Patrick's Notebook

by Jonathan Turley

Scottish Man Convicted Of Calling Ex-Girlfriend’s Boyfriend A “Leprechaun”

I have been a critic of the alarming criminalizing of speech in Great Britain through hate speech laws. Such laws create an insatiable appetite for greater and greater speech regulation and create a sense of empowerment among citizens to silence those with whom they disagree. Now, a Scottish man has been convicted of a message that was grossly offensive, indecent or menacing. According to the Evening Express, the prosecutor (appropriately named Susan Love) cited the fact that Terry Myers, 41, called the Irish boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend a “leprechaun.”

Love declared that the mail was threatening but added that it was a racially aggravated offense due to the use of the word “leprechaun.”

His defense attorney said that the two men had a “petty and pathetic” history and that his client regretted the use of the term.

He was nevertheless found guilty and fined £280 ($350) for the offense.

We have been following the worsening situation in England concerning free speech. The problem is trying to draw such lines rather than embracing free speech as protecting not just popular but unpopular and even hateful speech. Once you start as a government to criminalize speech, you end up on a slippery slope of censorship. What constitutes hate speech remains a highly subjective matter and we have seen a steady expansion of prohibited terms and words and gestures. As noted in a prior column, free speech appears to be dying in the West with the increasing criminalization of speech under discrimination, hate, and blasphemy laws.

As someone of Irish (and Italian) descent I would not be insulted to be called a leprechaun. Indeed, being called a magical figure is a substantial improvement from the usual abuse that tends to follow more scatological than magical themes.

from Yahoo News

Whether protesters, health concerns or a lack of enthusiasm kept Trump’s supporters from turning out in large numbers on Saturday, the spectacle of empty seats and an outdoor stage being dismantled as the rally began left viewers across the country with very different images than the campaign had hoped for. They were also unlikely to please the man the rally was meant to bolster.

President Trump’s reelection campaign got off to a rocky start Saturday, with a rally in Tulsa, Okla., that drew a much smaller crowd than his campaign had planned for.

“We begin, we begin our campaign!” Trump said exuberantly as he took the stage at Bank of Oklahoma Center before a crowd that fell far short of filling the 19,000-seat arena.

Trump quickly blamed the “fake news” for discouraging turnout and said “we had some very bad people outside, they were doing some very bad things,” intimating that his supporters had been prevented from entering the arena.

The president then assured those in attendance that “the silent majority is stronger than ever before.”

Settling into a version of the stump speech that he had delivered many times until he suspended campaigns in March as the coronavirus pandemic swept across America, Trump hit all of his familiar themes: his trade deals with China, rebuilding the military, his appointment of hundreds of conservative judges, and told a long anecdote about how much money he saved on the purchase of a new airplane to replace Air Force One.

Missing from his repertoire was his baiting the camera crews to pan the arena and show the size and enthusiasm of the crowd and thanking the fire marshals for letting him exceed the nominal capacity of the auditorium. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Michael Balsamo and Colleen Long

The Justice Department moved abruptly Friday night to oust Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan overseeing key prosecutions of President Donald Trump’s allies and an investigation of his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. But Berman said he was refusing to leave his post and his ongoing investigations would continue.

“I have not resigned, and have no intention of resigning, my position,” Berman said. His statement came hours after Attorney General William Barr said Berman was stepping down from his position.

The standoff set off an extraordinary clash between the Justice Department and one of the nation’s top districts, which has tried major mob and terror cases over the years. It is also likely to deepen tensions between the Justice Department and congressional Democrats who have pointedly accused Barr of politicizing the agency and acting more like Trump’s personal lawyer than the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

The move to oust Berman also comes days after allegations surfaced from former Trump national security adviser John Bolton that the president sought to interfere in an Southern District of New York investigation into the state-owned Turkish bank in an effort to cut deals with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Darmi Msarko

Today AFP reported that Facebook removed ads by President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign that contained a symbol used in Nazi Germany for political prisoners.

