I have had to remain silent for a few days, not only because my computer stopped breathing just after I read, dumbfounded, the news of the death of my friend John Kaminski (of whose illness, unfortunately, I was unaware), but also because I knew that someone very dear to me would no longer read my messages, and would no longer send me any.
It is heartbreaking, but there it is: the further we advance in years, the more we see those we love slipping away, like leaves that a breath of wind suddenly drops (often without any warning) back to Mother Earth.
Years ago I had read some of his articles online and had been so impressed by this NON-Yankee American writer, who understood the essentials (who was, first and foremost, and why, the Enemy of the good, the beautiful, the true, nature, animals, humanity – even the American people themselves)… I wrote to him with sincere admiration and he wrote back immediately. From then on we became friends, and his e-mail address went on my mailing list, as did mine on his.
He even generously wanted to do an interview with me, and I was very honored… I was only sorry that my English was rudimentary and broken, but for him this did not constitute any problem. And he had the same generosity when, sua sponte, he sent me some of his books, precious jewels that I will keep forever.
Thoughtful, kind, sensitive, with an intelligence full of light and always open to new acquisitions, new discoveries, John was like an eternal child explorer of the world and himself. We disagreed on some of his conspiracy theories, but it did not matter because in the background, in the essentials, precisely, we were always in complete agreement.
John, also in this NOT Yankee, hated the hellish kosherbadmusic that became “pop” after 1945, after the catastrophe of National Socialist Germany, of Europe, of civilization. Thus he wrote to me in an email dated January 6, 2024: “Church choral music has long been my favorite musical genre, Gabriel Fauré my favorite composer, and Cantique de Jean Racine my favorite song.” I had just sent him this very short masterpiece by the French composer, and it was a joy for me to read his words.
Before he flew into another dimension, as if he felt that his own departure was near and that he had to write something fundamental and comprehensive on a crucially important subject, he published eight beautiful essays (8, number of cosmic balance and symbol of Infinity) on his site entitled “RELIGION IS A MIND CONTROL DEVICE.” Now the site is no longer online, but I hope someone capable of doing so will save all its contents and other writings of the great John Kaminski on archive.org, one of the few, last oases of freedom of thought and expression
Dear John, I hope with all my heart to see you again in the Elysian Fields.
CAFE protested outside the Maplehurst Detention Centre for political prisoner Leslie Bory who has been inside for 381 days, without bail, for allegedly posting threats against privileged groups on a podcast. His trial may not occur until next January. He will have been in two years Meanwhile violent criminals, mostly black, get bail. It’s political discrimination.
Online Harms Act threatens free expression in Canada
Posted On: February 29, 2024FeaturedNews ReleasesStatement
Online Harms Act threatens free expression in Canada
On February 26, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada Arif Virani introduced Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, in the House of Commons. The Online Harms Act is presented by the government as a means to promote the online safety of persons in Canada and reduce harmful content online. The Online Harms Act would impose severe penalties for online and offline hate speech, including life imprisonment, which is the most severe criminal punishment in Canada. This new legislation would establish a new Digital Safety Commission with power to enforce new regulations created by the federal cabinet. The Canadian Human Rights Commission would acquire new powers to prosecute and punish non-criminal hate speech.
Good intentions should be applauded
Although the Online Harms Act seriously threatens free expression in Canada, there are good intentions behind some of its provisions. It is a laudable goal to force online platforms to remove revenge porn and other non-consensual sharing of intimate images, content that bullies children, content that sexually victimizes children, content that encourages children to harm themselves, and content that incites violence, terrorism or hatred.
Unnecessary duplication of the Criminal Code
However, good intentions do not justify passing additional laws that duplicate what is already prohibited by Canada’s Criminal Code. Additional laws that duplicate existing laws are a poor substitute for good law enforcement.
Section 162.1(1) of Canada’s Criminal Code already prohibits online and offline publication of an intimate image without consent. Section 163 already prohibits publication of obscene materials and child pornography. Thus, it is already illegal to post online content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor.
Section 264(1) already prohibits criminal harassment. Section 319(1) already prohibits the public incitement of hatred towards a group that is identifiable by race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and other personal characteristics. Section 59(1) criminalizes sedition: advocating the use of force to achieve governmental change within Canada. Sections 83.21 and 83.22 criminalize instructing to carry out terrorist activity; any online content that incites terrorism is already illegal.
Further, Section 22 of Canada’s Criminal Code prohibits counselling, procuring, soliciting or inciting another person “to be a party to an offence.” Any person who counsels, procures, solicits or incites another person to be a party to an offence will be found guilty if the person receiving such counsel commits the offence in question. This applies to terrorism and other violent crimes, and even to minor criminal offenses like shoplifting. Further, section 464 of the Criminal Code criminalizes counselling another person to commit an offence even if that offence is not committed.
