patrick.net

Biden's FBI to detain Blaze reporter for J6 reporting. Aren't you glad you don't live in a banana republic, comrades? ...

Remind me, how many journalists did Trump arrest? ...

These are for unknown charges! They won't even tell him or his lawyers what they're bringing him in for until he appears before the magistrate!

Steve did enter the Capitol in his capacity as a journalist, like many other journalists and photographers, after hundreds of other individuals had posted pictures and videos from the J6 event that, apparently, contradicted the narrative.

No matter what they charge Baker with, this is his crime.

But don't worry! The Biden White House is a return to normalcy!

"Democracy" is safe!

White House Orders Fox News to Retract Reports on Biden Bribery Allegations

The reports focus on allegations that the president and his son, Hunter Biden, took millions of dollars in bribes from foreign nations to peddle their influence in Washington D.C.

It has been alleged that while he was vice president, Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor, who was investigating Burisma Holdings at the time.

Last year, for example, students at Stanford Law School – law students, who should understand the value of the First Amendment better than anyone else on campus – shouted down a federal judge whose views they didn’t like. When a Stanford diversity dean – yes, that’s an actual position – appeared on the scene, she didn’t back the judge. Instead, she instead lectured him, asking, “Do you have something so incredibly important to say?” and, infamously, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

This was far from an isolated incident.

Adults, particularly left-leaning young adults, truly believe they have the right not to hear words or concepts that might bother them. They refer to “microaggressions” and “unsafe environments.” ...

The solution for those of us who believe in free speech is to let advocates and opponents, of the Covid vaccines or anything else, talk to each other, or past each other, or at each other – while the world listens, or doesn’t. ...

Why have journalists and academics – the very people who should care most about free expression - lost their appetite for free speech? And how did I get caught in its crosshairs?

The simple two-word answer is Donald Trump.

Trump’s election in 2016 set our elite institutions into a spiral of anger – not merely at Trump, but at the Americans who had the temerity to resist Hillary Clinton’s coronation and elect him instead.

But Trump is not the only answer.

After all, 2016 wasn’t just the year of Trump. It was the year of Brexit. It was the year when elites on both sides of the Atlantic fundamentally lost their ability to set the so-called Overton window, the acceptable parameters of political discussion. No one serious in Washington or New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco – Republican or Democrat - wanted Donald Trump elected in 2016. And no one serious in London, Tory or Labor, wanted Britain to pull out of the European Union.

And the elites, correctly, saw large social media sites, Facebook and Twitter in particular, as the largest single engine of their loss of control.

Curation of the public discourse makes a self-referential parody of democracy: the legitimacy of the Regime nominally rests upon the will of the People, but the will of the People is whatever the Regime wills the people to will. In a sense, this has been the case in industrial technocracies more or less since their inception. Whoever controls the organs of opinion formation – the news and entertainment media, the schools, the universities – controls the mass mind, and therefore controls politics. The openly totalitarian regimes of the Democratic People’s Republics did this blatantly, with direct state management of the press and the academy; the more subtle liberal democracies did this behind the scenes, with nominally independent, private media and universities manipulated via back-channel communications, government grants, intelligence agency inserts (e.g. Project Mockingbird) and so on. The Great Shuttening is partly a reaction to the loss of influence of these legacy institutions, and a panicked attempt to assert control over the unruly many-to-many communications networks that have been displacing them.

Now let’s say things get dire and desperate for our beloved Regime. Effeminate foxes they may be, preferring subterfuge to naked force, but events force their hand. Order 66 goes out. Quadrotor swarms are despatched across the world, a Night of the Loud Drones – although it doesn’t take a whole night, it’s all over in minutes. A few hundred thousand small and precisely targeted explosions, and the most troublesome dissidents are excised from the body politic.

