The lights are going out all over Europe, and the darkness may spread to America soon. I’m Virginia Dare and this is Radio VDARE.
Heather Nauert at the U.S. State Department is blasting social media restrictions in Iran, saying: “We support a freedom of the press. When a nation clamps down on social media, we ask the question, ‘What are you afraid of?’”
Of course, it’s not Iran which we need to be saying this to. It’s Western nations which dishonestly claim they are free. We can start with Germany, which at this point is ruled by what is essentially an occupation government dedicated to the dispossession of its own people.
Germany has begun enforcing a new law which imposes fines of up to 50 million euros for each incident of so-called hate speech online [Brand-New Online ‘Hate-Speech’ Law Snares 1st Victim, WND, January 2, 2018]. By “hate speech,” of course, we mean any expression of opposition to immigration, Islamization, or the European Union.
And it’s not just Germany. In the United Kingdom, the birthplace of so-called “English liberty,” you can be arrested for criticizing the wrong person or group on Facebook or Twitter [Arrests for offensive Facebook and Twitter posts soar in London, by Sadie Levy Gale, UK Independent, June 4, 2016]. In Belgium, political parties opposed to immigration have been banned outright. In France, even icons like Brigitte Bardot have been put on trial for criticizing mass immigration. In Canada, freedom of speech has long since ceased to exist.
Free speech has essentially been abolished in much of the Western world. And the crackdown is coming here.
In the United States, censorship is mostly funneled through tech companies. Twitter has begun purging right wing accounts; Facebook deliberately builds censorship against right-leaning sites into its algorithms to prevent as much engagement as possible [Facebook Bias: It’s Baked Into The Algorithms, WND, May 15, 2016]. Google has also used its political bias to help shape the public debate [How the liberal leanings of Google, Facebook shape the political landscape, by Jeff Mordock, Washington Times, October 23, 2017].
As far as universities go, it’s hard to say there is more free speech at Harvard than there is in Iran.
But the groundwork is also being laid for a government crackdown. The greatest enemies of free speech in this country, journalists, are pushing the Narrative that speech by the Wrong People constitutes violence against the Right people [When Is Speech Violence? By Lisa Feldman Barrett, The New York Times, July 14, 2017] It’s this kind of thought which has led to the current climate on college campuses, with the trigger warnings and antifa riots we’ve all grown to know and love.
And even the United Nations is demanding the United States change its free speech laws. After the Unite The Right rally in August 2017, “The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination” blasted President Donald Trump. It said it was “disturbed by the failure at the highest political level of the United States of America to unequivocally reject and condemn the racist violent events and demonstrations… thereby potentially fueling the proliferation of racist discourse and incidents.” It also said the United States should “ensure the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly are not exercised with the aim of destroying or denying the rights and freedoms of others, especially the right to equality and non-discrimination, and that the Government of the United States of America provide the necessary guarantees so that such rights are not misused to promote racist hate speech and racist crimes.”
Obviously, this is a pretty direct call to implement European style speech laws in the United States. And the hypocrisy is staggering. In South Africa today, government officials gleefully sing songs like “Kill The Boer” and preside over gruesome farm murders. But in America, after a legal protest turns into chaos because of malevolence of the state and local government, the United Nations thinks all but powerless demonstrators are the problem.
For that reason, whatever you think about President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, it’s a good thing in the sense that it has allowed the United States to cut the amount of money we give to that anti-American, anti-freedom organization.
But that still leaves us with the question of the tech companies and the media conglomerates who are working hard to limit our free speech. One solution would be to regulate the media companies such as Twitter and Facebook as social utilities subject to the First Amendment [Steve Bannon wants Facebook and Google regulated like utilities, by Ryan Grim, The Intercept, July 27, 2017].
But if such a decision is going to made, it needs to be made soon. America truly is the last outpost of free speech on Earth. And if we fall, as it appears increasingly likely, there will be no future for any of us.
I’m Virginia Dare and we’ll talk again soon.