Those who support the Online Harms Act should explain why they believe that existing legislation is inadequate to address “harmful” online expression.
New government bodies to censor online speech
If passed into law, the Online Harms Act will create a new Digital Safety Commission to enforce compliance with new regulations created by the federal cabinet. This Digital Safety Commission will have the power to regulate nearly any person or entity operating as a “social media service” in Canada. Any person or social media service found to have permitted “harmful content” would face penalties. The severity of the penalties would be established by the federal cabinet. The creators and users of online content will self-censor to avoid the risk of running afoul of the new regulations and government-imposed censorship. The Online Harms Act provides that an Order of the Digital Safety Commission may be converted into an Order of the Federal Court and enforced like a Court Order. This could result in people operating social media services being fined and imprisoned for contempt of court if they refuse to censor Canadians’ speech.
Pre-emptive punishment for crimes not committed
The Online Harms Act, if passed into law, will add section 810.012 to the Criminal Code, which will permit pre-emptive violations of personal liberty when no crime has been committed. This repudiates centuries of legal tradition that rightly reserved punishment for what a person had done, not for what a person might do. Under this new provision, a complainant can assert to a provincial court that they “fear” that someone will promote genocide, hate or antisemitism. If the judge believes that there are “reasonable grounds” to justify the fear, the court can violate the liberty interests of the accused citizen by requiring her or him to do any or all of the following:
wear an ankle bracelet (electronic monitoring device)
obey a curfew and stay at home, as determined by the judge
abstain from alcohol, drugs, or both
provide bodily substances (e.g. blood, urine) to confirm abstinence from drugs or alcohol
not communicate with certain designated persons
not go to certain places, as determined by the judge
surrender her or his legally owned and legally acquired firearms
In other words: a citizen who has not committed any crime can be subjected to one or more (or all) of the above conditions just because someone fears that that person might commit a speech crime in future. Further, if the person who has committed no crime fails to agree to these court-ordered violations of her or his personal liberty, she or he could be sentenced to up to two years in prison.
Our criminal justice system is not supposed to function this way. Violating the liberty of citizens through pre-emptive punishment, when no crime has been committed (and quite possibly when no crime will be committed), is a radical departure from centuries of common law tradition. The respect that our legal system has for individual rights and freedoms means that an accused person is presumed innocent until proven guilty by way of a fair trial, held before an independent and impartial court. We do not punish the innocent, nor do we restrict their liberty based on what they might do. The mere fear that harmful expression may occur is not a legitimate basis for court-ordered imprisonment or other conditions that violate personal liberty.
Life imprisonment for words spoken
For the existing Criminal Code offence of advocating for genocide, the Online Harms Act would raise the maximum penalty from five years in jail to life imprisonment. Free societies recognize the distinction between speech and actions. The Online Harms Act blurs that distinction.
Considering the inherent difficulty in determining whether a person has actually “advocated for genocide,” the punishment of a five-year prison term is already an adequate deterrent for words alone.
Federal cabinet can censor speech without input from Parliament
The Online Harms Act, if passed into law, would give new powers to the federal cabinet to
pass regulations (which have the same force of law as legislation passed by Parliament) that place prohibitions or obligations on social media services. This includes passing regulations that impose fines or other consequences (e.g., the removal of a licence or the shutting down of a website) for non-compliance. New regulations can be created by the federal cabinet in its sole discretion, and do not need to be debated, voted on or approved by Parliament. Parliamentary proceedings are public. Any political party, or even one single MP, can raise public awareness about a Bill that she or he disagrees with, and can mobilize public opposition to that Bill. Not so with regulations, which are deliberated in secret by the federal cabinet, and that come into force without any public consultation or debate.
Apart from a federal election held once every four years, there is no meaningful way to hold cabinet to account for the draconian censorship of social media services by way of regulations and the harsh penalties that may be imposed for hosting “harmful content.” The federal cabinet can also decide what number of “users” the “social media service” needs to have in order to trigger federal regulation of content, or the federal cabinet can simply designate a social media service as regulated, regardless of the number of its users.
New censorship powers for Canadian Human Rights Commission
The Online Harms Act, if passed into law, will give the Canadian Human Rights Commission new powers to prosecute and punish offensive but non-criminal speech by Canadians if, in the subjective opinion of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, they deem someone’s statement to be “hateful.” The Online Harms Act will empower Canadians offended by non-criminal expression to file complaints against their fellow citizens.
Those who are prosecuted by the Human Rights Commission cannot defend themselves by establishing that their supposedly “hateful” statement is true, or that they had reasonable grounds for believing that their statement was true.
Those found guilty by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal can be required to pay as much as $50,000 to the government, plus up to $20,000 to the person(s) designated as “victims” by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. These significant financial penalties will discourage or eliminate necessary discussion on controversial but important issues in our society.
