“Censor not, lest ye be censored,” Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, tweeted recently. Since purchasing Twitter, Musk has been vilified by the far left and liberal activist community for pledging to restore free speech on the platform, ostensibly allowing more conservative and right-wing voices space on one of the world’s largest and most influential social media sites.
That very same day, Monday, April 24, several notable right-wing dissidents were unceremoniously deplatformed and banned on Twitter with no explanation given. Popular talk radio personality James Edwards, the longtime host of The Political Cesspool, Dr. Kevin MacDonald, one of the leading dissident intellectuals who edits The Occidental Observer, Dr. Tom Sunic, a Croatian-American former diplomat, academic, and author, along with countless others had their increasingly popular Twitter accounts permanently banned.
Edwards explained to this reporter:
I had been on Twitter since 2016 and never once received a prior warning or reprimand. This wasn’t my second or third strike. This was an online assassination that went straight to a permanent ban. No reason was given.
I conduct myself professionally and have always been sure to responsibly present our arguments. I don’t quarrel with individuals on social media and have never even used profanity or crude rhetoric.
Simply put, by no reasonable standard of measurement could it be argued that I violated even the most ambiguous terms of service. This was just another case of naked censorship.
Dr. Kevin MacDonald noted he simply received an email with a subject line that read: “Your account is permanently suspended.”
The email continued:
After careful review, we determined your account broke the Twitter Rules. Your account is permanently in read-only mode, which means you can’t Tweet, Retweet, or Like content. You won’t be able to create new accounts. If you think we got this wrong, you can submit an appeal.
No reason was provided for the permanent ban, and no explanation was provided detailing in what specific way any Twitter Rules were violated.
“No reason was given and that’s also the case with James,” MacDonald told this reporter referring to the permanent ban. “We have appealed, asking for reasons but I rather doubt anything good will happen.”
Sunic, meanwhile, noted that the Twitter ban didn’t surprise him at all, arguing “that the censorship in the U.S. is continuing where the Soviet Union left off.”
Sunic wrote following his ban:
I know what I am talking about. My family and I were all proscribed in communist ex-Yugoslavia for several decades. My father, an ex-lawyer, even served prison time for “hostile anti-communist literature.”
Now we are witnessing the same intellectual purges, albeit adorned with fancy and demonic euphemisms such as “hate speech” and “ethnic sensitivity training” in the U.S. and EU—akin to the ex-Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, i.e., the NKVD.
Several other dissident commentators were purged recently as well, including Andrew Anglin, editor and lead writer for The Daily Stormer, easily one of the most censored websites in the world. Paul Fromm, a Canadian free speech activist and occasional contributor to this newspaper, was also banned. It remains unclear what specific rules any of these activists, writers, and commentators broke, if any.
In addition to the recent censoring of popular dissidents, many other content creators and political activists have been permanently banned for months now. Mike Peinovich, Joseph Jordan, Warren Balogh, and others associated with the National Justice Party (NJP), a burgeoning political movement dedicated to advocating “for White civil rights, the working and middle class, and the traditional family against our corrupt and illegitimate institutions,” have been shut down and censored on Twitter. Links to the organization’s website are also banned from even being shared on the platform.
Patriotic Alternative, a similar right-wing political movement based in the UK, and its leadership and affiliated organizations are also permanently banned on Twitter. Additionally, Nick Fuentes, a leading political commentator and organizer based in Chicago, is also banned on the platform.
Laura Towler, a leader with Patriotic Alternative, recently pointed out:
Twitter censorship is worse under Elon Musk than it ever was before. Not only are most of our accounts suspended still/again, but so are URLs to websites like Patriotic Alternative and NJP. This makes it almost impossible to share any [public] activism, direct people to solutions, or even recruit people to sign up. People are able to lie about us and we have no ability to defend ourselves.
Warren Balogh also powerfully argued that censorship under Musk is even more extreme than it was previously, noting that Musk purchased “the most important social media platform in the world for political discourse, with the promise to restore free speech, then [has made] it more restrictive than it ever was for dissident individuals and parties in the West at the wishes of the ADL [Anti-Defamation League.—Ed.].”
Balogh explained:
This is what we get living under the arbitrary rule of an oligarchy of degenerate billionaires. This whole system has to go, including oligarchs like Musk who think they are gods, and the world and all our most fundamental freedoms are their playthings, that they can amuse themselves with or discard when they get bored.
Shortly after purchasing Twitter, which was a long, drawn-out process fraught with controversy and conflict, Musk openly stated that, under his watch, the platform would allow all speech that the First Amendment specifically protects.
“By ‘free speech,’ I simply mean that which matches the law,” Musk tweeted on April 26, 2022. “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”
Musk’s mixed messaging and outright schizophrenic thinking on free speech matters continues to grow. While denouncing censorship on his personal Twitter account, which receives millions of views, his underlings at the social media behemoth censor legitimate and responsible right-wing dissidents that have long been in the crosshairs of organized special interest groups like the ADL, who work overtime to cancel and shut down their opposition.
NB: This article was originally published by American Free Press on May 17, 2023. Subscribe to America’s last real newspaper today!
Greetings! The following press release is being sent out later today, but we want our loyal supporters to receive the news here first:
Free to Fly Canada, through retained counsel Umar Sheikh of Sheikh Law, has filed a Class Action lawsuit against the Canadian government on behalf of aviation employees harmed as a result of vaccination mandates. We have developed a comprehensive and methodical approach to holding the government responsible and bringing justice to thousands of impacted workers.
Plaintiffs Greg Hill, Brent Warren, and Tanya Lewis are representative of a proposed class of those subjected to tortuous harm by Transport Canada’s “Interim Order Respecting Certain Requirements for Civil Aviation Due to COVID-19, No. 43“. This Order mandated vaccination for those within the transport community in 2021. In so doing, it induced employers to violate contractual agreements for thousands of Canadian employees, violated rights guaranteed by the Charter, and interfered with free and fair collective bargaining. This is the first time a case of this type has been brought in Canadian Courts and we are proud to help chart this course.
