“Talk of Twitter free speech may be all the rage right now in the United States, but a look around the world begs the question: What good is ostensible social-media freedom if governments can silence and sanction you with the harshest of penalties for what you post online? The international landscape for state censorship of online speech is bleak. There exists a dangerous and mounting global trend to criminalize expression, including online speech, blurring the line between dictatorship and democracy, and wreaking havoc on human rights.
In Mexico, a sitting congressman, Gabriel Quadri, may lose the right to run for office ever again because of what he posted on Twitter — a grave violation of his civil and political rights that should attract international attention. Quadri, an avowed liberal, took issue when seats [Editor’s Note: not physical seats but congressional seats.] reserved for women in Mexico’s congress were claimed by men who identify as transgender. Now, for the mere act of tweeting, he’s a tried and convicted “gender-based violator” under Mexican law. His case makes clear that while Twitter HQ may be galvanizing in defense of free speech, for so long as repressive governments wield censorship power, the Internet is no safe space for free expression.
…Like many a concerned citizen the world over, in taking to Twitter, what Quadri did was seek open conversation on a highly relevant matter of serious societal importance. He committed no crime and endorsed no violence. His case mirrors that of Finnish member of Parliament, Päivi Räsänen, charged with the “crime” of hate speech that carried with it a two-year prison sentence. A longstanding civil servant, medical doctor, and grandmother, Räsänen has been subjected to three years of onerous legal proceedings for a 2019 tweet expressing her views on marriage and sexuality.
Let us not forget that in some parts of the world, you can be sentenced to death for what you post online. In Nigeria, Rhoda Ya’u Jatau is on trial for blasphemy charges after sharing a message condemning the brutal killing of Deborah Yakubu, who was stoned to death for her Christian faith last May. Blasphemy carries with it a potential sentence of death in Nigeria. Also, upcoming at the Supreme Court of Nigeria is the appeal of Sufi musician Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, who is currently on death row for a blasphemy conviction after sharing song lyrics on the messaging platform WhatsApp.
While the consequences may vary, what these cases have in common is the dark underlying thread of totalitarian repression. Governments are weaponizing the law to stamp out speech that fails to comport with their “approved” worldview. It is imperative that we shine a spotlight on the repressive regimes under which you can be deprived of your most basic human rights for what you say online. Without free speech there can be no freedom, and everyone should be free to voice their opinions without fear of punishment.“
C0ming soon to a country near and dear to you if Progressives continue to have their totalitarian way!
We look forward to House Republicans opening an investigation, an event the Biden clown car dreads, into this, one of the most shameful debacles in American history,
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, courtesy of the Journal of Democracy via AEI, Michael Beckley and Hal Brands provide insightful analysis of…
“Since ancient times, contests among great powers have often involved contests of ideas. The Peloponnesian War was not simply a clash between a regnant Sparta and a rising Athens, but also pitted a liberal, seagoing protodemocracy that saw itself as the “school of Hellas” against a militarized, agrarian slave state. The ideological threat that revolutionary France posed to the European order was just as serious as the military one. In the run-up to the Second World War, fascist powers and democracies squared off; during the Cold War, the superpowers divided much of the world along ideological lines.
The intertwining of ideology and geopolitics should not be surprising: At root, foreign policy is how a country seeks to make the world safe for its own way of life. Many analysts accept that U.S. foreign policy is driven by ideological impulses. Even hardcore international-relations “realists” concede the importance of ideology when they bemoan the grip that liberal passions have on Washington’s statecraft. Curiously, though, there has been more resistance to the idea that there may be an ideological component to the grand strategy of America’s chief rival—the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Beijing is not making any “grand strategic effort to undermine democracy and spread autocracy,” writes one leading Sinologist. Its foreign policy is based on “pragmatic decisions about Chinese interests.” Realists say that China plays Realpolitik while America ignores John Quincy Adams’s 1821 advice to go “not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Other analysts suggest that it is a distraction or even a “delusion” to emphasize the ideological aspects of Sino-American rivalry at the expense of Beijing’s military and economic challenge.
In fact, the reverse is true: To grasp the Chinese challenge, we must grasp its ideological dimensions. If Woodrow Wilson and his followers wanted to make the world safe for democracy, the PRC’s rulers want to do the same for autocracy. For them, autocracy is not simply a means of political control or a ticket to self-enrichment, but a set of deeply held ideas about the proper relationship between rulers and the masses. In his October 2022 keynote speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—during which he had himself installed for a third term as top leader, while on the final day having his predecessor Hu Jintao unceremoniously escorted out of the room—Xi Jinping insisted that “constantly writing a new chapter in the Sinicization of Marxism is the solemn historical responsibility of contemporary Chinese communists,” and made it clear that “the authority of the Party Central Committee” will continue to be at “the core of leadership in controlling the overall situation.” Everything in the speech hinges on the CCP remaining in sole charge of “developing socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
This belief in the superiority of an autocratic Chinese model coexists with deep insecurity: The PRC is a brutally illiberal regime in a world led by a liberal hegemon, a circumstance from which the CCP draws a sense of pervasive danger and a strong desire to refashion the world order so that the PRC’s particular form of government is not just protected but privileged. That is why a powerful but anxious Chinese regime is now engaged in an aggressive effort to make the world safe for autocracy and to corrupt and destabilize democracies. Democracy promotion may be out of style in U.S. foreign policy, but what the scholar Jason Brownlee calls “democracy prevention” is very much at the heart of Chinese strategy today…”
“Corrupt and destabilize democracies”…”corrupt and destabilize democracies”…
So Xi has that going for him…
Since we’re on the subject of threats to democracy, writing at The Epoch Times, Jeff Tucker correctly concludes we’re living in…
“The main defense of Dr. Anthony Fauci in his legal deposition this month was pretty simple: he forgot. He said that he couldn’t recall nearly 200 times and versions of that many more. He said that he was so busy running his huge agency plus shepherding vaccines that he couldn’t possibly remember this or that email implicating him in a censorship scheme. He gets thousands of emails a day and there’s no reason to think that any, in particular, would grab his attention.