Advocates for censorship often stress the fact that human rights prosecutions are not criminal. It is true that those found guilty of violating vague speech codes by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal do not suffer the consequences of a criminal record. However, those who are prosecuted for expressing their beliefs face the difficult choice of having to spend tens of thousands of dollars on legal bills or having to issue an abject apology. Regardless of whether they choose to defend themselves against the complaint or not, they may still be ordered to pay up to $20,000 to the offended party or up to $50,000 to the government, or up to $70,000 to both.
Many Canadians will continue to exercise their Charter-protected freedom of expression, but many will self-censor to avoid the risk of being prosecuted by the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
Anonymous complaints: no right to face one’s accuser
The Online Harms Act, if passed into law, will allow complaints to be filed against Canadians in secret, such that the citizen who is prosecuted by the Canadian Human Rights Commission loses the ancient and well-founded right to face and question one’s accuser. This repudiates centuries of common law tradition requiring the legal process to be public and transparent.
The pretext for eliminating this necessary and long-standing legal protection is that some complainants might be subjected to “threats, intimidation or discrimination.” This ignores the fact that threats and intimidation are already Criminal Code offences, and any illegal discrimination can be addressed by way of a new and separate complaint. Those filing complaints about expression should be accountable for their decision to do so; this is an inherent and necessary component of both criminal and civil legal proceedings.
No need to establish that someone was harmed
If the Online Harms Act is passed into law, the Canadian Human Rights Commission will not even require a victim in order to prosecute a citizen for what she or he has said. For example, a man in Vancouver can file an anonymous complaint against a woman in Nova Scotia who made disparaging online remarks about a mosque in Toronto, regardless of whether that mosque’s members were harmed, or even offended, by the post. No actual victims are required for the Canadian Human Rights Commission to find guilt or to impose penalties. Nor does a victim need to prove that he or she suffered loss or damage; feeling offended by alleged “hate” is all that is needed to become eligible for financial compensation.
Conclusion
For reasons set out here above, the Online Harms Act will harm freedom of expression in Canada if it is passed into law. Many Canadians will self-censor to avoid being prosecuted by the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Canadians who do not self-censor, by practicing courage and by continuing to exercise their Charter-protected freedom of expression, will still see their online expression removed from the internet by the operators of social media websites and platforms. These operators will seek to avoid running afoul of Mr. Trudeau’s new regulations. Everyone will live in fear of the Digital Safety Commission.
The Justice Centre urges all Members of Parliament to vote against this legislation.
Leap Day this year is the fortieth anniversary of Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s announcement that during a “walk in the snow” he had decided that he would step down and not lead the Liberal Party into the next Dominion election. He had been leader of the Grits for sixteen years since Lester Pearson stepped down in April of 1968. With the exception of the six month premiership of Joe Clark he had been Prime Minister all that time. His was the third longest premiership in Canadian history. The longest was that of William Lyon Mackenzie King who had been a different kind of Liberal leader. King, like Trudeau, had been a traitor to Canada, her history, heritage, and traditions, but in his case it was American-style capitalist liberalism to which he had sold us out. In the case of Pierre Trudeau it was Soviet and Chinese Communism that was his true master. Canada’s second longest premiership was also her first that of Sir John A. Macdonald. Sir John had been the leader of the Fathers of Confederation and never betrayed us. Nor did Canadians ever grow tired of Old Tomorrow. Shortly before his death in 1891 he won his sixth majority in that year’s Dominion Election by campaigning for “The Old Flag, the Old Policy, the Old Leader” against a Liberal Party that sought to move us closer economically and culturally into the orbit of the United States. By contrast by the time Trudeau took his famous walk Canadians had grown absolutely sick and tired of him. The Liberals were heading to defeat, Trudeau knew it, and in the interest of preserving his legacy and what was left of his reputation jumped off the ship before it sank.
The electorate’s having grown sick of Trudeau and his party should be regarded as the expected outcome when a Prime Minister remains in office for a long period of time. Sir John’s enduring popularity can be taken as the exception explainable by the fact that he was an exceptional statesman, identified with the country he led as no other Prime Minister could ever hope to be due to his central role in her founding, and a personable leader to whom people could relate. When a Sovereign, like Queen Victoria during whose reign Confederation took place or like our late Queen Elizabeth II of Blessed Memory, has an exceptionally long reign this is cause for celebration and rejoicing. It is the role of the Sovereign, after all, to embody the principle of continuity and everything that is enduring, lasting, and permanent in the realm. The man who fills the Prime Minister’s office, by contrast, is very much the man of the moment. Premierships, therefore, are usually best kept short.
