I met Ursula Haverbeck in Germany. She was the epitome and grace and class. She was fearless in her pursuit of the truth. She reminds me of another German, who said: “Here I stand, I can do no other,” in defence of being true to one’s conscience. [In German, ““ Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir. Amen.” ] Her imprisonment in old age shows the bankruptcy of the present German government and the heroic courage of this quiet grandmother. — Paul Fromm
Premier Danielle Smith describes threats to free speech and the marketplace of ideas
Alberta free speech statement
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Elected P.E.I. Councillor Challenges Being Suspended and Fined From Elected Job for A Sign Critical of Residential School Hysteria
Voters’ choice is under attack by woke elected bodies. It’s happened to at least two school trustees in Ontario and others in Alberta and Manitoba. The elected official makes a statement the leftists on council or the school board don’t like and they suspend him, thus denying the voters the services of the person THEY hired. Only the voters, at the next election, should be able to dismiss an elected official. The latest example is Murray Harbour Councillor John Robertson in P.E.I. The Canadian Press (February 23, 2024) reports: “Between late September and early October last year, coinciding with the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, the councillor displayed a sign on his property with the message, “Truth: mass grave hoax” and “Reconciliation: Redeem Sir John A.’s integrity.” The thought police on council nuked him. “The councillors then decided to impose a $500 fine and suspend him from his municipal post for six months. Robertson, elected in November 2022, was also removed as chair of the maintenance committee and ordered to write an apology to the mayor, council and the Indigenous community.” To his credit, Councillor Robertson has taken the matter to court and is seeking judicial review, arguing that the other councillors’ actions infringed on his right to freedom of speech, expression and belief. — Paul Fromm
P.E.I. councillor punished for posting sign questioning Indigenous unmarked graves seeks judicial review
Murray Harbour Coun. John Robertson claims fellow councillors exceeded their authority and violated his Charter rights by fining and suspending him
Author of the article:
The Canadian Press
Michael MacDonald
Published Feb 23, 2024 • 3 minute read
A makeshift memorial is seen outside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, B.C., after the possible discovery of 215 unmarked graves on the property in May 2021.Photo by Cole Burston/AFP via Getty Images/File
CHARLOTTETOWN — A village councillor in Prince Edward Island is asking a court to quash sanctions imposed on him after he displayed a sign on his property questioning the existence of unmarked graves at former residential schools.
In documents filed last week with the P.E.I. Supreme Court, Murray Harbour Coun. John Robertson claims fellow councillors exceeded their authority and violated his rights on Nov. 18, 2023, when they decided he had breached the council’s code of conduct.
The councillors then decided to impose a $500 fine and suspend him from his municipal post for six months. Robertson, elected in November 2022, was also removed as chair of the maintenance committee and ordered to write an apology to the mayor, council and the Indigenous community.
The councillor’s application for judicial review, dated Feb. 16, says those sanctions were unreasonable because they failed to account for his fundamental rights to freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, as guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Robertson argues that he shouldn’t be punished for stating personal opinions that have nothing to do with his role as an elected member of council.
Between late September and early October last year, coinciding with the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, the councillor displayed a sign on his property with the message, “Truth: mass grave hoax” and “Reconciliation: Redeem Sir John A.’s integrity.”
Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, is considered an architect of the residential school system because he championed policies of assimilation and violence toward Indigenous people.
In May 2021, the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation announced that ground-penetrating radar had revealed the possible remains of as many as 215 children around the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia’s interior. Since then, many other First Nations across Canada have searched for unmarked graves at school sites in their territories.Recommended from Editorial
“The subject of Mr. Robertson’s impugned statements included questioning the reliability of news reports of a political nature and providing an opinion respecting a political figure and did not relate to any function undertaken by Mr. Robertson as a member of council,” the application says, arguing the other councillors employed an “overboard interpretation” of the code of conduct.
The document says Robertson has resisted requests to resign, “asserting that the expression of his personal opinions on political topics were not properly the subject of the council’s oversight.” Terry White, mayor of Murray Harbour, population 282, could not be reached for comment Friday.
Restore the Bank of Canada to the purpose of funding infrastructure projects in Canada.
Eliminate usurious private lending institutes.
– Abolish Income Tax.
– Re-examine The Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Is “The Charter” a legal constitution or not?