The class action is open to any unvaccinated employees who have been adversely affected by Transport Canada’s Interim Order 43. This could be reflected through termination of employment, coerced early retirement, or suspension. These suspensions were often called a leave of absence by employers, but given their involuntary nature were not thus, by definition. We have been failed by our government, unions, and employers, and this proceeding is a means to fight back. To read the full pleading and get more information on signing up or supporting, please use the link below. We’ll be sure to keep you updated and appreciate any and all support in moving this cause forward! Greg & Matt
I had been on Twitter since 2016 and never once received a prior warning or reprimand. This wasn’t my second or third strike. This was an online assassination that went straight to a permanent ban. No reason was given. I conduct myself professionally and have always been sure to responsibly present our arguments. I don’t quarrel with individuals on social media and have never even used profanity or crude rhetoric. Simply put, by no reasonable standard of measurement could it be argued that I violated even the most ambiguous Terms of Service. This was just another case of naked censorship.
It also wasn’t my first rodeo. I was banned by Facebook and PayPal in the mid-2000s, long before it became altogether commonplace for dissidents to be banned from everything. At this point, I very nearly have been banned from everything, including YouTube, Amazon, and every known credit card payment processor in the universe. Frankly, I have never known any other reality.
Because of this, I was relatively late to join the Twitter party, not arriving until the fall of 2016. Within weeks, Hillary Clinton was featuring my Twitter account in a campaign ad against Donald Trump. Though my work had been covered/targeted by countless print and broadcast media outlets long before my tenure on Twitter, there was no doubt that Twitter boosted my audience and led to greater exposure. By the time the end came this week, my Tweets were routinely gathering tens of thousands of views, sometimes hundreds of thousands. One recent Tweet generated in excess of one million views, which, in truth, is probably the reason I have been taken out.
I suppose the only real surprise was that I was able to last there for as many years as I did. When it comes to arbitrary censorship, the interesting thing is that you just never know when or why you’ll be taken out. As I said, I certainly didn’t do anything to bring this upon myself; the timing of these things is always random. You just wake up one day and you’re gone. In the meantime, there are a limitless number of minority racists whose accounts are littered with profane, hate-filled rants that call for the actual murder of White people. Of course, those accounts are safe.
I was hardly the only one to be shipped off to the Twitter Gulag this week. At the exact same time that I was banned, Dr. Kevin MacDonald and Dr. Tomislav Sunic, among others, were also shuttered. MacDonald and Sunic, especially, are gentlemen and legitimate scholars whose voices deserve any and all platforms. Still, if the party has to end, it’s always better to leave with friends. It was not lost upon us that we all survived the previous regime only to be banned by Elon Musk’s operation.
One commenter wrote that we could take our bans as a high compliment, as well as “an independent verification that you all stand on the moral high ground of truth and courage.” Sure, at least there’s that, but MacDonald alone had a following numbering five Roman legions that have now been dispatched into the ether.
It would be disingenuous for me to tell you that it isn’t somewhat maddening to build up a large, organic following only to have it evaporated on a whim. Like most people, I don’t like being violated. But what I like even less is to hear men whine about things not being fair. I have long possessed an admiration for the Machiavellian nature of our enemies. They have done to me exactly what I would do to them. I respect that. They have set the rules and we should remember them.
I do not now, nor have I ever believed in the equality of individuals or ideas. We are right and they are wrong. If I were in control, I would be eager to do everything within my power to extract the anti-White, “woke” agenda from our society. Root and stem. I give my enemy credit for being more ruthless than our people, who are still too noble for their own good. While we ought not to lose the moral compass that separates us from our adversaries, we must see things clearly.
Still, the one message above all others that I want people to remember during this teachable moment is that we cannot apologize for our positions or behave during times of difficulty in a way that brings dishonor to our cause. It is an animating thing to engage in the struggle of one’s time. In the best of us, it will stir the Faustian spirit that exists within our hearts and minds. Without trials of principle, you will never know whether or not you are honest. Making the hard decision during times of challenge brings honor to our ancestors and solidifies our standing as a man.
As a friend of mine recently put it, great men are never made except through great trials. Adversities aren’t obstacles, but rather our greatest opportunities — to get better, forge our character, work harder, become smarter, and prove our worth. You won’t know what you’re made of until your time comes and you face a decision. We should welcome these opportunities, whether it be something as trivial as a social media ban or during other situations when the stakes are much higher.
At the end of the day, I remain thankful for the opportunity to serve and hope that whatever example I set can be done for the greater good of our collective. In the meantime, the show must go on and it’s time to get back to work.
James Edwards hosts The Political Cesspool Radio Program. When not interviewing newsmakers, Edwards is no stranger to making news himself, having appeared as a commentator many times on national television. Over the course of the past two decades, his ground-breaking work has also been the subject of articles in hundreds of print publications and media broadcasts around the world.
OAKVILLE, ONTARIO, May 13, 2023. Over 300 people, many veterans of last last year’s Truckers Freedom Convoy rallied here this evening. There was great fellowship, dancing and renewed commitment to fight tyranny, mandates and Globalism, and, above all, the totalitarian regime of Justin Trudeau.
– Bill 36~ Petition and action steps – Big Thanks to Laureen & Friends
– Stop Digital Currency- Petition
– National Citizens’ Inquiry – Vaccine Choice Canada’s Ted Kuntz
– Time to stand up – Michelle Leduc Catlin
– International Covid Summit III– Long and short version
– Liberals and MANDATORY Vaccines We Need to Know!