Pierre Trudeau’s son, Captain Airhead, has been Prime Minister since 2015 and Canadians are now far sicker of him than they ever were of his father. Personally, I had had more than enough of him while he was still the third party leader prior to the 2015 Dominion Election. Why it took this long for the rest of the country to catch up with me I have no idea but here we are. It is 2024 and Canadians are divided on whether they would like Captain Airhead to follow his father’s footsteps and take a walk in the snow, whether they would like to see him suffer the humiliation of going down in defeat in the next Dominion Election or whether they would like to see him brought down in an act of direct divine intervention involving a lightning bolt that strikes the ground beneath him causing it to open up, swallow him whole, and belch out fire and brimstone. What unites Canadians is that we all wish that he would make like Dr. Seuss’ Marvin K. Mooney and “please go now.” Thermidor is rapidly approaching for Captain Airhead and his version of the Liberal Party as it eventually comes for all Jacobins.
The Canadian Robespierre seems determined, however, not to go to his inevitable guillotine without one last stab at imposing his ghoulish and clownish version of the Reign of Terror. On Monday the Liberals tabled, as they have been threatening to do since the last Dominion Election, Bill C-63, an omnibus bill that would enhance government power in the name of combatting “online harms.” A note to American readers, in the Commonwealth to “table” a bill does not mean to take it off the table, i.e., to suspend or postpone it as in the United States, but rather to put it on the table, i.e., to introduce it. Defenders of omnibus bills regard them as efficient time-savers. They are also convenient ways to smuggle in something objectionable that is unlikely to pass if forced to stand on its own merits by rolling it up with something that is desirable and difficult or impossible to oppose without making yourself look bad. In this case, the Liberals are trying to smuggle in legislation that would allow Canadians to sue other Canadians for up to $20 000, with the possibility of being fined another $50 000 payable to the government thrown in on top of it, over online speech they consider to be hateful and legislation that would make it possible for someone to receive life imprisonment for certain “hate crimes”, by rolling it up in a bill ostensibly about protecting children from online bullying and pornographic exploitation. As is always the case when the Liberals introduce legislation that has something to do with combatting hate it reads like they interpreted George Orwell’s depiction of Big Brother in 1984 as a “how-to” manual.
Nobody with an IQ that can be expressed with a positive number could possibly be stupid enough to think that this Prime Minister or any of his Cabinet cares about protecting children. Consider their response to the actions taken over the last year or so by provincial premiers such as New Brunswick’s Blaine Higgs and Alberta’s Danielle Smith to do just that, protect children from perverts in the educational system hell-bent on robbing children of their innocence and filling their heads with sex and smut from the earliest grades. Captain Airhead and his corrupt cohorts denounced and demonized these premiers’ common-sense, long overdue, efforts, treating them not as the measures taken in defense of children and their parents and families that they were, but as an attack on the alphabet soup gang, one of the many groups that the Liberals and the NDP court in the hopes that these in satisfaction over having their special interests pandered to will overlook the progressive left’s contemptuous disregard for the common good of the whole country and for the interests of those who don’t belong to one or another of their special groups.
Nor could any Canadian capable of putting two and two together and who is even marginally informed about what has been going on in this country in this decade take seriously the Prime Minister’s posturing about hate. The leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Pierre Poilievre, when asked about what stance the Conservatives would take towards this bill made the observation that Captain Airhead given his own past is the last person who should be dictating to other Canadians about hate. Poilievre was referring to the blackface scandal that astonishingly failed to end Captain Airhead’s career in 2019. It would have been more to the point to have referenced the church burnings of 2021. In the summer of that year, as Captain Airhead hosted conferences on the subjects of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia that consisted of a whole lot of crying and hand-wringing and thinking out ways to get around basic rights and freedoms so as to be able to throw in gaol anyone who looks at a Jew or Muslim cross-eyed, Canada was in the midst of the biggest spree of hate crimes in her history. Christian church buildings all across Canada were targeted for arson and/or other acts of vandalism. Not only did Captain Airhead fail to treat this violent and criminal display of Christophobia as a serious problem in the same way he was treating these other types of hatred directed towards specific religions he played a significant role in inciting these attacks on Canada’s Christian churches by promoting a narrative in which all allegations against Canada’s churches and her past governors with regards to the Indian Residential Schools are accepted without question or requirement of proof. (1)
Clearly Captain Airhead does not give a rat’s rump about hate qua hate. If hatred is directed towards people he doesn’t like, like Christians, he shrugs it off even when it is expressed through violent, destructive, crime. If it is directed against people he likes, or, more accurately, against groups to which he panders, he treats it as if it were the most heinous of crimes even if it is expressed merely in words. While I am on principle opposed to all laws against hate since they are fundamentally unjust and by nature tyrannical (2) they are especially bad when drawn up by someone of Captain Airhead’s ilk.
