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Censorship Industrial Complex

Scotland’s crazy anti-hate law may be sign of things to come here

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Brian Giesbrecht

Scotland had 8,000 complaints in the first week. Is it likely that a similar avalanche of claims will result in Canada if C-63 becomes law?

Actually, there will probably be a lot more here.

For one thing, our population is many times the size of Scotland’s.

Some argue that Scotland’s new hate speech law is more draconian than Canada’s yet-to-be-enacted equivalent, Bill C-63. Others say this is not so — that portions of ’63’ are even greater threats to free speech than Scotland’s extreme new law.

Regardless of who wins in this radical experiment in mass censorship, one thing we can predict with certainty: Both laws will be a goldmine for the legal profession and a nightmare for anyone who has ever dared to write, say or broadcast anything controversial.

How? Well, in the first week that Scotland’s new hate legislation has been in force there has been an avalanche of new claims launched — 8,000, and counting. Every one of those claims will have to be defended by a person who believed that they were exercising their right of free speech.

Now, 8,000 of those people will be caught up in expensive, time consuming, and emotionally draining litigation. Their cases will mostly be heard by officials and judges who were appointed specifically because they shared the same views as the government that appointed them — the same government that felt the need to prosecute these 8,000 people.

That 8,000 surpassed the total number of hate crime allegations in Scotland for all of 2023. A projection is that there will be an estimated 416,000 cases for 2024 if this rate keeps up. The complaints have completely overwhelmed Scotland’s police.

The Scottish Police Federation’s David Threadgold said this about how the new law was being used by angry citizens with an axe to grind: “…the law was being “weaponised” by the public in order to settle personal grudges against fellow citizens or to wage political feuds, while suggesting that the government encouraging the public to report instances of ‘hate’ has clearly blown up in their face.”

We have already seen this Scottish law in action when J.K. Rowling, who is famous not only for her wonderful Harry Potter books, but more recently for stating what we knew as fact for the first few hundred thousand years or so of human history — namely that men are men, and women are women — famously reposted that claim and dared the Scottish police to charge her.

The police announced that she wouldn’t be charged — at least that particular police officer wouldn’t charge her at this particular time.

The other person who has been the subject of many of those 8,000 complaints is First Minister Humza Yousaf — the very man responsible for this monstrosity of a law. Yousaf is himself quite famous for complaining that Scotland has too many white people. Who knew?

That odd observation resulted in a world famous spat with none other than Elon Musk. The online slugfest basically took the form of each man accusing the other of being a racist. At times it looked more like a schoolyard fight.

That a national leader seriously feels that the sledgehammer of the criminal law must be used to sort out such cat fights between citizens is rather alarming.

But, in this regard, Yousaf and Trudeau are birds of a feather. Both are convinced that only “acceptable views” — namely the views they agree with — will be allowed, while “unacceptable views,” namely, those they don’t like, must be disappeared by the machinery of the state.

It should be explained at this point that Scotland’s new law, unlike our C-63, requires police to determine whether or not the person under complaint has “stirred up hatred.”

Bill C-63 has those “hate” complaints heard by the Human Rights Tribunal.

In both cases however, one person’s opinion will judge another person’s opinion. However, one person will be paid to perform this function, while the other person might become a criminal if their opinion fails a completely subjective test.

Scotland had 8,000 complaints in the first week. Is it likely that a similar avalanche of claims will result in Canada if C-63 becomes law?

Actually, there will probably be a lot more here.

For one thing, our population is many times the size of Scotland’s.

For another, C-63 allows people to make complaints anonymously if the tribunal says so. It also promises up to $50,000 per complaint. That’s a powerful motivator. That $50,000 doesn’t come from some magic bank, by the way. If you are the person complained about, it comes from you. And you might be required to fork over an additional $20,000 to the tribunal for their troubles.

I’m not sure if they will expect a tip.. 

