THE WAR AGAINST ELON MUSK AND FREE SPEECH
When riots eventually broke out in Britain in August, 2024, against the British government’s subversive policy of changing the kingdom’s demographics by allowing millions of Third World chancers to arrive in Britain where even illegal immigrants are housed free of charge in nice hotels (a luxury not available to the native born) the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, seized with both hands the opportunity of using the riots as a pretext to limit free speech – just as Jacinda Ardern did in New Zealand in 2019 after one man, Brenton Tarrant, shot some Muslims in two mosques.
In both cases these manipulative Prime Ministers clicked in to the media hysteria around these two unfortunate events as they believed that a traumatised public, manipulated into “group outrage” by the mainstream media, would accept such violations of freedom that would be unlikely to be accepted in more normal times. By no yardstick could the riots be justified but that does not mean that the issue of mass migration that triggered them should not be recognised as a very serious problem.
By blaming “social media” for the riots Starmer, with the help of a compliant media (BBC, the Guardian, the Independent, etc.) managed to shift the debate from the serious issue that provoked the riots to the alleged “danger” of social media.
This war against social media is strongly supported by the mainstream media, consisting as it does of government stooges of mainly definite Left wing views. Mainstream media, with its “group narrative” of events, fears the power of the free wheeling ideas that are expressed on social media and which are so often outside the agreed narrative of the sinister combination of government, academia and mainstream media.
The more that people engage with – and get their news from – social media, the fewer newspapers they will buy and the more likely they are not to watch the BBC or, even worse, New Zealand’s TV1 News at Six. That means less revenue from the sale of newspapers and from advertising from mainstream media and more for Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) and other social media platforms, leading eventually to the demise of mainstream media and the sacking or redundancy of more and more of its reporters. We saw this in New Zealand with the closedown of TV3 with the loss of hundreds of jobs.
This fear was also what motivated London’s Independent newspaper on 13th August, 2024, to write an article headlined “How To Delete Your X Account After Elon Musk’s ‘Vile’ Site Helps Fuel Far-Right Riots”. The article itself was effectively an instruction manual for readers to quit X, guiding the reader through the technicalities of what buttons to push, etc.
Fear of the growing power of social media is also why Stuff on its website took to writing at the end of its online articles: “Be a Friend of Facts. What you’ve just read was written by a fiercely independent reporter and general good human. Our journalists tell it like it is. They’re trained to know facts from falsehoods, science from spin, politicking from public interest…Our journalists are free to report the news across Aotearoa without corporate or government influence.” There are at least seven false statements in this mighty piece of misinformation, including the name of the country. Thus by its own words does Stuff show the greater truth of social media over mainstream.
They have reason to be afraid for their jobs for during the weeks of the protest at Parliament in Wellington against the brutal and unnecessary Covid mandates and lockdowns more people were getting their online information and news from Voices for Freedom and other online groups on social media than from the mainstream media. All this helps explain the continuing hostile articles in mainstream media against X and other social media platforms.
Starmer and his gang of crusading female ministers singled out Musk, the owner of X, as the prime target of blame for the riots that swept through the working class areas of Britain – even more so than Tommy Robinson. And yet neither Musk nor Robinson were even in Britain at the time! Starmer has threatened to force X to “restrict” posts that some of its more than 350 million users might put on it – posts that are “legal but harmful”. This would include any post that dares to question the economically damaging and yet ineffective “net zero” policy or indeed global warming itself.
In the words of the leader of Britain’s Reform Party, Nigel Farage, “What we should be allowed to do on social media is to speculate, to ask questions, to try to put facts out, put facts out that wake up the rest of the community. And while you’re engaged in something like that you can never guarantee that what you say is 100% true….Now, Starmer, by cracking down on that, poses the biggest threat to free speech we’ve seen in our history”.
Starmer must have been a very shonky lawyer not to understand that it is not technologically possible for a social media platform to sift out instantly views that in Starmer’s narrow opinion are false. In the case of United States v Alvarez the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “some false statements are inevitable if there is to be an open and vigorous expression of views”. How could X or other platforms work out what is true and what is false since this can only be done through debate, fact sharing and comparisons within a legal framework that allows it?
As Hannah Cox wrote in Newsweek on 15th August, 2024, “The Brits are in a full-fledged free fall into oppression where citizens will be terrified to push back, unable to meaningfully participate in their government or their society, where neighbours will turn on neighbours”. In other words, a snitch society of Left wing crusaders scouring the Internet to find posts that are off the official narrative and which they can claim are “false”. Just like in the days of the Stasi in East Germany under the Communists.
As part of their war against Musk, which is really a war against free speech, both the British government and the European Union have brought in legislation (Britain’s Online Safety Act and the E.U.’s Digital Services Act) to try to get rid of X by financial means. The British Act demands that social media platforms actively identify, mitigate and manage the risks of harm from “illegal” material – something that, as already mentioned, is technologically impossible. The E.U. allows them to fine X a total of 6% of its global annual revenue while the British Act goes for 10% of the same.
