With her luster dimming at home, New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is trying out her professional scold routine in front of a world audience, perhaps preparing for a role at some international body. Key to that shift is her belief that this whole free speech thing is a menace, and something should be done about it, preferably around the globe. As it turns out, she has a whole pro-censorship project ready to go for a career reboot after electoral politics.
"A bullet takes a life. A bomb takes out a whole village. A lie online or from a podium does not," Ardern told the U.N. General Assembly in September. "But what if that lie, told repeatedly, and across many platforms, prompts, inspires, or motivates others to take up arms. To threaten the security of others. To turn a blind eye to atrocities, or worse, to become complicit in them. What then?"
"In Aotearoa New Zealand, we deeply value our right to protest," she continued. "But that does not mean the absence of transparency, expectations, or even rules. If we correctly identify what it is we are trying to prevent. And surely we can start with violent extremism and terrorist content online."
Her address then turned to promoting the Christchurch Call to Action, an international initiative she co-founded with France's President Emmanuel Macron with the goal "to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online," according to its founding document.
At the U.N., Ardern briefly acknowledged free-speech concerns, before waving them away as less important than the dangers of unregulated speech. By her words, this category encompasses promotion of terrorism, undefined extremism, disinformation, and also ideas the powers-that-be find threatening.
This is the face of authoritarianism - even though it looks different than you were taught to expect. And it's the mindset of tyrants everywhere:
This is someone so inebriated by her sense of righteousness and superiority that she views dissent as an evil too dangerous to allow: https://t.co/kmG4zTgPwh
"How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists?" Ardern demanded of her audience. "How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld, when they are subjected to hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology?"
To combat these perils, she demands "international rules, norms, and expectations" comparable to those applied in weapons control.
In case you were wondering, yes, the United States government did sign on to the Christchurch Call for Action in May 2021. D.C.'s conduct since (and well before) illustrates just why governments ought not be allowed to concern themselves with speech that doesn't directly threaten harm to others.
— FEE (Foundation for Economic Education) (@feeonline) June 6, 2022
In recent months, federal authorities have issued advisories warning that a taste for traditional Revolutionary War imagery such as the Gadsden flag may indicate a tendency towards "violent extremism." The Biden administration was repeatedly caught engaging in censorship by proxy, leaning on social media companies to suppress "misinformation" and viewpoints it didn't like, but which is protected against government action by the First Amendment.
"Government officials can use informal pressure—bullying, threatening, and cajoling—to sway the decisions of private platforms and limit the publication of disfavored speech," the Cato Institute's Will Duffield warned last month. "The use of this informal pressure, known as jawboning, is growing. Left unchecked, it threatens to become normalized as an extraconstitutional method of speech regulation."
And there was the Department of Homeland Security's still-born effort to establish a Disinformation Governance Board tasked with distinguishing truth from falsehoods (talk about foxes and henhouses).
In places unshielded by the First Amendment, the situation is worse.
The U.K. is currently debating an Online Safety Bill that, if passed, will let officials "directly silence user speech, and even imprison those who publish messages that it doesn't like," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (The U.K. government supports the Christchurch Call for action.)
The European Union adopted a Digital Services Act that "will most likely result in a shrinking space for online expression, as social media companies are incentivized to delete massive amounts of perfectly legal content," cautions Jacob Mchangama, executive director of Copenhagen-based human-rights think tank Justitia. (The EU's European Commission supports the Christchurch Call for Action.)
For its part, Germany's NetzDG law "conscripts social media companies into governmental service as content regulators," Diana Lee wrote for Yale Law School's Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic. It has also inspired copycat legislation in over a dozen countries. "In a global free speech race to the bottom, the NetzDG matrix has been copy-pasted by authoritarian states to provide cover and legitimacy for digital censorship and repression," notes Justitia. (Germany's government supports the Christchurch Call for Action.)
Many online companies, including Amazon, Meta, and Google, have also signed on to Ardern's international censorship project. They either agree with its sentiments, or else see the need to court regulators who might otherwise make life difficult (remember the dangers of jawboning).
"Democracy and the ability to have civil and honest conversations is already becoming imperiled, which is why this is the worst possible time to empower lynch mobs who choose to take offence at ideas they don't support," Seymour told reporters in April 2021.
While it's too early to predict any country's future political developments, ACT is now rising in the polls while Ardern's Labour party falls. Jacinda Ardern appears to be preparing to move on to new projects in life, and it's rather obvious that will involve promoting global restrictions on speech, with government officials choosing between truth and falsehood, and designating what is fit for public discussion.
You can be confident that politicians in many countries will be more than happy to hear that message, and to embrace any encouragement of tightened censorship.
In my view, it all begins and ends with fully acknowledging and appreciating FROM WHENCE our rights derive:
As stated at the outset in the words of the Declaration of Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their CREATOR with certain unalienable rights...."
The problem in recent generations is that as more and more in society forget or outright reject this KEY truth -- that THE CREATOR of mankind is THE SOURCE of our rights -- the more and more that vacuum is filled by GOVERNMENT and its BUREAUCRACY which is comprised of FALLIBLE MEN and WOMEN who PRESUME AUTHORITY and behave as if it is THEY who are the BESTOWERS -- and thus if they so desire, also the ABRIDGERS of said rights.
Unless we quickly restore this sacred understanding -- that the derivation of our rights is from THE MOST HIGH GOD -- and that the primary role of the government is actually to provide the SAFETY and SECURITY so that we can EXCERCISE those rights -- it saddens me to say that unfortunately we can be quite certain that we will continue to see this insidious erosion of the liberties that have been gracefully bestowed upon this nation from above for nearly the past two and a half centuries.
The founders of this nation also left behind wise words which reflect this crucial point and are now very timely in regards to our present situation:
"Resistance to tyranny becomes the Christian and social duty of each individual ... Continue steadfast and, with a proper sense of your dependence on God, nobly defend those rights which heaven gave, and no man ought to take from us."
-- JOHN HANCOCK
"God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever..."
-- THOMAS JEFFERSON
This was actually behind one of the main disputes between the Federalists and anti-Federalists in regard to whether or not it was even a good idea in the first place to create a constitution at all. This, due to fears of the centralization of power towards the national government over the states. Indeed, without the inclusion of the BILL OF RIGHTS (at the adamant demand of the anti-Federalists), there is a good chance the constitution might not have been agreed upon and adopted into our system of governance as we've known it to this day...
"It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here."
-- PATRICK HENRY
"I earnestly recommend to our Christians to reject every 'system' as the fallible production of human contrivance which shall dictate the articles of faith and adopt the Gospel alone as their guide. Those Christian societies will ever be found to be the wisest and the best, which make the scriptures alone and not human articles, a confession of belief, the sole rule of faith and conduct."
-- JAMES MADISON
"We have staked the whole future of American civilization not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments."
-- Also attributed to JAMES MADISON yet hotly disputed as to its authenticity -- but suffice to say, WHOEVER wrote these words also captured perfectly the same spirit in other quotes by him and other founders on this particular matter -- so I believe it's still worth considering here)
And lastly, the very real problem we now face as a result of forgetting or rejecting THE DIVINE SOURCE of our RIGHTS brings to mind the famous quote by BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, wherein after a woman asked him after the signing of the Constitution what kind of government he had given us, he replied:
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