– May 13 Geoengineering Zoom
– Freedom Rising Newsletter – Issue 45- no facial recognition
– Druthers The May edition is online And now available at our rallies! Donations are always needed.
——————————- o0o————————————-
In case you missed the rally last Sunday…
Thanks to Laureen and Shar, who hosted the event while Mary Lou was volunteering at the National Citizens Inquiry. A surprise speaker showed up in the person of a Penticton High School Student. Accompanied by his friends, he shared some of what was going on at the high school. He and his friends showed great interest in what we are doing. A tiny step into the world of our future leaders.
Like we always say…
Surprise speakers are a common occurrence at our rallies.
Miss a week and you miss a lot!
——————————- o0o————————————-
JOIN THE TEAM!
Want to join the fun in one of these initiatives or suggest another more important to you?
Just reply to this email or call 780-908-0309 to offer your help and suggestions.
——————————- o0o————————————-
RALLY – Penticton4Freedom – every Sunday at 1.
Sunday, May 14th, 1 to 3 p.m. 2020 Main Street, Corner of Main & Warren, Penticton.THIS WEEK Bettina will speak on what is becoming an incredibly important issue.The details behind what our governments and military are doing are asimportant to know as all other rights and freedoms issues. https://www.geoengineeringfreecanada.com/
To Join a zoom meeting with Bettina this Saturday at 10:00, please scroll down to a second poster under Worth a Look.
=============================================Future dates:May 21 – looking for a host for the day – Mary Lou will be away at a Freedom Event in CalgaryFighting for freedom is more fun with friends. Bring a few.Suggest a topic or a speaker, and we’ll be happy to find someone to share their knowledge with us.——————————- o0o————————————- OTHERS’ EVENTS · Kelowna CLEAR Rallies – 1st Saturday of each month at noon – Stuart Park, Kelowna · Oliver Rally – in front of city hall – Saturdays at 12:30 p.m. ·
Local Action4Canada – Tuesdays at noon, in front of Richard Cannings’ Office – 301 Main Street ~ Next Planning Meetings May 16 – at 4:30 p.m. – Winepress Church ~~ Contact Derrick for details of local prayer walks scheduled for Penticton locations. ~ · First & Third Tuesdays, Penticton Council meeting at 1. City Hall, Penticton. · School District 67 School Board Meetings 6:30 PM – last Monday of the month. · FreedomFest Camping May 20-22. Chuilchena BC for more info contact ddodds@cablelan.net or Denis 250.572.2120 ·
The Kelowna Courts of Injustice May 23 (9:00 a.m.) May 24-26, 2023, 9:30 a.m. R v David Lindsay s. 266 Criminal Code Assault ——————————- o0o————————————- ACTIONS OF THE WEEK———————————— o0o————————————- Canada’s federal government has buried a change in this year’s budget Bill C-47 that will permanently exclude every federal political party from our privacy laws. If Bill C-47 passes, political parties won’t ever have to abide by Canada’s privacy laws, allowing them to do whatever they want with our sensitive personal information without independent oversight, subject only to the party privacy policy they write themselves! Our right to privacy is fundamental to our democratic process. Help protect our democracy by signing the petition so that NO political party can exist outside of our privacy laws!Sign the Petition!Right now political parties are in a privacy wild west: they aren’t private companies subject to PIPEDA, our private sector privacy laws, nor are they subject to The Privacy Act, which regulates how government agencies handle our personal information. According to the government’s own survey, more than 96% of people in Canada think this should change,6 yet the federal government has chosen NOT to include political parties within the scope of its newly proposed privacy laws, Bill C-27.7 Even worse, they’re trying to make this wild west permanent; they’ve snuck an amendment to Canada’s Elections Act in the very back of their 2023 budget Bill C-47 that will make it so federal political parties NEVER have to abide by privacy laws and NEVER face scrutiny from independent regulators.8 A law that says nothing more than that you get to set your own rules is no law at all. Sign the petition for federal political parties to abide by Canada’s privacy laws!———————————— o0o————————————-
Bill 36 Action~ The crucial independent and industry-specific regulation of regulated professions will be eliminated under Bill 36. Instead of bureaucrats who will operate in the best interests of the government, not the public or professionals, governance is best handled by people with the necessary skills, such as those who directly provide health solutions. Another point of contention is the government’s decision to attack and reform private health care when it is obvious that hospitals and community medicine are in danger of failing. You can rapidly confirm this teetering implosion by talking to emergency personnel or hospital professionals. Under their control, politicians have systematically destroyed healthcare. Join the Local Bill 36 Action Print your own copies of the two letters and the Bill 36 petition and drop them off at alternative Health Care clinics and Businesses. Check with Laureen at our rallies for a list of locations already petitioned to avoid duplication. TAKE ACTION Thank you, Laureen, for initiating this ongoing project. And to Lynn, Shar, Darlene, Gloria, Carol and others for your hard work on this initiative.Join the team and get updates at our rallies on Sundays at our Penticton4Freedom ralliesBill 36 flyers from Unity Health Sciences and Uninformed Consent Brochures are also available at the rallies.https://www.cssem.org/bill36 NOTE: John Rustad, the sponsor of this petition, was an independent MLA when he first launched this petition and has already submitted 28,000 signatures to the BC Legislature. His most recent submission included having many BC medical professionals attend the parliamentary session with him, but Adran Dix refused to acknowledge their attendance in the gallery. John Rustad is currently the Leader of the Conservative Party of British Columbia ———————————— o0o————————————-Please make your voice heard within the week!!!!! Stop Digital Currency “The way Canadians pay for everything from the daily necessities to major purchases is evolving rapidly. As the world becomes increasingly digital, the Bank – like many other central banks – is exploring a digital version of Canada’s national currency.” Give your input until June 19. Info https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2023/05/bank-canada-launches-public-consultations-digital-dollar/The surveyPublic consultation
Michelle Leduc Catlin – First they came for the unvaccinated, and I did not speak out because I was not unvaccinated. Then they came for the truckers, and I did not speak out because I was not a trucker.