Captain Airhead’s supposed concern about “online harms” is also a joke. Consider how he handles real world harms. His approach to the escalating problem of substance abuse is one that seeks to minimize the harm drug abusers do to themselves by providing them with a “safe” supply of their poison paid for by the government. This approach is called “harms reduction” even though when it comes to the harms that others suffer from drug abuse such as being violently attacked by someone one doesn’t know from Adam because in his drug-induced mania he thinks his victim is a zombie space alien seeking to eat his brain and lay an egg in the cavity, this approach should be called “harms facilitation and enablement.” Mercifully, there is only so much Captain Airhead can do to promote this folly at the Dominion level and so it is only provinces with NDP governments, like the one my province was foolish enough to elect last year, that bear the full brunt of it. Then there was his idea that the solution to the problem of overcrowded prisons and criminal recidivism was to release those detained for criminal offenses back into the general public as soon after their arrest as possible. Does this sound like someone who can be trusted to pass legislation protecting people from “online harms”?
Captain Airhead inadvertently let slip, last week, the real reason behind this bill. In an interview he pined for the days when Canadians were all on the same page, got all their information from CBC, CTV, and Global, before “conspiracy theorists” on the internet ruined everything. He was lamenting the passing of something that never existed, of course. People were already getting plenty of information through alternative sources on the internet long before his premiership and the mainstream legacy media became far more monolithic in the viewpoints it presented during and because of his premiership. What he was pining for, therefore, was not really something that existed in the past, but what he has always hoped to establish in the future – a Canada where everyone is of one opinion, namely his. This is, after all, the same homunculus who, back when a large segment of the country objected to him saying that they would be required to take a foreign substance that had been inadequately tested and whose manufacturers were protected against liability into their bodies if they ever wanted to be integrated back into ordinary society, called them every name in the book and questioned whether they should be tolerated in our midst.
Some have suggested that Bill C-63 is not that bad compared with what the Liberals had originally proposed three years ago. It still, however, is a thinly-veiled attempt at thought control from a man who is at heart a narcissistic totalitarian and whose every act as Prime Minister, from trying to reduce the cost of health care and government benefits by offering people assistance in killing themselves (MAID) to denying people who having embraced one or more of the letters of the alphabet soup, had a bad trip, the help they are seeking in getting free, deserves to be classified with the peccata clamantia. It took a lot of pain and effort for this country to finally rid herself of the evil Section 13 hate speech provision that Captain Airhead’s father had saddled us with in the Canadian Human Rights Act. Captain Airhead must not be allowed to get away with reversing that.
It is about time that he took a walk in the snow. Or got badly trounced in a Dominion election. Or fell screaming into a portal to the netherworld that opened up beneath his feet. Any of these ways works.
The time is come. The time is now. Just go. Go. GO! I don’t care how. Captain Airhead, would you please go now?! (3)
(1) Anyone who thinks the allegations were proven needs to learn the difference between evidence and proof. Evidence is what is brought forward to back up a claim. Proof is what establishes the truth of a claim. That the evidence advanced for the allegations in question simply does not add up to proof and moreover was flimsy from the onset and has subsequently been largely debunked is an entirely valid viewpoint the expression of which is in danger of being outlawed by the bill under discussion. In a court of criminal law the burden is upon the prosecutor to prove the charge(s) against the defendant. Not merely to present evidence but to prove the accused to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The same standard must be applied to allegations made against historical figures and past generations. They, after all, are not present to defend themselves against their accusers. To fail to do so is to fail in our just duty towards those who have gone before us. The ancients had a term for this failure. It is the vice of impiety.
(2) The folly of legislation against hate was best expressed by Auberon Waugh in an article entitled “Che Guevara in the West Midlands” that was first published in the 6 July, 1976 issue of The Spectator, and later included in the collection Brideshead Benighted (Toronto: Little, Brown & Company, 1986). Michael Wharton, however, writing as “Peter Simple” was second to none, not even Waugh, in ridiculing this sort of thing.– Gerry T, Neal
Lawfare By New York Radical Leftist Letitia James Targets Peter Brimelow and VDARE, Immigration Critics for Destruction
Tucker Carlson recently interviewed Lydia Brimelow about New York Attorney General Letitia James’s attack on VDare.
