Free Speech

British Blasphemy? UK Government Moves Toward New Definition of “Islamophobia” for Speech Regulation

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has announced that the government will be further cracking down on hate speech with a new working group tasked with defining ‘Islamophobia’. The free speech community is raising the alarm that the effort is likely to further broaden the government controls over speech.

It was announced last week that Rayner’s working group would be chaired by former Conservative attorney general Dominic Grieve KC, who has himself admitted that defining Islamophobia while safeguarding free speech is ‘extremely difficult.’ Notably, Grieve wrote the foreword to the 2018 All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) report on Islamophobia, which advanced a definition that many critics argue is far too broad.

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Censorship

South African Police Open ‘Treason’ Investigation into Critics of Government

While some members of the South African government have acknowledged that Afriforum and Solidarity are merely exercising the free speech that is guaranteed by the South African constitution’s Bill of Rights, the extremist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), led by the staunchly anti-white racist Julius Malema, said last week that their advocacy was “treasonous.”

The ANC itself called on South Africans to “to isolate these right-wing races and focus on working together,” ominously referring to entire racial groups instead of to specific individuals or organizations it wished to target.

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Politics

WHCA Cared More About Protecting Biden Than Defending The First Amendment

The WHCA was notably silent when The Federalist, along with The Daily Wire, sued the State Department for blacklisting conservative media outlets. And as The Federalist co-founder and CEO Sean Davis pointed out, “When the Biden White House demanded that big tech companies like Facebook and Google censor conservative media outlets for the crime of critically reporting on the Biden White House, the WHCA didn’t object.”

When former President Joe Biden was caught relying on a cheat sheet with pre-arranged questions, the WHCA stayed silent about the lack of “free” press happening. Ironically, one of the reporters on the cheat sheet, the Los Angeles Times’ Courtney Subramanian, was later elected to the WHCA Board in 2023.

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Legal

FCC to Brief House Republicans on ‘Unprecedented’ George Soros Scheme to Control 200 Radio Stations

Federal law requires applicants with excessive foreign ownership to file a petition for declaratory ruling at the same time that they seek FCC approval for the relevant license transfers, they must then complete that process before the FCC can approve the assignment of licenses, and that process must enable Executive Branch agencies with national security and specific policy expertise to weigh in.

Carr continued, “Did they obtain approval from the FCC for their excessive foreign ownership? No, they did not. Did the Applicants afford the Executive Branch agencies with national security and relevant policy expertise an opportunity to consider their application as well as the source and amount of foreign investment? No, they did not.

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Censorship

Maine legislature censures Rep. Laurel Libby for pointing out trans athlete who won girls’ competition

During Tuesday’s vote, Libby came to the house floor with a prepared seven-page speech on the importance of protecting girls’ and women’s sports from trans inclusion. However, throughout the night, her microphone was consistently turned off when she was trying to deliver that speech. 

“I was completely unable, from my first sentence, to get a word out, before the other side was shutting me down,” Libby said, adding that she had never seen anything like that happen during her tenure in the Maine legislature. 

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Censorship

JD Vance: Everything We Do Should be to Defend Democracy, But Europe is Abandoning Shared Values

For years we’ve been told everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defence of democracy. But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials, threatening to cancel others, we have to ask if we are holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say ourselves because I fundamentally think we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values, we must live them.

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Censorship

USAID Funded Massive ‘News’ Platform, Extending ‘Censorship Industrial Complex’ To Billions Worldwide

USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, “Internews Network” (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and “training” over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives.

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