and so on, and who follow me down the street bellowing Fuck Helen Joyce, don’t think my work has scientific or artistic merit. That clause isn’t going to stop them going after me.

The problem isn’t so much that I might actually be charged and found guilty. It’s that I can’t be sure I won’t be. This is the so-called chilling effect.

I hear from my fellow thought criminals all the time. And I’ve seen the public polling. Most people agree with me entirely on issues of sex and gender.

But they don’t dare say so.

Well, I do, and I’m not going to stop saying it. I don’t do it for fun, I do it because everyone’s human rights depend upon it. I am going to keep saying the following true and important things:

• Being a man or woman is entirely a matter of biology and not at all a matter of identity.
• Men can’t be women. None of them, no matter how much they want to.
• Children shouldn’t be given puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. They shouldn’t be told they can change sex. They shouldn’t be told that their feelings define their identities.
• No men, and that includes men who say they are women, should be allowed into women’s spaces or sports.

And so, if Ireland, my home country, does pass this dumb new law, I’m willing to go there and say all this again, because I feel a moral imperative. And even if you don’t feel the same urgency on this particular subject, I hope you will support me. My free speech is your free speech. You don’t know what unpopular thing you may one day feel a moral imperative to say.

Dr. Helen Joyce is the author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality and the Director of Advocacy at Sex Matters.

September 19, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Elon Musk to Sue George Soros-Linked NGOs For Spreading ‘Misinformation’ to Stifle Free Speech

BY DR FREDERICK ATTENBOROUGH | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 28, 2023

Elon Musk has announced that his company, X (formerly Twitter), will sue partner organisations of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation (OSF) after the NGO network was accused of spreading ‘hate misinformation’ to justify an unprecedented crackdown on lawful free speech.

Musk made the statement in response to an article by journalist Ben Scallan, in which he claims that OSF-linked leftist NGOs are manipulating the statistics to show a steep rise in hate crimes across Ireland – despite the government’s own data indicating the opposite is true – and helping to usher in a new hate speech law that will restrict free speech and open up new pathways for political persecution.

The article was reposted on X by Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger, who added: “The reason politicians and Soros-funded NGOs are spreading hate misinformation is to justify a draconian crackdown on freedom of speech.”

To this, Elon Musk simply replied, “Exactly. X will be filing legal action to stop this. Can’t wait for discovery to start!”

It’s unclear which OSF-linked groups Scallan is referring to exactly or which NGOs will be the target of Musk’s suit – although interestingly the self-styled “free-speech absolutist” has recently threatened to sue the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), having accused the U.K.-registered NGO of using flawed methods to promote “misleading narratives” and of running a “scare campaign” that has driven away advertisers from the platform. Although the CCDH – which is listed in journalist Matt Taibbi’s report into the organisations comprising the “censorship-industrial complex” – doesn’t declare its funding on its site, Companies House information shows it received almost £1 million in 2022.

Despite an Ipsos survey commissioned by Ireland’s Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth showing that over eight in 10 Irish people feel “very comfortable” living next door to people with different nationalities, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, disabilities, religious beliefs (and non), or marital statuses, the most up-to-date Garda Síochána data suggests the country has actually seen a 29% increase in reported ‘hate crimes’ in 2022 compared to the previous year.

Of course, an increase in reporting is not necessarily the same thing as an increase in actual hate crimes or incidents. As Scallan points out, the discrepancy between these two data sets is partly if not entirely explained by the fact that Soros’s NGO network has for many years been running campaigns to lower the threshold for hate crime reporting in Ireland, while encouraging citizens to report hate crimes and hate incidents to the police.

In fairness, the Garda does at least acknowledge this, having conceded that a “very low threshold of perception” currently applies to hate crime reporting. Yet methodological sophistication of this kind has been curiously absent from proposals put forward by Ireland’s governing classes that argue for a new, allegedly desperately needed, hate crime law. In those proposals the distinction between perceived and actual hate crimes has all but collapsed: ‘increased reporting’ is breezily conflated with ‘increased crime’ such that for politicians like Justice Minister Helen McEntee and Senator Pauline O’Reilly the need for intensified state censorship of perfectly lawful speech that certain sub-sections of Irish society happen to regard as ‘hateful’ now seems entirely unproblematic.

This confusion isn’t just to be found in the debating chambers of the Dáil and Seanad Éireann. It constitutes the underlying philosophy of the country’s draft Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, in which a hate crime is defined as an episode “perceived by the victim, or any other person, to have been motivated by prejudice, based on actual or perceived age, disability, race, colour, nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or gender”.

As Scallan points out, under this definition, you don’t even have to be the victim of an alleged crime to report it. “A random bystander who has nothing to do with the event can say, ‘I think it was based on prejudice,’ and it will be categorised as such.”

By and large, of course, it won’t be “random bystanders” with a priggish manner, flapping ears, and a little too much time on their hands that end up weaponising this definition of what constitutes a ‘hate crime’. The real damage will be done by activist groups and George Soros-funded NGOs bent on criminalising perfectly lawful views that they happen not to like for doctrinaire ideological reasons.

“Will mocking memes be tolerated?” asked independent senator Ronan Mullen during a debate on the proposed legislation in the Senate earlier this year. “Will carrying a placard stating, ‘Men cannot breastfeed’ warrant a hate-speech investigation or up to five years’ imprisonment, a lifelong label as a criminal hater, and all of the stigma and life limitation that goes with that? Nobody actually knows.”

Nobody actually knows, no. But each of Mr Mullen’s hypothetical scenarios could potentially lead to a reported ‘hate crime’, which would then feature in the Garda’s annual reporting dataset, which would then perpetuate the myth that Ireland is becoming less tolerant, which would then lead to calls for even more draconian hate speech laws, which would then… and so on and so forth, in an endless cycle of intensifying state censorship.

Perhaps the most shocking of all the authoritarian provisions in the Bill that flow from this vague, entirely subjective definition of ‘hate’, is one that will make it a criminal offense to possess material on one’s person or in one’s home likely to “incite hatred”.

With regard to the obvious question of how something saved on, say, a mobile phone could possibly “incite hatred”, the Bill simply reverses the usual burden of proof in criminal cases, presuming “that the material [is] not intended for personal use”, and that a suspect must be planning to disseminate it, unless they can prove otherwise.

If passed, this provision will allow police to raid homes and seize devices, with a potential penalty of a year in prison and a €5,000 fine just for refusing to give up your passwords. Possession of hateful material will carry a penalty of up to five years in prison.

Despite many critics calling the law “Orwellian” and campaigning against it, the Irish parliament’s lower house adopted it by a vote of 160 against 14 earlier this year. The legislation now only needs the approval of the upper house in October to become law.

Dr. Frederick Attenborough is the Communications Officers of the Free Speech Union.

August 28, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

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