This petition is on behalf of North Cowichan residents and is addressed to their public officials. It provides a model for any group in Canada wishing to express their views in their own communities.
Members of the same group create town hall meetings, inviting local area policymakers to join them (even though they never do attend). The most recent was a Bill 36 Town Hall meeting in Victoria, attracting over 200 participants and several researchers. Both the audience and the other speakers at the event gasped at some of the clauses included in Bill 36. We will see if there was a recording made of that event and if so, will include it in next week’s email. About 20% of those present were those not previously known to the organizing group – a step toward eliminating the “us” and “them” paradigm that has existed for the past 3 years.
——————————- o0o————————————-
Please read… I truly believe Druthers is the single most potent tool we have for defending our freedoms in Canada and getting more people to join us, so please, help this fundraiser along. It’s important that we keep the information flowing to our fellow Canadians. etransfers: admin@druthers.net If you prefer to make a cash donation, come to one of our rallies and we will be happy to include your donation in our next e-transfer. In the past six months, through your support, P4F has been able to sponsor over 17,500 copies of Druthers and distribute over 7,000 in the South Okanagan. Thank you! Read The May Issue Covering news and information that mainstream media won’t. Read DRUTHERS
——————————- o0o————————————-
Remember that Freedom Hugs are available at ALL our Penticton4Freedom events!
Pelagius was a Celtic monk who lived in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Although he was born somewhere in the British Isles, he lived most of his life in Rome until the city was sacked by the Visigoths. Following the Fall of Rome he fled to Carthage and spent the remainder of his life in the region of North Africa and Palestine. This was hardly a quiet retirement for it was in this period that the preaching of his disciple Caelestius brought him increasingly under the scrutiny of St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Jerome and led to his teachings being condemned by multiple regional synods, his excommunication by Innocent I of Rome in 417 AD, and finally, the following year which was the year of his death, the most sweeping condemnation of his teachings as heresy at the Council of Carthage, the rulings of which would later be ratified by the third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431 AD making the condemnation of Pelagius and Pelagianism the verdict of the whole Church in the days before her ancient fellowship was broken.
What did Pelagius teach that was so vehemently rejected by the early, undivided, Church?
Pelagianism was the idea that after the Fall man retained the ability to please God and attain salvation through his own efforts and by his own choices unassisted by the Grace of God. Expressed as a negation of Christian truth it was a denial of Original Sin and of the absolute necessity of God’s Grace.
Over a millennium later the Protestant Reformers, strongly influenced by the teachings of St. Augustine, would read their own conflict with the Patriarch of Rome through the lens of the earlier Pelagian controversy although the Pelagian controversy had to do with the absolute necessity of God’s Grace whereas the controversy in the Reformation had to do with the sufficiency of God’s Grace. This led to further distortions of historical understanding of the earlier controversy so that in certain theological circles, particularly those who identify so strongly as Calvinists that in their hierarchy of doctrine they place the canons of the Synod of Dort in the top tier, make those matters on which all the Reformers agreed – the supreme authority of Scripture and the sufficiency of the freely given Grace of God in Christ for salvation – secondary, and assign the truths of the ancient Creeds to a tertiary position, any positive statements concerning Free Will are looked upon as either Pelagian or a step down the slippery slope to Pelagianism.
Free Will, however, is not some aberration invented by Pelagius, but a truth held by all the ancient orthodox Churches alongside Original Sin. Neither is confessed in the Creed, because neither is Creed appropriate, but both are part of the body of the supplementary truths that help us to understand Gospel truth, the truth confessed in the Creed. Free Will and Original Sin are complementary truths. Apart from Free Will, the only explanation for Adam’s having committed the sin that brought sin and death upon his descendants, is some version of supralapsarianism, the repugnant and blasphemous hyper-Calvinist doctrine of Theodore Beza that teaches that God decreed the Fall of Man to occur in order that He might have grounds to punish people He had already decided to damn.
Why did God give man Free Will if He knew man would abuse it and fall into sin?
If God had not given man Free Will, man would not be a moral creature made in God’s own image, but would rather be like a rock or a tree. Man without Free Will would have the same capacity for Good that a rock and a tree have. Rocks and trees perform their Good – the reason for which they exist – not because they choose to do so, but because they have no choice. This is a lower order of Good than the Good which moral beings do because they choose to do it. God created man as a higher being with a higher order of Good and so He gave man Free Will because man could not fulfil this higher Good without Free Will. Without the possibility of sin, there was no possibility of man fulfilling the Good for which he was created.
Original Sin impaired man’s Free Will and in doing so placed a major roadblock in the way of man’s fulfilment of the Good for which he was created. When Adam sinned he bound himself and all his posterity in slavery to sin. The ancient sages, such as Plato, urged man to employ his will in subjecting his passions to the rule of his reason or intellect. They understood that the worst slavery a man could endure is not that which is imposed from the outside by laws, customs, or traditions but that which is imposed from the inside when a man is ruled by his passions. This is the closest than man could come to understanding his plight without special revelation. When Western man in the post-World War II era turned his back on Christian truth he abandoned even this insight and began embracing the idea taught by Sigmund Freud et al. that liberating the passions rather than ruling them was the path to human happiness. Although the evidence of experience has long since demonstrated this to be folly Western man continues down this path to misery. The salvation that God has given to man in Jesus Christ frees us from this bondage to the sin principle, which rules us through what Plato called our passions and St. Paul called our flesh. This is why the work of Jesus Christ accomplishing our salvation is spoken of as redemption, the act of purchasing a slave’s freedom from bondage.