– Eliminate any central bank digital currency.
– Audit the federal government by a consortium of private citizens.
– Paper ballots in all jurisdictional elections, including hand-counts. No ‘voting machines’, no electronic tabulations.
– Investigate thoroughly all covid-19 related activity, including cancelling all vaccine contracts. All colluding with already know criminal cv-19 related activity prosecuted, incarcerated, and de-pensioned.
– No mandatory medical dictates.
– Keep all pharmaceutical company lobbies out of all government and citizen activity.
– Stop the process of codifying vitamins, herbs and all natural health products.
– Allow natural health procedures to serve the people.
– Repeal MAID. People can end their own lives without the taxpayer involved.
– Stop murdering people before they are born – it is a child’s body.
– A 100% moratorium on immigration. Deport all international criminals and illegal entry individuals.
– Stop funding the U.N., and remove Canada from U.N. membership.
– Stop funding the entire women’s lobby to end all unfair advantages to females only.
– Investigate the R.C.M.P.
– Stop the aboriginal money extraction industry. Everyday Canadian tax-payers today should not be forever paying for what the monarchies did hundreds of years ago.
– Investigate aboriginal tribal and band councils regarding where received money was spent. Accountability.
– Allow freedom of speech. Repeal any legislation restricting what can be said or written.
– Stop government expansion. We have enough laws and government departments.
– Continue drilling for oil.
– Keep foreign investment out of local resource extraction. Allow Canadians to develop such industry. -Thoroughly investigate the current majority in Parliament.
We’re at the edge of the terrible transformation that is occurring everywhere in the free world Author of the article: Jordan Peterson Published Sep 11, 2023 • Last updated 2 days ago • 9 minute read 1664 Comments
Some of those reading this column will know that I have been ordered by the Ontario College of Psychologists to undergo “social media re-training” of indeterminate length, as a consequence of expressing my opinions publicly, with the specified outcome of my comprehensive compliance, as judged by my re-educators.
The charges levied against me include re-tweeting a tweet by the Leader of the Official Opposition in Canada (are you listening, “conservatives”?), criticizing Justin Trudeau and a diverse number of his minions, and expressing skepticism about the doom-saying fear-mongering tyranny-promoting chicken-little prognostications of the eco-fascists.
Why should Canadians care? If you’re a miner, and the canary caged next to you asphyxiates, you don’t blame the bird for being there. You notice that the air has become toxic, and you make tracks for the surface. Regulated professionals, subject to the petty tyranny of their overseeing agencies, are now starting to gasp and choke. Them first — you, next.
It’s already true in Canada that lawyers cannot have the reasonable certainty they once had with regard to the outcome of the cases they are pursuing, relying as they once did on precedent and the common or even civil law. Instead, they have to be prepared to be subjected to the opinions of an increasingly activist court, whose members have taken it upon themselves to put forward what is essentially a radical leftist (“progressive”) agenda. It’s true that physicians and teachers are so afraid to say what they think that even the reasonable among them no longer dare to tell the truth to the patients and children they serve. How do I know this? Because they tell me so. And how well do Canadians presume that the professionals they need will serve them, when they have all been cowed into, at best, liars of silence?
And why should Canadians believe in the existence and operation of such an agenda, rather than (comfortingly) passing such suggestions off as the ranting of demented, conspiratorially-minded right wingers, such as myself?
Here are a couple of facts (remember those?) simultaneously indisputable and unpleasant: Our “Minister of the Environment and Climate Change,” Steven Guilbeault, was not only a radical leftist activist, in his previous incarnation, but is now simultaneously savaging the economy of Western Canada, upon whose revenue his home province of Quebec shamefully, ungratefully and resentfully depends upon, while he works directly with the Chinese Communist Party, rulers of a country building more coal plants every year (two a week) than the rest of the world combined; six times more, to be precise.
He is doing that while rumours of CCP influence over the Canadian electoral process abound (!), under the supervision of a prime minister who has explicitly expressed admiration for the efficiency of communist tyranny, who was a friend to the demented tyrant who ran Cuba as his private fiefdom for decades. That would be Fidel Castro, bosom buddy as well as to Trudeau senior, and the same man who told former president Jimmy Carter that he would have sacrificed his whole island paradise to nuclear annihilation by our American allies just to move the Soviet agenda forward.