Transcript:
Tucker [00:00:00] Illegal immigration into the United States is at its highest levels ever. Tens of millions of people have come here illegally over the past 15 years, and none of them will ever leave. Mostly they come from the poorest countries on the planet. We don’t know anything about them, really. We don’t know if they’re pro-America. We don’t know if they’re hostile to the people who already live here. We don’t know, in the case of the recent arrivals, what they’re going to do for a living as robotics eliminate low-skilled jobs. So what’s happening right now at the border that what’s often mentioned on TV is really undersold as a story. This is changing America forever, and almost certainly for the worse as we’re watching it. And no one is doing anything about it. The governor of Texas occasionally makes noises about it — it’s over his border that this human wave is flowing, and yet he’s taken no real steps to stop it. There are some media outlets that let you know that it’s happening in general terms, but they don’t seem particularly outraged by it. We’re sitting here as our country is destroyed and no one’s responding, and at some point you have to ask why? Are the majority of Americans in favor of this? Of course not. In fact, no one’s in favor of this. No one will defend this in public. No one will explain why we need it. Why it’s a good idea. How it’s going to help this country. How your grandchildren will live in a better place because of it. People are just silent, like it’s not even happening. And again, you have to ask why. And the answer, of course, is really simple because they’re afraid, they know they’ll be punished if they say anything about it. The story of Peter and Lydia Brimelow explains why they’re afraid. Peter Brimelow has been a journalist for 50 years. Worked at a whole bunch of what are now called mainstream publications. Was an editor — Barron’s, Forbes, National Review, Dow Jones, a legitimate old school journalist. And in the late 90s, he began to ask questions about our immigration scheme. Is this really good idea, is it helping America? And of course, no one could answer those questions because the answer is obvious. No, it’s destroying America; as it destroyed California, so it will destroy your state. That’s certain. But for asking that question, he was fired from his jobs and shunted off into what we call the fringes. But he didn’t stop. He started a website called VDARE. He runs it now with his wife, Lydia.
And for the crime in the supposedly free country of opposing the immigration system currently in place — not the official system, but the actual system — where anyone from the poorest parts of America [sic] with no skills whatsoever can come here and immediately go on welfare. That’s our current system. For saying that that’s a bad idea, powerful forces have just tried, to destroy their lives, not just their lives, the lives of their family, using the justice system to do it. And needless to say, you probably guessed, using something called the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is nothing to [do with] the South or poverty. It has to do with shutting down free speech in this country. They have descended on the Brimelows and have really kind of tried to destroy them. That’s not an overstatement, but you judge for yourself because Lydia Brimelow, who helps run VDARE, joins us now to explain what’s happened to her. Lydia, thanks so much for coming on.
Lydia Brimelow [00:03:13] Thank you so much, Tucker. It’ll be very nice to have our story told.
Tucker [00:03:18] So I have known your husband, sort of, since he was not a controversial figure at all. And he became a controversial figure when he began to say things like, hey, why are we doing this? And he was immediately called a white nationalist, a white supremacist. And I remember very well his response, which is, no, I’m not. And if I was, I’d say so. But that kept up and he wound up publishing with you, VDARE online. That would seem not a particularly controversial thing to do in a free country. But for your family, it’s been, a very risky thing to do. So I hope that you would explain to us what the government, we’ll start with the government, is trying to do to you for daring to oppose the immigration system.
Lydia Brimelow [00:04:03] Yeah, absolutely. So it’s hard to believe everybody who hears the story says it’s completely incredible. Peter founded VDARE Foundation, which has [as] its main project VDARE.com, back in the late 90s. As you said, we’re in our 25th year now, and I joined about ten years ago. I do the fundraising and the back office work, and he handles everything that goes up on the website VDARE.com. We’re a nonprofit journalism enterprise. So everything that we do, all of our people are paid through generous donations from individuals. I can tell you we don’t get any government grants or big foundation grants either. It’s all just grassroots. And we’re veterans of cancel culture at this point. So we’ve been kicked off a lot of mainstream services that most people use to distribute the media that they produce. And that is nothing compared to what we’re facing right now, which started about two years ago, originating out of the hate crimes division in the state of New York. A series of subpoenas were issued by Letitia James first, to Facebook, which I can explain a little bit in a minute. And then to us and our board members, at VDARE Foundation, with no clear trigger, they have refused to tell us what they’re investigating. It’s been two years of us just being crushed under this burden of investigation. The subpoenas were, like, 47 points each.
They want us to turn over essentially every document that we have interacted with, since 2016. And for a small organization, you know, at our peak, we had four full time employees. Right now we have two. That’s Peter and myself. This has just been an absolutely crushing burden. And I will say the Facebook subpoena was interesting because we had actually been kicked off of Facebook, years previous. So we had not even been on Facebook to interact with Facebook in many years, and they were asking for all of the data that VDARE had ever accumulated, created, while we were on Facebook, which we had incidentally, also requested. VDARE was kicked off of Facebook the same day that every one of the people involved in our organization was kicked off, including myself. I had never posted anything political online, at all, but they took all my baby pictures. The video of my daughter’s first steps, which was not saved anywhere else. Facebook still has that. They have, in fact, told my lawyers that we are too dangerous to get our data back, including my daughter taking her first steps. So that was the first subpoena that Letitia James’s hate crimes division issues.
Tucker [00:06:43] May I ask you to pause for one moment and just clarify something. So Facebook is calling you too dangerous to possess your own baby pictures? Has VDARE ever committed violence? Is there something we’re missing? Terrorism? Insurrection. Killing people?
Lydia Brimelow [00:06:59] Never.