Much has been written about C-63. Many knowledgeable Canadians have discussed in detail the hundreds of objections they can see with this Bill. Senior Canadian voices, such former Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, and world famous author Margaret Atwood, have warned Canadians about this seriously flawed legislation.

But what no one has done — except for Trudeau apparatchiks — is to give any good reasons why Canada needs this legislation.

If Scotland’s projected number of complaints for 2024 is 416,000 and they have a population of less than six million, the projection for Canada would be into the millions of complaints. Even setting aside the obvious impossibility of paying for thousands of new tribunal adjudicators, staff, and the thousands of new lawyers required to help the million-plus people who are thrust into this hate complaint boondoggle, why would any serious government even wish such a thing on their citizens?

Do we not have a rather large bag of serious problems we must contend with?

We have a generation of young people, for example, who might never in their lives be able to afford a home of their own. How do we expect these young people to raise a future generation of Canadians without a home in which to raise them? Isn’t that a bigger problem than someone’s hurt feelings?

Another example… Trudeau has just noticed that we don’t seem to have an army anymore. Isn’t that a bigger problem than whether or not someone feels that they have been misgendered, or called nasty names?

There is a list, as long as the longest arm, of very real problems that need urgent attention. Why are we wasting time and money on the brainchild (yes, I use that term loosely) of a desperate prime minister and his few remaining fellow ideologues?

This legislation is totally unnecessary, and an appallingly disrespectful way to treat Canadians. We already have hate laws. We already have laws to protect children. C-63 is as useless as the tired apparatchiks pushing it.

We should definitely pay attention to what is happening in Scotland. It will be our fate if this perfectly awful Bill C-63 is not defeated.

Brian Giesbrecht, retired judge, is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

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Censorship Industrial Complex

France condemned for barring populist leader Marine Le Pen from 2027 election

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From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

It remains to be seen how long the rule of lawfare can last against the rising demand for popular politics. The globalist remnants across the West are now liberal democracies in name only.

Marine Le Pen, the former leader of the populist French opposition party, has been sentenced to prison and barred from standing for election as president in 2027, following a court ruling against her for alleged financial crimes.

Le Pen is currently leading polls to win the presidential election, being 11 to 17 points ahead of the party of the globalist President Emmanuel Macron.

The ruling Monday on charges of “misuse of EU funds” sees Le Pen, leader of the National Rally (RN) party, facing two years’ imprisonment and a five-year ban on running for elected office. Her lawyer stated she would appeal the ruling.

 

Speaking a day before the verdict, Le Pen said, “There are 11 million people who voted for the movement I represent. So tomorrow, potentially, millions and millions of French people would see themselves deprived of their candidate in the election.”

She is to address the French nation in a televised statement Monday night.

Party leader Jordan Bardella responded on X, saying, “Today, it is not only Marine Le Pen who is unjustly condemned: it is French democracy that is being executed.”

Bardella has called for “peaceful mobilization” in support of Marine Le Pen, with a petition launched in protest at the “democratic scandal” of her effective cancellation as a candidate.

The RN won 33 percent of the vote in the first round of the 2024 French parliamentary elections, being the single largest party overall. It is prevented from entering government by a “cordon sanitaire” – an agreement between liberal-global and left-wing parties to “firewall” national-populists from power regardless of how many people vote for them.

Le Pen’s appeal would suspend the jail sentence and the fine of 100,000 euros – but would not be heard until 2026, effectively sabotaging her preparations for the 2027 election should she win. The ban takes effect when the appeal process is exhausted, meaning Le Pen is free to campaign until her appeal is heard in a year’s time.

The court ruled that Le Pen, whose RN was the single largest party in the recent French parliamentary elections, had misused 3 million euros in EU funds by paying party officials based in France.

She had told France’s La Tribune Dimanche on Saturday that “the judges have the power of life or death over our movement.”

The judges appear to have given her party a death sentence. Eight further RN members and twelve assistants were also found guilty in the same trial.