He is doing that under the rainbow-festooned banner of a “Liberal” party that has moved so far to the left that the hapless socialist NDP has nothing whatsoever left to offer (particularly labouring as they do under Jagmeet Singh, the most hypocritical politician Canada has ever coughed onto dry land. He is an empty suit of designer clothes too incompetent even to have bargained for the cabinet seat that is the going price, on the world market, for a politician’s soul).
He is doing that as part of an administration that is an express supporter of the deadly doctrine of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity, the mask that the wolves of compassion wear while they open the throats of the idiot sheep who think they are supporting all that is good and true. Equity: there’s a basket of snakes. What does equity mean? The useful idiots of the moderate left insist that it’s just a synonym for “equality of opportunity.” Why the new word, then, thinkers on the liberal side?
Equity means something very particular, good Canadians. It means that all economic and social systems that do not produce precise equality of outcomes across all possible measures of human difference (race, ethnicity, sex, “gender,” age, health status, ability, you name it) are to be regarded as “systemically prejudiced” and utterly re-tooled, in a revolutionary manner. What’s wrong with that, you ask, thinking of the excluded and the “marginalized,” in that manner so sympathetic endlessly and conveniently deserving of praise; considering yourself, despite your lack of actual effort on their behalf, a friend of the poor.
Let me ask you a straightforward question: do you own anything? A cell phone, perhaps; maybe a car; possibly even an apartment or house (although that is increasingly unlikely, particularly for young people, in Trudeau’s socialist paradise). Does that not mean that other people (the same marginalized; the same poor) don’t own that phone, that car, that house? Are you not therefore excluding them? The answer to that question, by the way, is “yes.” Of course you’re bloody well excluding them — oppressing them, marginalizing them, with your exclusive access to what you have hypothetically worked to earn.
“Property is theft”: no shortage of barely successful peasants such as yourself have died as a consequence of that cliché. How did societies get themselves to that point? By adopting the doctrine of equity, which is now deemed a mandatory belief by the professional organizations that regulate lawyers, physicians, psychologists, accountants, engineer and teachers (and that is not nearly all) in Canada.
Equity is no different than communism, boys and girls. Wait: let me clarify, as that is an error, but not in the direction you think. It’s far worse than mere communism. Marx had nothing on the post-modernists, who now occupy the universities, and have dramatically expanded upon his dread and murderous vision. Marx viewed oppression as essentially one-dimensional: the proletariat (that’s the poor for those of you who went through Canada’s “education” system and still don’t know even that) were exploited by the “bourgeoisie” (that turns out to be “anyone who owns anything at all”). That has happened forever; that’s all you really need to know about history and human social relationships in general; and it has to stop. By any means necessary.
Hence the hundred million or so deaths at the hands of the compassionate progressives in the 20th century. Of course, that wasn’t real communism.
You can tell, because some people were accidentally left standing.
For the postmodernists whose theories now dominate the academy and, increasingly, the western world, the bitter resentment of Marx was just the beginning. The concept of oppression is now limitlessly multi-dimensional. Everyone has become a victim, because of their height, their weight, their lack of attractiveness or athletic ability, their country of origin, their religious belief, the status of their ancestors.
What’s the problem with that? After all, life is hard, and much is distributed unfairly. Well, when everyone is a victim, everyone also becomes, perforce, an oppressor — and the punishment for that is severe. Maybe you’re a bit fat (victim, victim), but you’re white, or the tan that we now call brown that could become white in a flash. Presto! You’re a perpetrator. Maybe you don’t own a house (victim, victim). But you own a rusty old wreck from the 90s. Compared to those who can only afford a bicycle (perhaps because they’re useless layabouts) you are definitely an oppressor. Perhaps you’re genuinely poor (victim victim), but you’re young. You can be certain that you are then at least afflicted by implicit ageism, and your very youth a mark of at least your unconscious bias and general shameful reprehensibility.
Are you beginning to understand the game? I doubt it. It’s much easier for Canadians to keep their sheep/ostrich-heads firmly in the sand, and assume that anyone pointing out not so much what’s going on but what’s already happened is an extremist, a bigot, a right-wing conspiracy theorist, a Confederate sympathizer (in Canada (!)), a MAGA Republican, hell-bent for God only knows what possible reason on overthrowing Canadian democracy.
