FREEDOM IN FOCUS

The New Year is a good time to take stock. So let's take stock of where we're at in terms of the cause of freedom. I suspect we're in for some epic political battles for freedom in 2024 and 2025. Obviously the outcome is far from guaranteed, but I'm hopeful and cautiously optimistic for the future. Before explaining the reasons for my optimism, it's important to underline just how serious the challenges are (I discuss these challenges in greater detail in other posts) that face those of us who care about the fate of freedom in the West:

* Ireland is poised to pass one of the most draconian hate speech bills in the West, a bill that would allow police to raid your home based on your unpublished thoughts.

* The European Commission has passed the Digital Services Act, which empowers it to oversee the content moderation policies of social media companies.

* The EU Commission has also reached an agreement with the European Parliament on a European Digital Identity, which paves the way for a central bank digital currency, which is one of the greatest threats to freedom of our time.

* The World Health Organization is pushing for amendments to the International Health Regulations to be finalized by this coming May, which would empower it to declare an international public health emergency and on top of that, make legally binding directives about how states should respond to the threat.

* Climate change activists have been whether at the international and national level or local level have been working to instill fear and panic in the population, and the effect of fear is paralysis. And of course, susceptibility to manipulation and openness to “emergency” interventions.

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So these are all very real and imminent threats to our freedom in the West. And yet, I remain optimistic and hopeful for the future, for the following reasons:

* First, because many governments in the West are clearly so blinded by their own hubris and perhaps their own past successes that they have completely lost touch with popular sentiment and they're just carrying on as if everything is as before and not realizing that they are progressively alienating an ever greater number of voters so they will reap the rewards of their own ignorance and their own pride. And I believe that they're sowing the seeds for rival political movements, which could include pro-freedom political parties.

* Second, there is growing popular resistance to oppressive and illiberal and technocratic policies. We're seeing this in the farmers’ protests in the Netherlands and Germany, and in electoral results across Europe, which clearly are swinging towards the right. And whether you agree with all of the policies of emerging alternative parties, certainly it tends to be the case that these parties are more respectful towards civil liberties than their leftist counterparts or their centre-right counterparts.

* Third, our legal systems have not yet been completely corrupted, so they still have resources within them to help us fight for the cause of freedom. The First Amendment to the United States is a very significant barrier to any kind of state sponsored censorship. And in Europe, besides our national laws and our national laws, which include some defense of civil liberties, we also have the right to freedom of expression guaranteed in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. So I, for one, fully expect the Digital Services Act to come under serious legal scrutiny in the coming months. In addition, there have been a number of significant legal victories recently in the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom on behalf of freedom of expression, freedom of movement and freedom of religion, which I find to be encouraging for the future.

* A fourth reason I'm not unduly disheartened by the challenges facing freedom in the West is that I feel truly privileged and honored to be part of this epic battle for freedom. And for me, the struggle, which will continue as long as is necessary, has intrinsic value. And in a sense, the fact that we fight for our rights, the fact that we fight for our liberties, is a sign that we're alive, that we're breathing, that we're alive to the truth about our own dignity, and the day in which we throw in the towel and just submit to technocratic edicts is the day we die on the inside.

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Please find above a 4 minute excerpt from my in-depth, 45 minute interview with Jan Jekielek on Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders.

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In this interview from 8th September 2022, James Freeman, former MEP, gets my take on the recently enacted Digital Services Act. Tune in to this in-depth interview to learn more about the mechanisms through which the DSA enhances the EU Commission’s powers over the digital sphere in Europe.

The full interview can be found at The Freeman Report.

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The EU has drifted far away from the lofty vision of its founding fathers. In recent years, we've seen several regressive, anti-freedom initatives coming out of the EU Commission. Sadly, the EU Commission is now at war with our liberties:

1. Digital Services Act (curtailing free expression)

2. Covid Certificates (bio-surveillance)

3. Support for expropriation of farmland

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In this 20 minute interview on the Niall Boylan Podcast (July 24th 2023), I take climate activists and scientists to task for failing to explain in a rational way the nature of the climate emergency we allegedly face, and the reason we should believe that their solutions will avert a catastrophe (original episode can be found here).

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In this episode of FREEDOM IN FOCUS, I discuss the predicament of a citizen who realises he cannot trust official sources like CDC and WHO to tell the truth and report information impartially.

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During the pandemic, many of us were maligned and ridiculed as "conspiracy theorists" for defending long held democratic values and for stating elementary scientific truths such as the facts of natural immunity.