Sure, there will be shock and horror among the people. But the software update will follow up immediately after: these were all terrorists, fifth columnists, agents of Russia, China, and Iran, racists and sexists and homophobes, climate-change deniers and antivaxxers, removing them was necessary as a public health measure. And a few days later, another software update: Drone Passover never happened. See, all those people are still posting on social media. Their accounts are still active! Everyone saying they’re all dead (and that we murdered them) is a conspiracy theorist.

Remarkable what you can do with Large Language Models.

Or maybe they’ll simply claim that the people they murdered were innocent casualties of Russian Orthodox terrorists, and that much stricter controls are now necessary For the Safety of Our Democracy. The NPCs would buy that too. But they’ll buy anything.

The proposed amendment aims to remove the provision that allows individuals to defend themselves by claiming they genuinely believe in and were merely expressing religious teaching already found in the Scriptures.

This means that citing religious beliefs as justification for words or actions that the state effectively regards as “heresy” will no longer be accepted as a valid defense under the law.

The bill states:

“The enactment amends the Criminal Code to eliminate as a defense against wilful promotion of hatred or antisemitism the fact that a person, in good faith, expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion or a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text.” ...

“If ratified, Canada’s anti-Christian legal apparatus created over the last decade will overtly persecute Christians with the force of criminal law.

“Everything is already in place,” he warned. “Buckle up.”

Dr. Boot went on to explain that evangelism, preaching, counseling, statements in the workplace, on social media, and in books that condemn homosexuality or transgenderism on biblical grounds could be “subject to criminal prosecution and with heavy fines or jail time.”

The legislation will also include statements deemed “anti-Semitic.”

THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION:
HOW NSF IS FUNDING THE DEVELOPMENT OF AUTOMATED TOOLS TO
CENSOR ONLINE SPEECH “AT SCALE” AND TRYING TO COVER UP ITS
ACTIONS

Interim Staff Report of the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government

U.S. House of Representatives
February 5, 2024

England sentences man to two years in jail for "offensive stickers"

The stickers in question ranged from:
"It's OK to be White"
"White Lives Matter"
"Love your Nation"
"Stop Anti-White Rape Gangs"
"Stop mass immigration"
"Reject white guilt"
"They seek conquest, not asylum"

To the racism that's sadly growing on the Right (because the Left won't allow public discourse and the free exchange of ideas):

"Why are Jews censoring free speech?"
"Small hats, big problems"

... Maybe you say, "Yeah, but he was antisemitic," which still doesn't erase free speech, but okay - let's play that game.

Why aren't there mass arrests of the Arab "asylum seekers" in England who routinely call for violence against the Jews?

In the U.S., where freedom of speech is broadly and proactively upheld, profane stickers are protected under the First Amendment. In England — and in much of the rest of Europe — you can be prosecuted and imprisoned for displaying an offensive sign.

And the seriousness with which law enforcement takes that responsibility is pretty much laughable:

Det Ch Sup James Dunkerley, head of Counter Terrorism Policing North East, said: 'Those that seek to bring hatred to our communities through actions such as stickering will be identified and brought to justice.'

Free speech was born in England ... now it has died there.

https://www.aussie17.com/p/shocking-response-from-tga-regarding

A story from 27 February illustrates how bad things have gotten. It involves a 16 year-old girl at the Richard-Wossidlo Gymnasium in Ribnitz-Damgarten (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). She posted an AfD-friendly video featuring blue Smurfs to TikTok, in which she said that Germany was not just a place, but also her home. School officials got wind of the blasphemy and the principal, Jan-Dirk Zimmermann, called the police; subsequently, no less than three officers were dispatched to neutralise this unusual threat to the German democratic order. After first establishing that the girl’s social media posts were totally legal and broke no laws, they took her from her chemistry class and escorted her to a staff room, where they told her to refrain from making such posts in the future, “for her own protection.”

There is also no institution which can be trusted to print money without falling into corruption, so the Fed should not exist.

Friedman rule, money supply = GDP Growth + 1% with a narrow quarter/half point range they can use for extra help in recessions or overheated.