God created man in a state of Innocence which is an immature form of Goodness. Man in his Innocence possessed Free Will and was sinless but lacked knowledge and maturity. He was not intended to remain in this state but to grow into Perfection, Goodness in its mature form. The Fall into Original Sin interrupted the process of maturation and would have been ultimately fatal to it were it not for the Grace of God and the salvation given to man in Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, which Grace of salvation frees us from the bondage to sin into which we fell that we might finally grow in Christ into Perfection, the maturity of freedom with knowledge, in which we voluntarily choose the Good. If we could somehow remove man’s ability to choose evil this would in no way assist man in his journey, by God’s Grace, to Perfection. This is the Christian truth illustrated by Anthony Burgess in his novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) The experimental technique to which the narrator submitted in order to obtain a reduced sentence, succeeded in removing his ability to commit violent crime, but failed to turn him into a good person. In the novel, Alex does eventually become a better person but not as a result of the Ludovico Technique. (1)
I recently remarked that the orthodox arguments for the necessity of Free Will for man to choose the Good can also be applied to Truth to make a more compelling case for free speech than the one rooted in classical liberalism that is usually so employed. I wish to expand upon that idea here. Think again of Burgess’s novel. The Ludovico Technique rendered Alex incapable of committing violent crime – or even of acting in legitimate self defence – by causing him to experience nauseating sickness and pain at even the thought of doing the things that had landed him in prison, but it did not change his inner nature, it merely prevented him from acting on it. Now imagine a story in which a similar form of extreme aversion therapy to the Ludovico Technique is developed, not for a violent, rapist, thug but for a compulsive liar, (2) which similarly prevents him from speaking what he knows not to be true. This would not remove his internal compulsion to lie and make him naturally truthful, it would merely prevent him from acting on the compulsion.
If it is important, both to us as individuals and to the larger society to which we belong, that we develop good character by cultivating good habits, then it is important that we cultivate the habit of speaking the Truth to the best of our understanding. By adapting the lesson of Burgess’ novel as we did in the last paragraph, we saw that artificially removing the ability to do other than speak what we understand to be the Truth is not the way to achieve the cultivation of this habit. In the actual contemporary society in which we live, we are increasingly having to contend with constraints on our freedom of speech, not through experimental aversion therapy, but through laws and regulations telling us what we can and cannot say.
These come in two forms. The first and most basic are rules prohibiting speech – “you can’t say that”. The second are rules compelling speech – “you have to say this”. This distinction has in recent years been emphasized by Dr. Jordan Peterson after he ran afoul of a particularly egregious but sadly now almost ubiquitous example of compelled speech – the requirement to use a person’s expressed preference in pronouns rather those that align with the person’s biological sex. Here, the speech that is compelled is speech that falls far short of Truth. Indeed, the people who want this sort of compelled speech are generally the same people who speak of Truth with possessive pronouns as if each of us had his own Truth which is different from the Truth of others.
The rules that prohibit certain types of speech are no more respectful towards Truth. Here in the Dominion of Canada, the rules of this type that have plagued us the most in my lifetime are speech prohibitions enacted in the name of fighting “hate”. The very first in a long list of sins against Truth committed by those seeking to eradicate “hate speech” is their categorizing the speech they seek to outlaw as hateful. Hate refers to an intense emotional dislike that manifests itself in the desire to utterly destroy the object of hatred. This is a more appropriate description of the attitude of the people who call for, enact, and support “hate speech” laws towards their victims more than it does the attitude of said victims towards those they supposedly hate. The first calls for laws of this nature came from representatives of an ethnic group that has faced severe persecution many times throughout history and which, wishing to nip any future such persecution in the bud, asked for legislation prohibiting what they saw as the first step in the development of persecution, people depicting them very negatively in word and print. The government capitulated to this demand twice, first by adding such a prohibition to the Criminal Code, second by including a provision in the Canadian Human Rights Act that made the spread of information “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” into grounds for an anti-discrimination lawsuit. The CHRA provision was eventually removed from law by Act of Parliament but the present government is seeking to bring it back in a worse form, one that would allow for legal action to be taken against people based on the suspicion that they will say something “hateful” in the future rather than their having already said some such thing. The campaign against “hate speech” has from the very beginning resembled the actions taken against “precrime” in Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report (1956) in that both are attempts to stop something from happening before it happens, but the new proposed legislation would take the resemblance to the nth degree. Early in the history of the enforcement of these types of laws the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the lack of a truth exception did not render the limitations they imposed on freedom of speech unconstitutional in Canada (Human Rights Commission) v. Taylor (1990). More recently this notion of truth not being a defense was reiterated by Devyn Cousineau of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal in a discrimination case against Christian evangelist and activist Bill Whatcott. Whatcott had been charged with discrimination for distributing a flyer challenging a politician who had been born a biological male but who claims to be female. Cousineau made the statement in ruling against the relevance of evidence the defense intended to present as to the complainant’s biological maleness. Clearly, if the upholding of laws restricting freedom of speech on the grounds of “hate” require rulings to the effect that truth is no defense, then these laws are no servants of Truth.
That, as we have just seen, those seeking to restrict speech are serving something other than Truth, something they are willing to sacrifice Truth for, is a good indicator that it is free speech that is the servant of Truth. Further analysis confirms this. If speech is restricted by prohibitions – “you can’t say that” – then unless those who make the prohibitions are both incorruptible and infallible, it is likely that much that is prohibited will be Truth. If speech is compelled – “you must say this” – then again, unless those compelling us to speak are both incorruptible and infallible, it is likely that what we will be compelled to say will not be the Truth. The good habit of truth-telling, which we ought to seek to cultivate in ourselves, in which cultivation the laws and institutions of society ought to support us, is a habit of caring about the Truth, searching for the Truth, and speaking the Truth. Restrictions on speech, rather than helping us cultivate this habit, teach us to take the alternate, lazier, route of letting other people rather than the Truth determine what we must and must not say.