In this edition of the FREEDOM IN FOCUS podcast, I discuss some of the truths unveiled by the "conspiracy theorists" and argue they are owed an apology by those who bad-mouthed them, ridiculed them, and tried to shut them up.

The great cover-up failed because the true facts about the disastrous and inhumane pandemic policies are coming out, little by little.

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Many thanks to Patrick Henningsen for hosting me on TNT Radio for a discussion of Ireland’s new hate speech legislation.

Here’s the original link to the episode (27 minutes):

https://www.podbean.com/ep/pb-cemm9-140615e

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In spite of the wave of enthusiasm for community masking among public health elites and governments across the Western world, and repeated assurances by public health authorities like WHO, Fauci and the CDC that masks were critical for combating the spread of Covid-19, over two years of population-wide mask mandates across a large swathe of the Western world have not produced better disease outcomes, when compared with largely unmasked regions like Florida and Sweden, and have not been validated by any high quality evidence of efficacy.

This was not especially surprising. Only a population of robots could wear masks perfectly and in all relevant scenarios of viral transmission. We didn’t need 78 randomised controlled trials to realise that population-wide masking was a fool’s errand fron the start. Consider the following impediments to effective community masking:

* First, medical masks, even when used correctly, provide imperfect protection, at best, against viral transmission, since the aerosols that transmit SARS-CoV-2 are sufficiently small that they can exit through the pores of a mask or leak around its sides.

* Second, whatever about medical personnel in a clinical setting, it is unrealistic to expect the general population to strictly adhere to rigorous mask protocols while going about their ordinary life. People easily forget to change their masks, they don’t know how to correctly fit them to their face, or they fiddle with them, increasing the risk of contamination.

* Third, masks are quite uncomfortable, especially when worn tightly for prolonged periods of time, so people develop strategies to relieve their breathing, like exposing their noses or ordering food on a flight.

* Fourth, one of the main ways people socialise is by eating and drinking, which is obviously inconsistent with mask-wearing. The futility of masking in everyday social settings is amply illustrated by the image of a masked person walking across a restaurant, taking their seat, and then removing their mask in order to eat.

* Fifth, many social gatherings occur in households: when is the last time someone invited you over for a cuppa and insisted you wear an N95 mask while the kettle is boiling?

* Sixth, children in school are unlikely to adhere correctly to masking guidelines while interacting with each other or playing in the school yard.

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The virtual impossibility of adhering consistently to universal masking requirements while living a human life already gives us a clue that universal masking is unlikely to work as a strategy for curbing an infectious disease, whether the flu or Covid-19. And the evidence has borne this out. The latest mask evidence review by Cochrane, a respected international institute that collates and synthesises evidence related to health, echoes previous reviews by WHO, ECDC, and Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, which all found a high level of uncertainty about the efficacy of masking.

The updated Cochrane review, published on January 30th 2023, concluded that “the pooled results” of 12 RCTs (Randomised Controlled Trials) “did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks.” This finding, which is consistent with the findings of other prominent mask meta-studies, only serves to remind us that anyone who continues to believe in masking the general population to block viral transmission is essentially making an act of faith, much as one might throw muck at a wall and hope to God that some of it will stick.

And that is no way to ground a sensible response to an epidemic. Shots in the dark are ineffective strategies for dealing with a public health threat, and where they predictably inflict collateral harms, they are downright reckless. This particular shot in the dark create unintended consequences such as bringing public authorities into disrepute and inflicting needless collateral harms like psychological and physical discomfort, public resentment, and useless confrontations between citizens and public and private authorities.

But our governments - whether intentionally or through blind trust in the misguided advice of “experts” - opted to ignore the science and just roll out mask mandates willy-nilly for the entire population. This momentous experiment made life quite unpleasant for a lot of people, and inflicted many collateral harms that have not been properly acknowledged, such as cognitive impairment and communication deficits caused by the concealment of people’s faces, and a lot of psychological distress for those who where harassed every time they went into a supermarket if they lowered their mask to catch a breath or just refused to participate in the experiment.

Now that the experiment has been paused in most countries, it’s a good time to take stock and see if we can draw some instructive lessons for the future. Here are four lessons I have drawn from this misbegotten experiment:

* Pro-masking health authorities no longer deserve to be trusted, period.