As if they bloody well care.
As if they even know where Canada is.
Why am I fighting the college? Probably because I’m stupid, or at least, as a Canadian journalist so famously put it, “the stupid person’s smart person.” Touché. Seriously (although all educators are, perforce, the stupid people’s smart person). But I have plenty of money, and a wife I love, and a family that supports me, and friends that do as well, and the opportunity to live anywhere I want to in the world, and have been informed by those who run other political jurisdictions that they would restore my licence in a heart-beat if the low-level schemers in eternally good-thinking Ontario manage to purloin it, as they probably will. I really don’t need the hassle, to say nothing of the literally tens of thousands of dollars it costs per month to keep the vipers at bay.
The process is the punishment, as those who have successfully weaponized many such deep-state bureaucracies know full well.
I am doing it to bring to the attention of Canadians — and, if not Canadians, whose smug self-complacency is perhaps unparalleled in the world (except maybe in comparison to the Kiwis or the liberal Californians) — then to people elsewhere in the West, increasingly inclined as they are to see what is happening in Canada, just as intelligent miners see their canaries.
We’re at the edge of the terrible transformation that is occurring everywhere in the free world. As Canada goes, so hope the progressives, the world goes. Thus, the good fight might as well be fought here. I have a son, a daughter-in-law, and grandchildren in this benighted country. My parents live here. My daughter departed for freer lands, and I won’t forgive the current administration for that. Her example is tempting, and I’ve lived in the United States before — but the same problem exists among our neighbours to the south, despite their more extensive commitment to the freedom that has vanished with amazing rapidity in the Great White North.
It is not that freedom of speech is threatened in Canada, by the way, good people. It’s that it’s already pretty much gone — although, God willing, not permanently. The same can be said for freedom of conscience and association. We gave up freedom of mobility under Trudeau, which was the only freedom he could directly threaten, in his attempt to (successfully) divide Canadians, and therefore promptly did.
We still have the freedom to pretend that everything is just as it was 20 or even 10 years ago. But it’s not. The fact that I am being persecuted for criticizing the prime minister, for passing on the opinions of Pierre Poilievre, and for doubting the opinions of that veritable traitor, Steven Guilbeault, is a primary indication of that. My case would not be attracting the international attention that it is — as is the prosecution of the Trucker Convoy leaders, whose protest was widely admired outside this country — if that was not the case.
Why should you care? It’s not about me, folks. I have options.
You don’t.
But I’m still inclined to fight.
How about you?
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
Ron DeSantis Flies To Israel To Destroy Free Speech In Florida
This week Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida made a trip to Israel to sign HB 269, a bill that makes it a felony with up to five years in jail for passing out “offensive” flyers or pamphlets. This move has been widely criticized by free speech advocates and legal experts as a gross violation of the First Amendment. The bill states that anyone distributing “any material for the purpose of intimidating or threatening the owner” could be convicted of a felony “hate crime.” While we often write about the “hate speech” rules on Big Tech platforms, this is far worse. This is the state of Florida violating the First Amendment of the United States.
The legislation came about after activists from a group called the Goyim Defense League made headlines for several years for their activism efforts. The Goyim Defense League’s activism takes the form of distributing flyers that contain “uncomfortable truths” about the individuals who control the mainstream media in the United States. These flyers have been handed out across multiple states, including Florida, and have been met with mixed reactions from the public.
Despite the controversy surrounding the flyers, it is worth noting that they contain no threats of violence or threatening language. Rather, they present what the Goyim Defense League sees as a reality about the individuals who control the mainstream media, and invite readers to consider a different perspective. While some might consider this information to be “offensive,” there is nothing inherently threatening or “intimidating” about the distribution of flyers with factual information on them. The flyers even have a statement on them noting that they are “distributed randomly without malicious intent.”
The First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition. This means that individuals have the right to express their opinions, even if those opinions are controversial or unpopular. The government cannot censor or punish individuals for their speech, unless it poses an imminent danger or threat to others.
HB 269, however, seeks to criminalize speech that is deemed “intimidating” by the state. This is an extremely vague and subjective standard, and it could be used to silence a wide range of speech that is protected by the First Amendment. It is important to note that the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that speech that some may find offensive is still protected under the First Amendment.