Even restrictions on speech aimed at preventing the spread of untruths ultimately work against the speaking of Truth. As long as there are such restrictions, especially if the penalties for breaking them are severe, there will be something other than Truth to which people will look to determine whether or not they should say something, and the result will be that less Truth will be spoken out of fear of running afoul of the restrictions.
The classic liberal case for free speech was made by utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill in his On Liberty (1856). It is the topic of his second chapter “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion” which begins by arguing that this freedom is necessary not only when governments are tyrannical and corrupt, but under the best of governments as well, even or especially, when governments have public opinion behind them. “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion”, Mill wrote “and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” In support of the position taken in these justifiably famous words, Mill’s first argument was that mankind is better off for having all opinions, false or true, expressed, because the expression of the false, makes the true stand out the more. He wrote:
the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
In what he stated here, Mill was quite right. Unfortunately, what he meant by truth, small t, is not the same thing as Truth, big T. Mill wrote and thought within what might be called an anti-tradition that started within Western thought almost a millennium ago with nominalism and which has produced a downward spiral of decay within Western thought. Mill came at a late stage in this anti-tradition, although not so far down the spiral as to think that truth is entirely subjective and different for each person as so many do today. It had been set in that direction, however, by nominalism’s rejection of universals, whether conceived of as Plato’s otherworldly Forms existing in themselves or Aristotle’s embodied Ideas existing in their corresponding particulars, except as human constructions that we impose on reality by our words so as to facilitate in the organization of our thoughts. By so departing from the foundation of the tradition of Western thought, nominalism introduced an anti-tradition that over time came more and more to resemble an embrace of Protagoras of Abdera’s maxim “man is the measure of all things”. In the wisdom of the ancient sages, Truth, like Beauty and Goodness, were the supreme universals. Philosophically, they were the Transcendentals, the properties of Being or existence. In Christian theology, they existed in God Himself not as attributes or properties, but as His fundamental nature. Human happiness, however the philosophical and theological answers to the question of how it is attained differed (the Grace of God is the theological answer), consisted in life ordered in accordance with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Mill’s small t truth is worlds removed from this and this weakens what is otherwise a good argument against restrictions on the free expression of thought. If truth is not Truth, an absolute ultimate value in itself which we must seek and submit to upon peril of loss of happiness, but something which may or may not be available to us because we can never be certain that that what we think is truth is actually truth, then it is a far less compelling argument for allowing all thought to be freely expressed in words that it serves truth better than restrictions would. It opens the door to the idea that there is something that might be more important to us than truth, for which truth and the freedom that serves it might be sacrificed. Indeed, Mill provided the enemies of Truth and freedom with that very something else, earlier in the first, introductory, chapter of his book in which he articulated his famous “harm principle”. He wrote:
The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
On the surface, this seems like a principle that could do nothing but safeguard people against the abuse of government power. In our day, however, we can see how it is actually a loophole allowing the government to justify any and all abuse of power. Our government, for example, is currently using it to justify its bid to bring the flow of information entirely under its own control. The Liberal Party of Canada, which is the party currently in office, has made combatting what it calls “Online Harms” part of its official platform. The Liberals’ not-so-thinly-veiled intention is enacting this goal is to bring in sweeping internet regulation that will give them total control over what Canadians can say or write or see or hear on the internet. Neither freedom nor Truth is a high priority for the Liberals, nor have they been for a long time, if they ever were. The late Sir Peregrine Worsthorne years ago wrote that by defeating its old foes, and turning its attention to declaring war “on human, and even eventually animal, pain and suffering” and thus introducing the necessity for vast expansion of government power, liberalism “from being a doctrine designed to take government off the backs of the people” had rapidly become “a doctrine designed to put it back again”, and, he might have added, in a more burdensome manner than ever before.
Mill was right that truth is better served by allowing all thoughts to be freely expressed, even false ones. Apart from the acknowledgement of Truth as Truth, the absolute unchanging universal value, however, the argument is weak. Within the context of liberalism, it is doomed to give way to that ideology’s insatiable lust to control everyone and everything, in the insane belief that it is protecting us from ourselves, and re-making the world better than God originally made it. When we acknowledge Truth as Truth, we recognize that it is what it is and that it is unchangeable and so no lie can harm it. Lies harm us, not the Truth, by getting in our way in our pursuit of Truth, but attempts to restrict and regulate the free verbal expression of thought, even when done in the name of combatting falsehoods, do far more harm of this type than lies themselves could ever do. Just as men need free will to choose the Good, we need the freedom to speak our thoughts, right or wrong, in order to pursue and find and speak the Truth.
(1) The chapter containing this ending was omitted from the American edition of the novel and from Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation based on the American edition.
(2) The idea of preventing a liar from lying has been explored in fiction. The science fiction device of truth serum is one common way of doing this. Note that the real life interrogative drugs upon which this device is based, such as scopolamine and sodium thiopental, don’t actually compel someone to tell the truth, they just make him more likely to answer questions put to him. In Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) the title puppet, a compulsive liar, is not prevented from lying, but prevented from getting away with it, by the device of his nose growing whenever he tells a lie. Closer is the 1997 film Liar, Liar, starring Jim Carrey as a lawyer whose son is magically granted his birthday wish that his father be unable to tell a lie for 24 hours. William Moulton Marston, the inventor of the polygraph or lie detector, under the penname of Charles Marston created the comic book superheroine Wonder Woman and gave the character a magic lasso that compelled anyone trapped in it to speak the truth. None of these stories was written with the idea of the necessity of freedom of speech for genuine truth telling in mind. — Gerry T. Neal
When I arrived at the Legislature, there were 100 warm bodies gathered on one side of the drive. Lynn Ross was directing those whose names were on her list, to go in the main entrance. Eventually, about 25 of our group got in the main door, to sit in the public gallery for Question Period.