Elon Musk has warned the move will “backfire,” with globalist house magazine The Economist in agreement that “her sentence for corrupt use of EU funds could strengthen the hard right.” Its report stated, “Barring Marine Le Pen is a political earthquake for France.”

The shockwaves have reached across Europe, and around the world. Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini called the court’s ruling a “declaration of war by Brussels,” joining Dutch and Hungarian national-populist leaders Geert Wilders and Viktor Orban in condemnation of the move.

 

According to commentators, the legal ruling shows that the liberal-global regime is now canceling democracy. Independent journalist Michael Shellenberger said on X of worldwide globalist moves to criminalize its opponents: “This is a five alarm fire.”

 

Citing the lawfare undertaken against then-candidate Donald Trump, former State Department official Mike Benz described the many examples of the rule of lawfare were “a dagger in the heart of democracy”:

 

Donald Trump Jr. asked whether the French judiciary are “just trying to prove JD Vance was right” – referring to the vice president’s “blistering attack on European leaders” over their rising censorship and anti-democratic moves. Vance told EU and UK leaders in Munich, “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.”

U.S. political strategist Steve Bannon also referenced populist figures facing legal persecution in his “War Room” rundown of the Le Pen affair today:

 

The move to legally “firewall” Le Pen has left even her political opponents disturbed, with the ruling Prime Minister Francois Bayrou reportedly “disquieted” by the verdict. Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of the left-liberal LFI and a determined political enemy of Le Pen, has said, “The decision to remove an elected official should be up to the people” – not the courts.

Right-populist leader Eric Zemmour, who coined the term “remigration,” warned of a “coup d’etat” of activist judges in 1997 – and said today that “everything has to change” as “it is not for judges to decide for whom the people must vote.”

Laurent Wauquiez of the conservative Les Republicains – who have also refused to work with the RN in coalition – said, “The decision to condemn Marine Le Pen is heavy and exceptional. In a democracy, it is unhealthy that an elected official be forbidden to stand for election.”

It seems this latest example of liberal-global lawfare may even see Le Pen’s party rise in the polls, with a survey today showing two-thirds of all French voters saying her ineligibility would not stop them voting for her RN party.

Nearly half of voters believe she was treated harshly “for political reasons,” with a quarter believing the move to bar her will be a “trump card” for the party overall.

Whether the move “backfires” or not, the message to Western electorates is becoming clear. You can vote for liberals of the left, right, or center – because anyone offering a real alternative will be locked out of power, or locked up in jail.

It remains to be seen how long the rule of lawfare can last against the rising demand for popular politics. After canceled elections, speech crackdowns, and criminalizing their opponents, the globalist remnants across the West are now liberal democracies in name only.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Welcome to Britain, Where Critical WhatsApp Messages Are a Police Matter

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“It was just unfathomable to me that things had escalated to this degree,”

“We’d never used abusive or threatening language, even in private.”

