This week in Censorship, part 2.
Hate speech codes inevitably lead to tyranny. By Greg Lukianoff:
Free-speech advocates have long warned Americans about the dangers of adopting “hate speech” codes.
If they became widely enforced, the result wouldn’t be the kinder society intended by such censorship; it would be an intimidated, even frightened one.
Either you engage in mass arrests, or you enforce the rules selectively — which means targeting some viewpoints above others.
And haven’t we seen that since the Bondi massacre, with the Albanese Government cracking own on Nazis for an Islamic crime.
Opposition leader Susan Ley gets it right:
Tackling hate speech is not a licence to go after free speech.
There are clear issues that this legislation needs to address. It needs to be targeted to the threats that we face, and those threats are radical Islamic extremism and antisemitism.
France convicts 10 people for writing tweets that caused Brigitte Macron emotional distress. By Bryan Chai in Gateway Pundit.
Ten people were just found guilty in France for “cyberbullying” the country’s first lady, according to France24. These weren’t threats. Nor violence. Nor blackmail. It was speech — ugly, stupid, conspiratorial speech, in this writer’s opinion — aimed at a powerful public figure who sits at the very center of the French political class….
The claim that French first lady Brigitte Macron is secretly a man is absurd, unserious, and a distraction from real problems. What Macron allegedly has hiding in her skirt has little bearing on unchecked immigration, a brutal economy, or rampant crime.
But free societies don’t criminalize speech because it’s foolish or offensive. They tolerate it precisely because the alternative — empowering the state to decide what mockery, speculation, or ridicule is allowed — is the first step toward something far darker.
Punishing the speakers:
On Monday, judges handed down guilty verdicts against 10 individuals (eight men and two women) accused of “cyberbullying” Macron. … Defendants were ordered to undergo mandatory “cyberbullying awareness” programs, while others received suspended prison sentences of up to eight months, which is a rather remarkable escalation for online speech offenses involving no threats and no physical harm.
The message from the state was unmistakable: Say the wrong thing about the wrong person, and the justice system will intervene. …
The new standard is tyrannical:
Brigitte Macron’s daughter, Tiphaine Auzière, told the court that the harassment caused a “deterioration” in her mother’s life, explaining that “she cannot ignore the horrible things said about her,” and that the emotional toll rippled outward to the rest of the family.
That may be humanly understandable, but it is a catastrophic standard for criminal punishment.
If the threshold for state intervention is whether a powerful public figure can emotionally “ignore” speech, then free expression becomes entirely contingent on temperament. Had Brigitte Macron possessed thicker skin, would no crime have occurred? If the remarks had been laughed off instead of internalized, would the same words suddenly become lawful?
This is psychological guesswork masquerading as “law.”
Worse still, this standard is infinitely expandable. Any politician, spouse, or government-adjacent figure can now claim subjective distress as grounds to silence critics, satirists, or online provocateurs …
[Not just politicians, but groups — who cannot be offended. Trans, aboriginals, … every group (except white men) is protected.] …
Make no mistake, this is totalitarianism in its modern, sanitized form. No jackboots, no gulags, just bureaucrats, courts, and euphemisms like “harm,” “safety,” and “dignity” used to justify policing speech, belief, and eventually conscience itself.
Europe’s New Class cannot “tolerate mockery, offense, or even silent dissent without reaching for the handcuffs.” The most awful rulers Europe has had for centuries.