The leading social network, which has drawn fire over its hands-off approach to political speech in recent months, said in a statement the campaign messages violated a policy against “organized hate” and were taken down as a result.

“We don’t allow symbols that represent hateful organizations or hateful ideologies unless they are put up with context or condemnation,” Facebook head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher said at a House of Representatives committee hearing.

“That’s what we saw in this case with this ad, and anywhere that that symbol is used we would take the same actions.”

Facebook’s move against the ads targeted when they contended are dangerous far-left groups comes amid heated debate between social platforms and political leaders on what content may be allowed or banned.

In a tweet from a “Trump War Room,” the campaign contended the upside-down red triangle symbol at issue was “widely used” in reference to left-wing activist group Antifa. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Darmi Msarko

The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday to block the Trump administration from ending an Obama-era program that shields nearly 700,000 young undocumented immigrants from deportation, upending a key feature of President Trump’s immigration agenda.

In a fractured decision, the justices said the administration failed to give an adequate justification for terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as required by federal law.

The ruling keeps intact a program that is open to an estimated 1.3 million non-citizens who are eligible for DACA by virtue of having been brought to the U.S. as children, and who have maintained residency and meet the education or military service requirements and other criteria.

By Cynthia Chung

“Western Europe has only 20 to 30 more years of democracy left in it; after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship, and whether the dictation comes from a politburo or a junta will not make that much difference.”

– Willy Brandt (German Federal Chancellor, right before he stepped down in 1974)

Believe it or not, but the dystopic view that democracy is dead is by no measure a new idea. However, what might disturb you is where this design, in its contemporary form, really germinated from.

The idea that democracy is in a crisis and needs to be replaced with a new form of “governance” did not originate from the outcries of an oppressed people demanding their rights to a decent life. We are not presently seeing an organic, grassroots process in reforming how government, that is, democracy will be “improved” upon. Rather, what we are seeing is a controlled disintegration of the very thing we think we are trying to uphold, and this destruction has been in the works for over 45 years.

It is no coincidence that Samuel P. Huntington is very fond of the Willy Brandt quote “prophesising” the end of democracy (which was used at the beginning of both his books ‘The Crisis of Democracy’ and ‘Disaffected Democracies’), that is after all his purpose in life…to see to it that that prophecy comes true.

In this paper I will go through how the Henry Kissinger crew successfully purged the last significant remnants of decency within the CIA and reshaped the government structure into the Deep State that we see it grotesquely throbbing as today. In this story, we will see how those prominent figureheads who prophesise the “end of democracy” have been the very orchestrators of its destruction. » Read the rest of this entry «

by Mike Whitney

“Revolutions are often seen as spontaneous. It looks like people just went into the street. But it’s the result of months or years of preparation. It is very boring until you reach a certain point, where you can organize mass demonstrations or strikes. If it is carefully planned, by the time they start, everything is over in a matter of weeks.” —Foreign Policy Journal

Does anyone believe the nationwide riots and looting are a spontaneous reaction to the killing of George Floyd?

It’s all too coordinated, too widespread, and too much in-sync with the media narrative that applauds the “mainly peaceful protests” while ignoring the vast destruction to cities across the country. What’s that all about? Do the instigators of these demonstrations want to see our cities reduced to urban wastelands where street gangs and Antifa thugs impose their own harsh justice? That’s where this is headed, isn’t it?

Of course there are millions of protesters who honestly believe they’re fighting racial injustice and police brutality. And more power to them. But that certainly doesn’t mean there aren’t hidden agendas driving these outbursts. Quite the contrary. It seems to me that the protest movement is actually the perfect vehicle for affecting dramatic social changes that only serve the interests of elites. For example, who benefits from defunding the police? Not African Americans, that’s for sure. Black neighborhoods need more security not less. And yet, the New York Times lead editorial on Saturday proudly announces, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police–Because reform won’t happen.” Check it out:

“We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police….There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.

So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job…” (“Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police–Because reform won’t happen”, New York Times)

» Read the rest of this entry «