This isn’t the first time Ron DeSantis has signed anti-First Amendment legislation while in Israel. Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 741, also known as the “Combating Public Disorder” bill, into law on May 14, 2019, in Jerusalem, Israel. The signing ceremony took place at the David Citadel Hotel, where DeSantis was joined by several prominent Jewish leaders and members of the Israeli government.
The bill aims to protect religious institutions and their members from discrimination and harassment. However, many have argued that it does much more than that, and that it represents a serious threat to free speech and civil liberties.
One of the main provisions of HB 741 is a requirement that all Florida public schools, colleges, and universities adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that includes certain forms of criticism of Israel. The definition in question is the one adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which defines anti-Semitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews” and includes examples such as “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” and “applying double standards to Israel.”
Critics of HB 741 argue that this definition is overly broad and could be used to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel and its policies. They point out that the definition includes language that could be interpreted as equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, even though the two are not the same thing. They also argue that the definition is not necessary, as schools and universities already have policies in place to address discrimination and harassment.
Another provision of HB 741 requires law enforcement agencies to conduct training on identifying and responding to anti-Semitic incidents. Many have raised concerns that this provision could be used to target legitimate forms of protest and dissent. For example, if a group of pro-Palestinian activists were to stage a peaceful demonstration outside an Israeli consulate or embassy, could they be accused of engaging in an anti-Semitic incident?
Perhaps most controversially HB 741 creates a private right of action for people who believe they have been discriminated against on the basis of their religion. This means that individuals who feel that they have been the victim of anti-Semitic discrimination can sue the alleged perpetrator for damages. This is highly likely to be used to stifle free speech and dissent. For example, a professor who expresses a controversial opinion about Israel could potentially be sued by a student who disagrees with them and feels that their religious beliefs have been discriminated against.
The fact that Governor DeSantis flew to a foreign country to sign both of these bills is absurd. Florida is a state in the United States, and its laws should be signed within the state’s borders. The reality that Gov. DeSantis chose to sign these bills in Israel, a foreign country, raises serious questions about his priorities and commitment to upholding the Constitution for the citizens of the United States and his state of Florida.
The implications of HB 269 and HB 741 are deeply troubling. They could be used to silence political dissent, punish those who criticize government officials, or suppress speech that challenges the status quo. In short, it is a direct attack on the First Amendment and the principles of free speech that are so essential to a healthy society.
We must be willing to engage in open dialogue with those who hold different views, and to stand up for our rights even when it is uncomfortable or unpopular to do so.
This means supporting organizations and individuals who are working to protect free speech, like Gab, and advocating for policies that promote openness and transparency in government. It also means being willing to speak out against efforts to silence dissent or suppress speech even when they come from our own political allies.
The defense of our fundamental rights is not a partisan issue. It is a matter of basic human dignity and freedom and it requires all of us to stand up and be counted. We must remain vigilant in the face of attempts to suppress speech and dissent, and be willing to push back against these efforts wherever they arise. Only by doing so can we ensure that America remains free for generations to come.
Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab.com
Jesus Christ is King of kings
Why Canada should abolish Section 1 Author of the article: Arjun Singh, Special to National Post Publishing date: Sep 23, 2021 • September 23, 2021 • 4 minute read • 370 Comments
By all accounts, vaccine passports are here. Quebec, with the most provincial chutzpah, first introduced them, and B.C. followed suit. As have Ontario and Alberta, after Doug Ford’s U-turn from his “Hard no” earlier this year and Jason Kenney’s similar opposition . Outside government, scores of businesses are mandating vaccinations for employees, with proof being required — else, they be terminated.
One would think, in governments’ cases, that the law would safeguard citizens’ freedoms. Indeed, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that Canadians have the “freedom of conscience and religion” (Section 2a), freedom of movement within Canada (Section 6) and “equal protection … before the law” (Section 15). At the very least, this would prevent the imposition of vaccine passport requirements on citizens — vaccinated or otherwise — for travelling, let alone while accessing basic services: for most charter rights are fundamental. Quebec’s programme and the Trudeau Liberals’ recent federal vaccine mandate for flights and trains, thus, ought to be dismissed.
