May 22, 2024 | Creeping Fascism, Part 1: Just The Beginning

I keep a “creeping fascism” file with the intention of tracking governments’ erosion of their citizens’ rights and freedoms. But the file is filling up so fast that the first few articles in this series will have to be “data-dump” cut-and-past jobs rather than in-depth analyses of any specific depredation. So here goes:

JK Rowling Could Be Imprisoned For “Misgendering” Trans People Under New Law

(Modernity) – Author JK Rowling could be prosecuted for “misgendering” trans people under Scotland’s new hate crime law that comes into force today, an SNP minister has admitted.

A person could now be imprisoned for up to seven years if they engage in “insulting” behaviour towards ‘protected’ groups, and the prosecution only needs to prove that the hatred was “likely” rather than “intended”.

Siobhian Brown, the SNP’s community safety minister, stated that calling a “trans woman” (a man) “he” “could be reported and it could be investigated. Whether or not the police would think it was criminal is up to Police Scotland for that.”

During their training program on enforcing the new law, police officers were taught that even the content of plays and comedy gigs should be considered as potential hate crimes.

Rowling has vowed to continue calling biological males men and says she will now be targeted for telling the truth.

Blame Canada? Justin Trudeau Creates Blueprint for Dystopia in Horrific Speech Bill

(Racket) – Life sentences for speech? Pre-crime detention? Ex post facto law? Anonymous accusers? It’s all in Justin Trudeau’s “Online Harms Bill,” a true “threat to democracy”

On February 21st, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave a press conference in Edmonton, announcing his government’s decision to introduce the Online Harms Act, or Bill C-63. It was described in Canadian media as a “bill to protect kids” that would stop the “exploitation of children,” and Trudeau’s curt speech focused solely on minors. The scarf-clad PM angrily dismissed criticisms the bill might have a broader focus.

Then people read the bill.

The purview of the Online Harms Act extends far beyond speech, reimagining society as a mandated social engineering project, creating transformational new procedures that would:

• enlist Canada’s citizens in an ambitious social monitoring system, with rewards of up to $20,000 for anonymous “informants” of hateful behavior, with the guilty paying penalties up to $50,000, creating a self-funded national spying system;
• introduce extraordinary criminal penalties, including life in prison not just for existing crimes like “advocating genocide,” but for any “offence motivated by hatred,” in theory any non-criminal offense, as tiny as littering, committed with hateful intent;
• punish Minority Report pre-crime, where if an informant convinces a judge you “will commit” a hate offense, you can be jailed up to a year, put under house arrest, have firearms seized, or be forced into drug/alcohol testing, all for things you haven’t done;
• penalize past statements. The law gets around prohibitions against “retroactive” punishment by calling the offense “continuous communication” of hate, i.e. the crime is your failure to take down bad speech;
• force corporate Internet platforms to remove “harmful content” virtually on demand (within 24 hours in some cases), the hammer being fines of “up to 6% of… gross global revenue.”

Trudeau’s creation is a turbo-charged social surveillance law aimed first at forcing big platforms like Facebook and Twitter to “self-police,” but secondarily targeting individuals and doling out civil and criminal penalties for speech and thought on a scale not seen anywhere. What constitutes hateful conduct? While the bill newly defines hate speech as “likely to foment detestation or vilification” of Canada’s growing list of protected groups and individuals, Canadian lawyers interviewed were generally unsure of what the standard might look like in practice.

“It’s impossible to know what exactly it’s going to mean,” says Bruce Pardy, Executive Director of Rights Probe. “So you’re going to have to rely upon the court in a criminal prosecution, or the human rights tribunal in a human rights proceeding, to put their own interpretation on that, and figure out where the line is.”

Germany Confirms Leaked Audio Of Its Top Generals Discussing Blowing Up The Crimean Bridge

(Zero Hedge) – The government of Germany has confirmed the authenticity of a leaked audio recording file featuring top-ranking German military officials in a private discussion of a potential German operation to bomb the Crimean Bridge in Russia.”

The audio could have easily been dismissed in the West as simply Russian-sourced propaganda or even an AI fake; however, in an unexpected development the highest levels of the German government have now confirmed that the audio is indeed real and Berlin launched an investigation into the “serious” breach of secured communications.

From Mike Benz:

From a recent Dr. Drew video:

“Way Crueler Than Any Dictatorship”

Much More Coming

Readers who have been watching the drift towards techo-dictatorship will note that the above just scratches the surface. As I said, the creeping fascism file is filling up fast (maybe we should change it to “galloping” fascism).

So expect more from this series in coming weeks, much of it from a program that Racket’s Matt Taibbi just teased:

Note to Readers: That Eerie Silence

(Racket) – When I first started publishing the Twitter Files in 2022-2023 along with Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, David Zweig, Paul Thacker, and others, there was an emphasis on speed. Once we saw phrases like “flagged by DHS,” I knew the project was temporary, and guessed we’d probably need to stay ahead of the news cycle in order to avoid seeing material drown in blowback. So, we set aside some explosive bigger-picture storylines to focus on things that could be confirmed and published quickly. There were also topics we didn’t fully understand at the time.

Some of those broader stories will begin coming out now, hopefully starting this week. There’s a reason for working back through this material now. Sources tell me at least two different active groups are working on political content moderation programs for the November election that tactically would go a step or two beyond what we observed with groups like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, proposing not just deamplification or removals, but fakery, use of bots, and other “offensive” forms of manipulation.

Also: beginning around the time we published the “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex,” Racket in partnership with UndeadFOIA began issuing Freedom of Information requests in bulk. The goal was to identify inexcusably secret contractors of content-policing agencies like the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. The FOIA system is designed to exhaust citizens, but our idea was to match the irritating resolve of FOIA officers by pre-committing resources for inevitable court disputes, fights over production costs, etc. Thanks to UndeadFOIA’s great work, we now have a sizable library of documents about publicly-funded censorship programs (and a few private ones scooped up in official correspondence).

We’ll be releasing those, too, focusing on a few emails per batch, and publishing the rest in bulk. There’s so much material that a quick global summary here would be difficult, but suffice to say that the anti-disinformation/content control world is much bigger than I thought, enjoying cancer-like growth on campuses in particular, in the same way military research became primary sources of grants and took over universities in the fifties and sixties. Some of these FOIA documents are damning, some entertaining, some just interesting, but all of them belong to the public. We’re going to start the process of turning them over, hopefully today

John Rubino May 22nd, 2024

Posted In: John Rubino Substack

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