It’s all a bit implausible because we saw him on TV several times a day for the better part of three years. He was the hard-working actor out there. I do TV and interviews several times per week but I try my best to throttle them back and turn many down simply because they truly drain away energy and focus from other work. In short, they are all-consuming. The notion that he neglected issues of message in favor of serious science is an incredibly obvious strain on credulity.
So what was the point of this line of answer? Yes, he wants to save his skin. No question about that. But it occurs to me that there is another point, too. He wants to model for the nation and the world how to think about the whole of the last three years. His view is that everyone should forget about it.
You have surely noticed this happening ever since the opening following lockdowns and the rest. We are all just supposed to forget. We are supposed to move on. I’ve heard already a thousand times that we never had a lockdown. There seems to be little in the way of official memory of two years of school closures or the shutting of churches on holidays.
We are being told to forget about the medical mandates that displaced millions from their jobs. We had relatives die and we couldn’t attend their funerals, but we are supposed to forget about all that. I see claims daily that the censorship never really took place or wasn’t that bad really, so we should shut up already.
What about all the politicians who violated stay-at-home orders, went on vacations or got hairstyles, or were photographed partying without a mask even as they imposed them on everyone else? Hey, mistakes were surely made but let’s not make too big a deal of it.
Indeed, it was amazing to me how the most egregious and global attacks on human liberty in the name of public health were very quickly memory-holed by the major media, which we now know was the answer to public health agencies themselves the entire time. We all stood by in shock and wondered if we were the crazy ones.
That, after all, is the whole point of Orwell’s “memory hole,” the invention of an alternative history of the recent past that contradicts our own memories and invites us to believe that we are crazy or obsessed or otherwise thinking about things that truly don’t matter. This is why the memory hole was so important in Orwell’s book. It becomes a means by which the population is controlled in its thinking and therefore in its psychological capacity to resist the next round of impositions.
…People who invite us to forget are more than likely up to no good. It’s not just that they want to replace a real narrative with a false one. They want history to start over at any given moment so that we are more easily manipulated in the future.
Perhaps this is why basic memory skills have been so deemphasized in early childhood education for so long…
…We’ve been through almost three years in which powerful elites have done their best to wipe out history. I recall the chills I got down my spine when major media organs began putting trigger warnings on links older than a few months. The clear message was: This is no longer valid or reliable because things have surely changed. This is also why Fauci kept saying that the science has changed. It was a call for us to forget all the statements that contradict his latest statements.
In this way, we have entered into an age of amnesia with a ruling class that wants everyone to forget the wisdom of the past and even the events of recent history, to forgive but mostly to forget and move on like good little pawns in their game. Just do what we are told and forget everything else.
We can all resist this little game. We can access Archive.org and, more importantly, we can consult the wisdom of the ages through books and poetry and religious teachings. If civilization is to survive the onslaught, it will be because we choose to remember and act on those memories in defiance of every demand that we forget.“
All of which proves Rand Paul was right: Faux Chi is a liar. But you already knew that.
Moving on, here’s another septet of special selections certain to pique the interest of inquiring Conservative minds:
Its’s worth mentioning again the genuinely historic aspect of the January 6 committee was it marked the first time in U.S. history the minority party had been excluded from participating in a House investigation.
“It is not a scandal to be added to the salacious and shocking catalogue of notorious Washington scandals, but a scandal precisely because what is happening has become a completely ordinary way for business to be conducted in Washington. The scandal is that it is so unremarkable. The scandal is that it will be repeated again and again, no matter which party is in power.”
What would have been wrong about a series of continuing resolutions to keep the government open until the cows came home?!?
We say of…
…McConnell & Company:
Here’s the juice: With Amy Barrett on the bench, the Kentucky Fence Turtle has outlived his usefulness. And we cannot BEGIN to express the depth of our disappointment Tom Cotton was among their number.
And wasn’t Kim Strassel’s assessment of the GOP’s disinterest in curbing wasteful spending from the 1st of the month dead-on balls-accurate?!?
(5). In a related item, as Glen Greenwald notes, the FBI’s response to the latest Twitter Files release…
Anyone who questions the FBI — or finds it disturbing that they’re “partnering” with Big Tech on what should and should not be permitted to be said on the internet — is a hateful, crazy, unhinged anti-American conspiracy theorist, says the FBI.🇺🇸🇺🇸 https://t.co/RGX6nNYE7B
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these from Balls Cotton:
Finally, we’ll call it a week with the Sports Section, as we mark the passing of one of the all-time greats:
Legendary Steelers RB Franco Harris, author of the “Immaculate Reception” – one of the greatest plays in NFL history – has passed away at the age of 72.
A 4-time Super Bowl champion, Hall of Fame player and revered individual by so many.
Note Harris’ reaction after making what has been called the greatest play in NFL history: no dancing, no shucking, no jiving. It wasn’t about him, it was about his team.
Rest in peace, Franco.
Magoo
P.S. We’ll be enjoying the Christmas weekend with our family, so we’ll be radio silent until Wednesday. ‘Til then…
Video of the Day
Rand Paul tells it like it SHOULD be!
Tales of The Darkside
Matt Walsh bids you welcome to the short-lived world of the “Big Girl Community”.
Another Sign the Apocalypse is Upon Us
Something tells us this creature’s kids will be better off without her.
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