I was irritated because it seemed the Protective Services people were denying access to the rest of us, on the basis of their perception of our political opinion. But that is not what was actually happening. John Rustad came out and explained that there are 87 MLAs. Each of whom can ask the Clerk for some seats in the Gallery, to be allocated on a given day. He had arranged for 25 seats. The rest had been reserved by other MLAs.
The people from our group who did get in, are all professionals in the health system. After it became clear the rest of us wouldn’t be getting in to the building, we stood around, chatting on a beautiful spring day. Then, went over to the Good Earth coffee house across the street. The fellowship, alone, is worth the effort to get to these events
At noon, 80 folks reconvened on the South side of the Legislature. John Rustad and 6 individuals who had been in the public gallery gave short impressive speeches … summarizing why the Health Professions and Occupations Act is such bad legislation, and how impacts them. A Global tv cameraman got some footage.
What came through, is this statute is insufferable. Health professionals cannot – in good conscience – work under it. Just as ‘bad money drives out good’, they will retire or leave the Province rather than allow the government agent … effectively … to sit in the room with a physician and his patient.
What I can see coming, is it will take a good set of facts and a prosecution, to bring to a head, the abomination of Bill 36. The Act insults basic principles of what British Columbians presume as good government. As venal as they are ( and they are ! ) the Nee Di Ppers are not stupid. These anti-Christs are trained to try to ‘steal a march’… if they get away with it, they laugh at us Christians who want Liberty under the Law. If we manage to shove them back, they are shameless ; they just regroup for another attempt at imposing Red Fascism
This seemingly-small gathering defined one of the key issues in the next provincial election.
The Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III is set for this Saturday, the sixth of May. As this event, the peak of the ceremony surrounding the accession of our new Sovereign, has grown nearer, the woodworks have released a fairly predictable swarm of vermin intent on spoiling things as much as they can. Liberal Party bureaucrats circumventing proper procedure to quietly commission changes to our royal symbols to make them less evocative of tradition. Special interest groups trying to make what should be a solemn yet celebratory occasion embodying unity, stability, and continuity for each of His Majesty’s realms and for the whole Commonwealth, as was the Coronation of His Majesty’s late mother, all about them. Left-wing journalists calling our institution of monarchy “outdated” and “archaic”, which it, being timeless, can never be, suggesting that we “severe our ties” to it as if it were something external and not integral to our constitution, and defaming both the monarchy and our country as a whole by insisting that our history be read through the distorting lens of BIPOC racial grievance politics. Sadly, these latter have found a strange bedfellow in the person of Maxime Bernier, the leader of what they would absurdly describe as the “far right” People’s Party of Canada. For me, this last means that come the next Dominion election I will have one less option to vote for. While on most things, perhaps everything except this, where Bernier’s views differ from those of the present leadership of the Conservative Party I agree with Bernier, this is a deal breaker. No small-r republican will ever have my support, no matter how right he is on other things.
Bernier has allowed his objections to Charles the person blind him with regards to monarchy the institution. His objections to Charles have to do with the king’s views on certain controversial points. Our prime minister, Justin Trudeau is far further removed from Bernier’s views on these same points – and many others as well – than is our king. Imagine if Bernier had tweeted that because of his objections to Trudeau we should replace parliament with something else. This would be recognized instantly as a terrible suggestion. Yet the same bad reasoning – get rid of the institution because of objections to the person – is worse in the case of what Bernier actually said. The monarchy is a non-political – in the sense of party politics – office. It is therefore much worse to attack the institution because of objections to the officeholder based on partisan political views in the case of the monarchy than in the case of parliament and the prime minister.
It is because he approaches monarchy from the standpoint of Modern democratic assumptions – yes, populist nationalist assumptions, comically labelled right-wing by those seemingly unaware that the original right was anything but populist and nationalist, are Modern democratic assumptions, well within the boundaries of historical liberalism – that Bernier makes the basic blunder of failing to recognize that it is because the monarchy is non-democratic that it is non-political and that it is because it is non-political that it can both stand above partisan politics as a beacon of unity and serve as an anchor of stability for parliamentary government in the turbulent sea of Modern democratic politics, an institution far more important and valuable even than its ancient democratic complement of parliament, which only the basest of fools would want to mess with.. This mistake can be categorized with others common to those who have so imbibed the basic assumptions of the Modern Age that they simply cannot think outside that box and find it painful to even try. These mistakes all involve prioritizing that which, important as it may be to the moment, is fleeting and ephemeral, over that which is fixed, stable, permanent, and lasting. This is the consequence of turning our backs on the consensus of the wisdom of all of human tradition until yesterday and deciding that the marketplace is a better model for the whole of society than the family.
When we speak of stability and permanence with regards to human institutions, of course, we are referring to these qualities to the extent that they can be possessed by anything in our earthly, mortal, existence. Monarchy is the state institution that has demonstrated the largest capacity for such. Family is the most permanent social institution. While I am referring to family in the general sense of “the family”, the oldest and most universal social institution, specific families also have much longer lifespans than the individuals who belong to them in any generation. We are born into families that have been around a lot longer than us and, until very recently at any rate, those families raised us to behave in ways that would ensure they would be around long after we are gone, i.e., grow up, get married, have kids, raise those kids to do the same. Like living under the reign of a king whose Sovereignty has passed down to him from those who reigned over generations of our forebears this reminds us that we are not each our own individual selves the centre of the universe around which all else revolves and to whose wills reality must bend the knee. This is a reminder we are in constant need of now more than ever since we are constantly surrounded by voices telling us otherwise.