State regulators (censors) cannot be trusted to decide what is “true” speech and what isn’t. Remember the whopping lie that Jacinda Ardern told during the contrived Covid hysteria when she said that she would continue to be “your single source of truth”!!!!!! This was at a time when she was propagating the lie that her government’s chosen vaccine was “safe and effective” when in fact it was neither.
A further part of the Starmer government’s attack on free speech is a proposal to force schools to teach children as young as five to spot “extremist” content and “fake news” online. This is a form of child abuse. Starmer, in his earlier incarnation as Director of Public Prosecutions, used to prosecute people for child abuse. Should he ever feel the same inclination again, perhaps the best place to start would be for him to look in the mirror.
“English classes might be used to scrutinise newspaper reports, comparing their style and language to fake news, while pupils may be taught how to identify fake news websites via their designs,” wrote London’s Independent on 11th August, 2024. Why not use English classes to teach these deprived children how to speak and write basic English grammar, something that teachers now find too boring and insufficiently ideological to satisfy their brainwashing instincts.
The use of the word “extremist” is most disturbing because, if we are to maintain our freedoms and way of life – or even, let it be said, our traditional demographics – it is both natural and desirable to be “extremist” in upholding them. As the Republican presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, said in 1964, “Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice”. Therefore, when the authorities try to demonise people for being “extremists” or, more particularly “Far Right extremists”, they should not only be disbelieved but also called out and exposed.
Since she resigned and fled the country in a hurry Jacinda Ardern has devoted herself to what appears to be her first love: online censorship or, to be more precise, dictating to people what we can think and say on the Internet. In her usual manipulative way she calls it the “Christchurch Call”. The aim of this particular piece of censorship is to combat “online extremist content” – no doubt people like Barry Goldwater for saying “extremist” things in defence of liberty. In her intolerant mind the word “extremist” really applies to any view that gets in the way of her own views and prejudices; this was on public display during her would-be Covid dictatorship. Our forebears have died in the world wars for freedom of speech and we need to be as “extremist” as possible in defending it.
The war against Elon Musk is being waged on several fronts and is very disturbing since X is probably the last bastion of free speech in the world. In the words of Musk himself, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy and Twitter (now X) is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated”.
Oh dear! How dare he utter such heresy. A horrified Under-Secretary in Britain’s Labour government, Jess Phillips, damned X as “a place of misery” (for over 350 million users!). She would know all about misery as her habitually sad face epitomises it – the last person you’d ever want to meet at a party.
John Swinney, the First Minister in Scotland’s devolved government, chimed in and screamed, “The conduct [of X] is unacceptable and needs to be tackled”. His predecessor as First Minister, Humza Yousaf, went further and declared that Musk was “one of the most dangerous men on the planet”. Yes, dangerous to types like Yousaf for providing a platform for people to criticise the secrecy and incompetence of the Scottish government.
During his brief and disastrous term as First Minister Yousaf introduced unprecedented restrictions on free speech, especially in respect of “transgenderism”, which is itself a violation of nature since biologically every person born male has thousands of male only cells while everyone born female has thousands of female only cells and these can never be changed during a human life.
When British commentator Posie Parker pointed out this eternal and proven rule of nature at a park in Auckland, she was physically attacked and had to be rescued by the police. So much for free speech in New Zealand, where it is now subject to the “thug’s veto” – as was so plainly obvious during Julian Batchelor’s tour of the country to oppose the poison of “co-governance”. The hate campaign against social media has been well thought out and no repetition of such slogans as “hate speech”, “racism” or “Far Right” should distract us from its real purpose of straight out censorship.
Another weapon that has been used against X is cyber attacks to prevent people being able to tune in to its debates with Donald Trump and Ron de Santis.
In New Zealand the government’s war against free speech is now so all encompassing that there is even ideological training of police officers who have been ordered that ANY reported incidents of “hate speech” that are not offences still have to be recorded as “hate incidents”, the test of a “hate incident” being anything that the complainants feel is “hateful” towards them as a member of a minority group. But there is no “hate” against Europeans as a group- e.g. the Maori Party’s constant and racist hate campaigns against European New Zealanders. The test for this “hate” is entirely subjective (what some member of the public decides it should be) and not objective. The police do not make reports for other matters that are not offences without good reason so why should they do so for this? Under the defective leadership of Police Commissioner Andrew Coster (an Ardern appointment) the men and women in uniform are fast becoming “thought police” in the manner of the old Soviet Union.
In this war by the authorities against the right of the individual to express himself or herself on social media we must fight back with all our strength. Hopefully this article has shed a little light on the subject. There is more information on this vital matter in the book “Free Speech Under Attack”, published by Tross Publishing (www.trosspublishing.com)