Tucker [00:07:00] Okay, okay. Sorry. I just want to clarify that.
Lydia Brimelow [00:06:59] We’ve never even been accused of doing that, right? I mean, people use these scare smear words all the time, white nationalists, white supremacists, racist, xenophobe, whatever the flavor of the day is.
So we get accused of being those things all the time, which we would argue we are not. But violence is something we have never been associated with. We’re even careful to talk about the national divorce because of what implications that might have. I mean, we’re living in a very high-tension environment right now politically. And I think it’s important that people choose their words very carefully and choose their actions very carefully. I think it’s entirely justified that a large portion of the American population feels drawn to activism right now, but it needs to be chosen very carefully. And once you destroy something, you can’t take it back. And our enemies should remember that too. Once they destroy us, what are they going to do then?
But to go back to the subpoenas, we have our mainstream, you know, when I say mainstream, what I mean is like in normal times when VDARE is just surviving cancel culture and putting out this message that demography is destiny and that America is legitimate and real, that we’re a true culture and we have a national identity that’s worth defending, and that immigration has massive negative effects that nobody’s talking about.
Our operation is about $800,000 a year. In the last 12 months, about, we’ve had to spend half a million dollars just complying with the subpoenas.
“ Christian persecution is about to be introduced in Canada: If passed, Bill C-367 could land Christians in jail for quoting the Bible or expressing a faith based opinion if the Canadian government deems it “promotion of hatred or antisemitism”. This is an absolute disgrace.”
Christianity illegal? Long-running government campaign to stir hate reaching end goal
A government hate campaign against Christianity that WND first documented some 16 years ago when Canada’s discriminatory speech limits first started affecting Christian ministries there, is reaching its end game now.
It’s a plan to “criminalize Christianity, with Bible reading and prayer considered ‘hate speech’ – a ‘crime’ punishable with prison time,” according to a new re
he report explains, in blunt terms, “Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s World Economic Forum-controlled government is planning to outlaw Christianity with the introduction of an amendment to the Criminal Code that could see believers face jail time for expressing historic Christian teachings.”
The problems are found in Canada’s Bill C-367 that “will make it illegal to reiterate parts of the Bible, stripping away the ‘good faith’ defense for what is deemed by the state as ‘hate speech’ or ‘antisemitism.'”
Christianity illegal? Long-running government campaign to stir hate reaching end goal
New plan predicted to ‘overtly persecute’ faith members ‘with the force of criminal law’
By Bob Unruh Published February 29, 2024 at 4:31pm
The problems are found in Canada’s Bill C-367 that “will make it illegal to reiterate parts of the Bible, stripping away the ‘good faith’ defense for what is deemed by the state as ‘hate speech’ or ‘antisemitism.'”
Explained the report, “Traditional Christian practices such as celebrating Christmas or attending church service will be considered crimes that carry severe penalties.”
The procedure is simple. The changes in the law will remove a defense to hate crimes charges that allow statements if individuals “genuinely believe in and were merely expressing religious teaching” from the Bible.
The legislative scheme states its plan specifically: “The enactment amends the Criminal Code to eliminate as a defense against wilful promotion of hatred or antisemitism the fact that a person, in good faith, expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion or a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text.”
The result if ratified will be the willful and knowing persecution of Christians in Canada, an expert said
The procedure is simple. The changes in the law will remove a defense to hate crimes charges that allow statements if individuals “genuinely believe in and were merely expressing religious teaching” from the Bible.
It was Joseph Boot, chief of the evangelical think tank Ezra Institute, who said, “If ratified, Canada’s anti-Christian legal apparatus created over the last decade will overtly persecute Christians with the force of criminal law.”
He warned heavy fines or jail time will be imposed on those participating in “evangelism, preaching, counseling, statements in the workplace, on social media, and in books that condemn homosexuality or transgenderism on biblical grounds.”
And, the report said, Gab CEO Andrew Torba warned, “Christians who maintain traditional orthodox perspectives about Jews – views that have been part of our faith for 2,000 years, are the primary obstacle to the Ruling Regime.”
The bill, while still pending in parliament, is expected ultimately to pass.
WND’s original reporting on the issue first arose in 2008 when an official with the National Religious Broadcasters Association warned about Canada’s “hate crimes” laws targeting Christians.
At that time, what used to be called MacGregor Ministries, which offered lessons on how to recognize and eliminate “faulty fads” in Christian churches, made a forced move into the U.S. and created another name because of government threats in Canada.
A spokeswoman for the ministry said, then, “When a group such as Jehovah’s Witnesses said of our doctrine we’re worshipping a freakish three-headed God (the Trinity), we should be able to respond. We say, ‘Here’s the doctrine of the Trinity and here is where it is in the Scripture.'”
But those opinions, she explained, would be found in violation of Canada’s hate crimes laws.