You’d think that in Britain, the worst thing that could happen to you after sending a few critical WhatsApp messages would be a passive-aggressive reply or, at most, a snooty whisper campaign. What you probably wouldn’t expect is to have six police officers show up on your doorstep like they’re hunting down a cartel. But that’s precisely what happened to Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine — two parents whose great offense was asking some mildly inconvenient questions about how their daughter’s school planned to replace its retiring principal.
This is not an episode of Black Mirror. This is Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, 2025. And the parents in question—Maxie Allen, a Times Radio producer, and Rosalind Levine, 46, a mother of two—had the gall to inquire, via WhatsApp no less, whether Cowley Hill Primary School was being entirely above board in appointing a new principal.
What happened next should make everyone in Britain pause and consider just how overreaching their government has become. Because in the time it takes to send a meme about the school’s bake sale, you too could be staring down the barrel of a “malicious communications” charge.
The trouble started in May, shortly after the school’s principal retired. Instead of the usual round of polite emails, clumsy PowerPoints, and dreary Q&A sessions, there was… silence. Maxie Allen, who had once served as a school governor—so presumably knows his way around a budget meeting—asked the unthinkable: when was the recruitment process going to be opened up?
A fair question, right? Not in Borehamwood, apparently. The school responded not with answers, but with a sort of preemptive nuclear strike.
Jackie Spriggs, the chair of governors, issued a public warning about “inflammatory and defamatory” social media posts and hinted at disciplinary action for those who dared to cause “disharmony.” One imagines this word being uttered in the tone of a Bond villain stroking a white cat.
Parents Allen and Levine were questioned by police over their WhatsApp messages.
For the crime of “casting aspersions,” Allen and Levine were promptly banned from the school premises. That meant no parents’ evening, no Christmas concert, no chance to speak face-to-face about the specific needs of their daughter Sascha, who—just to add to the bleakness of it all—has epilepsy and is registered disabled.
So what do you do when the school shuts its doors in your face? You send emails. Lots of them. You try to get answers. And if that fails, you might—just might—vent a little on WhatsApp.
But apparently, that was enough to earn the label of harassers. Not in the figurative, overly sensitive, “Karen’s upset again” sense. No, this was the actual, legal, possibly-prison kind of harassment.
Then came January 29. Rosalind was at home sorting toys for charity—presumably a heinous act in today’s climate—when she opened the door to what can only be described as a low-budget reboot of Line of Duty. Six officers. Two cars. A van. All to arrest two middle-aged parents whose biggest vice appears to be stubborn curiosity.
“I saw six police officers standing there,” she said. “My first thought was that Sascha was dead.”
Instead, it was the prelude to an 11-hour ordeal in a police cell. Eleven hours. That’s enough time to commit actual crimes, be tried, be sentenced, and still get home in time for MasterChef.
Allen called the experience “dystopian,” and, for once, the word isn’t hyperbole. “It was just unfathomable to me that things had escalated to this degree,” he said. “We’d never used abusive or threatening language, even in private.”
Worse still, they were never even told which communications were being investigated. It’s like being detained by police for “vibes.”
One of the many delightful ironies here is that the school accused them of causing a “nuisance on school property,” despite the fact that neither of them had set foot on said property in six months.
Now, in the school’s defense—such as it is—they claim they went to the police because the sheer volume of correspondence and social media posts had become “upsetting.” Which raises an important question: when did being “upsetting” become a police matter?
What we’re witnessing is not a breakdown in communication, but a full-blown bureaucratic tantrum. Instead of engaging with concerned parents, Cowley Hill’s leadership took the nuclear option: drag them out in cuffs and let the police deal with it.
Hertfordshire Constabulary, apparently mistaking Borehamwood for Basra, decided this was a perfectly normal use of resources. “The number of officers was necessary,” said a spokesman, “to secure electronic devices and care for children at the address.”
Right. Nothing says “childcare” like watching your mom get led away in handcuffs while your toddler hides in the corner, traumatized.
After five weeks—five weeks of real police time, in a country where burglaries are basically a form of inheritance transfer—the whole thing was quietly dropped. Insufficient evidence. No charges. Not even a slap on the wrist.
So here we are. A story about a couple who dared to question how a public school was run, and ended up locked in a cell, banned from the school play, and smeared with criminal accusations for trying to advocate for their disabled child.
This is Britain in 2025. A place where public institutions behave like paranoid cults and the police are deployed like private security firms for anyone with a bruised ego. All while the rest of the population is left wondering how many other WhatsApp groups are one message away from a dawn raid.
Because if this is what happens when you ask a few inconvenient questions, what’s next? Fingerprinting people for liking the wrong Facebook post? Tactical units sent in for sarcastic TripAdvisor reviews?
It’s a warning. Ask the wrong question, speak out of turn, and you too may get a visit from half the local police force.
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