But this is Canada: where, for years, left-wing Liberal values have slowly invaded our legal system. This was true for Trudeau’s father, Pierre Elliot, as it is now. Hence, in 1982, when the charter was introduced, its first section included the following proviso: “The Canadian Charter … guarantees the rights and freedoms set out subject only to reasonable limits … as can be justified in a free and democratic society.” In essence, the charter rights of anyone may be limited for what the state considers “reasonable.”
By itself, this clause is only partly dangerous. Absolute freedom, in any context — especially if causing physical harm — is undesirable; as the ever-pithy Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, “the right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose.” But, as most would agree, allowing the government to judge whether its own acts are “reasonable” is, itself, an invitation for power to abuse such privilege. From Quebec’s strict curfews to Ontario’s police crackdowns, the pandemic and its oppressive responses in the name of “science” have laid that truth bare.
In response, one would expect the courts, upon petition, to step in and stop government overreach, being the constitution’s supposedly “non-partisan” referees. Until 1986, in Canada, that was true — until left-wing jurists, after rewriting the law, captured the judiciary that interpreted them. That year the Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision by Trudeau appointees, established the Oakes Test in R. v. Oakes to determine what restrictions on charter rights were “reasonable.” Among others, it allowed the curbing of charter freedoms in the name of “a commitment to social justice and equality” and “respect for cultural and group identity.”
With this decision, a faction of activist judges — seeing the constitution as a ‘living tree’ to be pruned without the people’s consent — reset the foundations of freedom overnight, bending them towards progressive politics. Instead of having minimal restraints for public order, all charter freedoms could now be legally impeded in the name of contested left-wing concepts like “social justice” and protecting “group identity.”
Worse, neither did the court define what these terms meant, enabling the left — via its dominance of social science academia — to influence their meanings, suiting the moment’s political objectives. As its late Chief Justice, Antonio Lamer, himself said, Section 1 empowered judges to “make essentially … a political call.” In effect, the constitutional “referees” changed the rules mid-game, to ensure their side would always win.
Thus, with Oakes, the dangers of Section 1 were fully unleashed, and have since beat a toll on Canadians’ civil liberties — capturing our constitution for the supremacy of “woke” social mores. “Whoever would overthrow a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech,” said Benjamin Franklin; and, true to form, it was one of the first casualties. In the Keegstra and Andrews decisions, the Supreme Court used Section 1 to allow the criminalization of speech “inciting hatred” — an ambiguous offence, at best, which effectively curbs free speech for the sake of hurt feelings. Once more, in the Little Sisters case, Section 1 rubber-stamped the Chretien Liberals’ banning of LGBTQ books’ import for their “obscenity.” This spate has continued, with governments and courts in concert over the years using Section 1 to curb the presumption of innocence until proven guilty (R. v. Stone), conservatives’ participation in elections (Harper v. Canada) and, most recently, to ban travel by citizens during COVID-19 (Taylor v. The Queen).
In defending such overreach on the charter, the progressive establishment has often asserted the notion of “collective rights” as the reason for restraining individuals, e.g., “safe spaces” precluding free speech to avoid public offence. There are few greater absurdities than this; “rights” exist to protect individuals and minorities from tyranny of the majority, which — with strength in numbers — needs no further safety in a democracy. By claiming a “collective right” of any kind, the Canadian left turns the very notion of rights on its head. It is legal fiction at best, and a neo-Marxist praxis at worst — a desperate attempt to stir up “class conflict” between the majority and minority where none ought to exist.
In the future, it’s highly likely that Section 1 will be used again to uphold encroachments upon citizens’ rights — from vaccine passports to online censorship (e.g., Bill C-10) and others. Canadians must, hence, stand on guard for thee and expunge this threat — regardless of the high bar for constitutional change. If Section 1 is the end of charter rights, we must end it, first.
Arjun Singh is a recent graduate of political science from the University of Toronto.
Paul Fromm on Free Speech and the 2021 Federal Election
Talk given in Hamilton, October 17, 2021
* UPDATE ON RELEASE OF POLITICAL PRISONER DR. JAMES SEARS
* Almost daily a new abuse — vaccine apartheid in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba & B.C.
* Freedom protests banned outside hospitals in Alberta & Quebec
https://worldtruthvideos.website/watch/paul-fromm-on-free-speech-and-the-2021-federal-election_XAHBzeJa2AoVzWs.html