The spokeswoman said the government ordered a complete change, or a shutdown, so the ministry moved.
“There was nothing we could do that would please them,” the spokeswoman said. “They wanted us every time we criticized something to say, ‘So Christianity is equal to Buddhism, Islam, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses… Just decide for yourself.'”
At the same time, WND discovered the Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family, one of the largest Christian publishing and broadcasting organizations in the nation, was reviewing and editing its broadcasts to avoid offending Canadian “hate crimes” censors.
The ministry stated, “In particular, our content producers are careful not to make generalized statements nor comments that may be perceived as ascribing malicious intent to a ‘group’ of people and are always careful to treat even those who might disagree with us with respect. Our Focus on the Family content creators here in the U.S. are also careful to consult with Focus on the Family Canada whenever questions arise. Focus on the Family Canada, in turn, monitors the content produced in the U.S. and assesses this content against Canadian law.”
Under the online harms act, those guilty of hate speech could face up to life in prison. Photo by Getty Images
When I was a kid, we used to say that, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt.” Nowadays, offensive speech is considered violence. Silence is violence. And those whose words are deemed by the state to be most egregious will be treated like serial killers.
“All of us expect to be safe in our homes, in our neighbourhoods and in our communities,” said Justice Minister Arif Virani, after tabling Bill C-63, the online harms act, in the House of Commons on Monday. “We should be able to expect the same kind of safety in our online communities.”
Except many Canadians don’t feel safe in their communities anymore. Last summer, Statistics Canada reported that the police-reported crime rate in 2022 had increased by five per cent compared to a year earlier. The homicide rate rose for the fourth consecutive year, reaching its highest level since 1992.
Rather than focusing on the type of crime that puts Canadians’ property and physical safety at risk — the “sticks and stones,” if you will — the government has chosen to focus on the words being transmitted to our smartphones and laptops.
To accomplish this, the Liberals propose burdening “social media” platforms with heavy-handed regulations; creating a giant censorship bureaucracy to force compliance; and re-empowering kangaroo courts to persecute people for thought crimes.
Bill C-63 establishes a new digital safety commission, digital safety ombudsperson and digital safety office (to assist the commission and ombudsman), which will be responsible for ensuring revenge porn and child pornography are taken offline within 24 hours. (Though child porn is already taken seriously by social media platforms and, if history is any indication, it won’t be long before the new bureaucracy’s mission expands).
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Websites will be responsible for ensuring they have tools that allow users to flag posts and systems in place to determine whether they meet the definition of “harmful content,” which includes “content that induces a child to harm themselves,” “content used to bully a child,” “content that foments hatred,” “content that incites violence” and “content that incites violent extremism or terrorism.”
While social media companies will be required to submit data on the volume of harmful content found on their sites to the new digital safety commission, enforcement will be punted to the courts and the human rights tribunal, where the penalties are much steeper than merely having a post arbitrarily deleted.
The bill would reinstate parts of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which will once again put decisions over what constitutes online hate speech in the hands of the quasi-judicial Canadian Human Rights Commission (HRC) and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.
It would also increase the penalty for anyone who “advocates or promotes genocide” to a maximum of life in prison — the same sentence, it should be noted, as was handed to Robert Pickton, one of Canada’s most prolific serial killers and rapists. And it specifically prohibits website operators from notifying users when they have been reported to law enforcement.
Although the Criminal Code uses the standard definition of genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part any identifiable group,” there is no longer any consensus — within government or society — on what the term “genocide” actually means. This could have profound implications for how the online harms act is enforced.
Even the strict legal definition could be muddied by the fact that Trudeau accepted the conclusions of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, “including that what happened amounts to genocide” — even though what took place doesn’t meet the legal definition of genocide.
As law professor Bruno Gelinas-Faucher told The Canadian Press in 2021, “A court could say … that the state has accepted responsibility under international law for the crime of genocide” — which is “a big deal.”
Even though prosecuting and enforcing penalties for the crime of promoting genocide would be left to the courts, vindictive users looking to punish those whose views they disagree with will be empowered to flag content, which websites will then have a responsibility to investigate (and possibly incentivized to censor in order to look as though they’re complying with the spirit of the law), and to submit frivolous complaints with the Human Rights Commission.
Do we trust the ideologues working for the HRC or the left-wing activists churned out by universities and scooped up by tech companies to determine whether any given social media post or online video meets the strict legal definition of promoting genocide? How could we, given that the term has been so watered down, no one seems to agree on what it means anymore?
Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, Jews and other supporters of Israel have been claiming that protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” are advocating genocide because a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean would necessitate the destruction of the Jewish state. On the other side are people who erroneously claim that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza and that anyone who supports its war against Hamas is therefore advocating genocide.
I’ll let you decide which group is more likely to end up on the wrong side of Trudeau’s new censorship regime.