The recognition that everything is not about us, that we are part of things bigger, more important, and longer lived than ourselves, is, paradoxically, absolutely essential to our growth as individuals, not physical growth of course, but our development into our best possible selves, the selves we are supposed to be, the kind of growth that perfection in the original root meaning of the word points to and which in the language of the ancient thinkers consists of finding and accomplishing to the best of our ability our good, that is to say, our end, our purpose, the reason we are here on this earth. For we cannot find and serve our own small-g good, if we are solipsistic prisoners of our own selves. Our individual small-g goods are not, pace Nietzsche, goods we make for ourselves out of our own wills, but are that within us which answers to big G Goodness. We do not have to be able to conceive of Goodness in philosophical terms, but none of us will ever come near being the best version of ourselves possible without acknowledging Goodness as something that is what it is regardless of what we think, say, or do about it and something to which our will must bend rather than vice versa.
Goodness is often spoken of in connection with Beauty and Truth, both of which like Goodness are what they are regardless of us and to which our wills must bend. These are stable and permanent in the absolute sense. In philosophy and theology they are called the Transcendentals, which term means “the properties of being, i.e., that which is to existence itself what “red” is to “apple”, but as has already been stated, a philosophical understanding of these things is hardly necessary. The important thing to understand is that we don’t have a say in what Goodness, Truth and Beauty are and that we are to conform ourselves to these rather than to try to force them to conform to our will.
We live in a time when we are suffering the consequences of having done the exact opposite on a massive scale. Take Beauty for an example. Our cities look as one would expect them to after a century or so of architects and city engineers designing buildings and streets with the idea that Beauty must take backseat to utility. Our countrysides, while not affected as badly as our cities, show the scarring one would expect when those responsible for projects that affect the countryside share the same priorities as the aforementioned architects and city engineers. Is it any wonder, with such disregard for Beauty being shown by the engineers responsible for city and country alike, that so many others add to the problem by strewing garbage all over both? We have art and music that looks and sounds like what one would expect from a century or so of sculptors, painters, and composers who no longer saw the primary purpose of their vocation as being to create works of Beauty but to “express themselves” and “reach the people” even if that meant shocking them with ugliness. Bernier’s objections to Charles the person are based on His Majesty’s life-long outspoken environmentalism which, in the minds of Bernier and many who think like him, make His Majesty into someone like Bill Gates or Al Gore. Even if His Majesty was that type it would still be utter folly to wish to abolish the office of the monarchy because of such a quirk in the present officeholder, but it is also an ill-informed misjudgment of His Majesty. His environmentalism began as countryside conservationism rooted in his love of the Beauty of the countryside. His love for Beauty has manifested itself in a similar outspokenness with regards to the other things discussed in this paragraph. It would be difficult to read his defense of older buildings and architectural styles and his biting criticism of modernism and functionalism as anything other than a deep traditionalism. Similarly, if you consider everything he has said and done with regards to environmentalism instead of focusing in only on climate-related matters, it is quite evident that he is more of a Wendell Berry than a Bill Gates.
Late last week a bill cleared parliament, the first of several planned by the current Liberal government, that will have the effect of severely limiting Canadians access to Truth by giving the government the same, or even stronger, control over alternative sources of information online that they already exercise over the traditional media. This is not, of course, how the prime minister and his cult of followers talk about what they are doing. They say that this first bill is intended to protect “Canadian content” on online streaming services. They say with regards to their internet legislation as a whole that they are trying to protect Canadians from “online harms” such as “misinformation”, “disinformation”, and “hate”. If one were to make the mistake of taking this language literally and seriously one could be fooled into thinking that it is the opposite of Truth that the government is trying to keep from Canadians for “misinformation” and “disinformation” as these words are properly used mean information that is false. The Liberals, however, use these words to mean information that disagrees with whatever narrative they happen to be promoting at that moment and since that narrative is almost inevitably false it is Truth that ends up being censored as “misinformation” or “disinformation”. A Ministry of Truth never promotes Truth, it only suppresses it. It is always a bad idea, but especially so when coming from someone like our prime minister who never tells the Truth when a lie will suffice. Only a few days before the Online Streaming Act passed he told an audience that he never forced anyone to get a vaccination. This was a rather audacious lie considering there were not many world leaders worse than him when it came to imposing vaccines on millions by preventing anyone without one from having any sort of a normal existence. Many opposed this bill and will continue to fight it, in the courts if need be, and to his credit Bernier is a leading example of these. This was done, however, in the name of freedom of speech, and freedom of speech was championed, not because of its necessity to Truth (without freedom of speech, including the freedom to speak that which is false, we do not have the freedom to speak Truth, the parallel to the classical theological argument that without Free Will, including the ability to choose evil, we do not have the ability to choose the Good) but because it violated our individual rights. I don’t deny that individual rights are important, but they are a liberal value, and like all liberal values their importance is greatly exaggerated in this age. Truth is more important. Sir Roger Scruton wrote “beauty is an ultimate value – something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations”. (Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, 2011) Imagine how different the fight against the Liberal Party’s plans to seize control of what we can say or see online would be if those fighting fought first and foremost in the name of Truth, the permanent and lasting value, and framed their arguments accordingly.
My hope and prayer for Max Bernier is that his eyes will be opened and that he will come to see that as important as all the things he has been fighting for are, what T. S. Eliot called “the permanent things”, both the truly permanent ultimate values of Truth, Goodness and Beauty and the relatively permanent concrete human institutions such as the family and in the political sphere parliament and especially the monarchy which point us to those ultimate values, are more important and that he will repent of having allowed his minor objections to Charles the person to attack the monarchy and espouse small-r republicanism. Until such time, he will have to do what he does without my support.