Institutions and authorities that pride themselves on basing their recommendations on “the science,” have succumbed to political pressures to advocate masking and give the public false assurances about the efficacy of masking (the head of the CDC, for example, is still recommending masking during outbreaks in spite of a dearth of evidence supporting them). The degree to which the public health establishment, both at the national and global level, has become politicised and ideologised means it cannot be trusted to make sound recommendations should another public health “emergency” or epidemic come along. We must independently corroborate any and all advice coming out of these organisations, rather than naively assuming, as many of us did before, that they are conscientious, public-spirited and scientifically informed.

* Citizens must be more pro-active about seeking out reliable health information.

As a direct correlate of our loss of trust in public health authorities, citizens must educate themselves and be more discerning about where they get their health advice from, not only during a pandemic, but also during “normal” times. We now know that national governments and international bodies like WHO and the European Commission are among the leading purveyors of medical misinformation, whether on masks or in relation to their decision to push universal vaccination, knowing full well that young and healthy people were at far, far lower risk from Covid-19 and many of them had already acquired natural immunity by the time Covid vaccines were “offered” to them (“offer” being a euphemism, given the steep penalties attached to refusal).

* Heavy reliance on coercion in health policy is both inhumane and counterproductive.

The rapid shift from masking advice to mask mandates was symptomatic of a shift in thinking among public health policy gurus and among governments: the traditional model of voluntary collaboration with citizens to promote and protect their health had been jettisoned in favour of a top-down, “do-as-your-told-or-else” approach. This approach alienated a significant number of citizens from public authorities and sowed the seeds of distrust toward public authorities. It created a highly confrontational atmosphere and undoubtedly worsed the mental health of citizens who found themselves coerced into behaviours they did not see the point of, such as masking while walking to their table in a restaurant, or masking on an airplane and then unmasking during meals.

* Citizens must learn to be more rebellious in the face of absurd and tyrannical directives.

Mask mandates would never have worked if a large portion of the population, businesses, schools and universities had simply ignored them. When governments use bully-boy tactics to enforce compliance with a health directive, this is already suspect on its face. When the rule they are enforcing flies in the face of citizens’ common sense, it deserves to be ridiculed and laughed out of town. In the Spanish city of Pamplona, where I live, police were actually reprimanding people in bars for not wearing masks between sips of beer. I know this through first-hand testimony. This sort of absurd, dehumanising and infantilising requirement brings civil authorities into disrepute and is a brazen insult to citizens’ intelligence. As such, it deserves to be openly disobeyed. If enough people disobey, the rule becomes irrelevant and un-enforceable.

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* A Free Society Needs a Moral Code Superior to Legislative and Constitutional Fiat

* True Freedom Does Not Come Cheap

* How Meaningful is My Work? Answer these Fifteen Questions to Find Out

* Social Engineering Experiments Have an Appalling Track Record

* We Must Awaken from the Slumber of Servitude

* Romantic Individualism, However Seductive, Cannot Undo the Individual's Profound Dependence on Social Structures

* Why National Democracy is Condemned to Wobble Between Technocracy and Populism

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We, citizens of the West, have just lived through a political and constitutional coup. Our political and constitutional systems were usurped in 2020 and mobilised in the service of revolutionary ends completely at odds with the values of constitutional democracy. But unlike violent military coups, in which the levers of power are seized by armed forces, this particular revolution was relatively bloodless – though not without its victims.

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Essentially, it was a technocratic coup, in which our constitutional liberties were suspended based on an “expert” utilitarian calculation that this was the only way to save us from a life-threatening disease. We were fed on a regular basis with doomsday predictions by a narrow selection of “experts,” primarily with medical or epidemiological training. These same “experts” furnished governments with highly speculative, scientifically unsupported theories about the efficacy of lockdowns, masking, and vaccine mandates at warding off disease and death.

This was a technocratic coup in the sense that the overturning of our freedom to worship, protest, socialise, travel, and consent to medication, was rationalised by “expert”-endorsed information and advice. That information and advice turned out to be rubbish, to put it bluntly. To put it more gently, it was based on unverified hypotheses. But it worked to put the fear of God into citizens and bamboozle them into compliance.

Many of our freedoms have been restored, but I would venture that we have not seen the last of this technocratic revolution. There is a lot of political rumbling about a climate “crisis.” It does not matter that the root causes of climate change, and especially its remedies, are complex and scientifically contested. All that matters is that governments now have a pretty well-rehearsed playbook for pulling off another technocratic coup. So let’s be ready for them this time!

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* Social Engineering Experiments Have an Appalling Track Record

* We Must Awaken from the Slumber of Servitude

* Romantic Individualism, However Seductive, Cannot Undo the Individual's Profound Dependence on Social Structures

* Why National Democracy is Condemned to Wobble Between Technocracy and Populism