Beep! Beep! Trump defeats the sinister machinations of his cartoonish foes

Rebecca Weisser I 16 November 2024 I Spectator Australia

On 6 November, as Australians watched the last lap of the Looney Toons cartoon that is the US presidential election, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was desperately shoring up his own electoral prospects. That the irrepressible Road Runner of American politics aka Donald J. Trump had once again outsmarted Wile E. Coyote ie the Democrat political machine was a victory for the ages. Having failed to jail him, or kill him, attempts that involved a cast of characters employing contraptions mail-ordered from ACME corporation, the Democrats turned Trump into something few Americans can resist – the underdog.

And so it was that despite the predictions of partisan pollsters, billion-dollar celebrity endorsements, and the overwhelming support of the dead, Vice President Kamala Harris was defeated by Orange Man, the Merrie Melodies version of the Great Dictator.

This is bad news for leftists everywhere. It signals that the world has passed peak woke. All the increasingly crazy policies of the Obama/Biden era that threatened to crash down on Americans under Kackling Kamala have been comprehensively rejected.

Trump not only won the biggest share of the popular vote by a Republican ever, and the electoral college (312 to 226), but Republicans control the House of Representatives and the Senate. That means that the biggest threat to Trump’s agenda are Republicans in Name Only (RINOs) but using executive orders he has a reasonable chance of pushing through his agenda.

At the top of Trump’s list is ending the ‘censorship cartel’. As he put it with trademark clarity, ‘If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple just like dominos one by one.’

Trump outlined in detail how he’ll dismantle the ‘sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media’ that have been ‘conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people’ by suppressing ‘vital information on everything from elections to public health’. To break up the ‘toxic censorship industry that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called “mis-” and “dis-information”’ he will: ban federal departments or agencies from colluding with anyone to censor lawful speech, ban ‘federal money from being used to label domestic speech as “mis-” or “dis-information”’, stop federal government funding for non-profits and academic programs or universities that support censorship, fire any federal bureaucrat who engaged in domestic censorship and prosecute any that violated federal law, only give online platforms immunity if they are neutral, transparent, fair and non-discriminatory, require them to take down unlawful content exploiting children or promoting terrorism, and ban any employee of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DNI, DHS, or DoD from working for social media companies for seven years. He’ll also create a digital Bill of Rights forcing government officials to get a court order if they want to take down online content, inform users if their content or accounts are removed or restricted and explain why, give users the right to appeal, and allow users over 18 to opt out of content moderation altogether.

Yet while Trump was outlining how he’ll ‘shatter the left-wing censorship regime’, Albanese is doing his belated best to put such a regime in place. He spent Wednesday rushing his MaD Mis and Dis-information Bill through the lower house to protect Australians from the ‘harm’ that can be done by ‘misinformation’.

Labor claims its Bill will only force social media companies to censor statements that are ‘verifiably false’ and reasonably likely to cause or contribute to ‘serious harm’ to electoral and referendum processes, public health, or vilification of particular groups.

By that Albanese doesn’t mean the harm done when 97 per cent of Australians are hoodwinked by public health officials into believing that Covid vaccines are ‘safe and effective’ only to discover that once vaccinated and exposed to Covid, Australia’s death rate has skyrocketed for three years in a row and life expectancy has officially gone backwards.

Albanese also doesn’t mean the harm that is done when Hamas fanboys start chanting ‘Gas the Jews’ in front of the Sydney Opera House two days after the 7 October pogrom in Israel and it is falsely claimed that what was chanted was ‘Where’s the Jews’.

For the New South Wales police that bought this hogwash, Europe’s first Jew-hunt since the second world war, in Amsterdam last Friday provided video footage of what Hamas supporters do to Jews when they do find them. About 25 people were assaulted including one who was hit with a vehicle, victims made to beg for mercy on their knees and say ‘Free Palestine’ and one man jumped into a canal to escape his attackers. In the city of Anne Frank, on the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogroms of 1938, some 2,000 Israelis hid wherever they could until eight emergency El Al flights ferried them to safety in the Jewish state. If the message wasn’t clear to the police they could study a repeat performance by terror supporters in Berlin who went on a Jew-hunt attacking a Jewish youth soccer team with knives and sticks.

The harm Albanese is worried about is to Labor’s electoral prospects. As the Bill’s explanatory memorandum (EM) makes clear, it will be possible to censor opinions, claims, commentary and invective that could sway voter behaviour during an election so ‘the outcome of an electoral process can no longer be said to represent the free will of the electorate’. And who would determine the truth of an opinion? Fact-checkers relying on ‘experts’. Great. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. put it, ‘Trusting experts is not a feature of science, and it’s not a feature of democracy. It’s a feature of religion and totalitarianism’. Luckily, even Australia’s lily-livered Liberal party, that wrote the first draft of this Bill when in government (thanks, Paul Fletcher) has figured out that censoring the political opinions of your opponents would harm them when they are in opposition.

But we have yet to hear a single Australian politician make the case as clearly as Trump who simply said, ‘The fight for free speech is a matter of victory or death for America and for the survival of Western civilisation itself,’ promising, ‘When I am President, this whole rotten system of censorship and information control will be ripped out of the system at large. There won’t be anything left. By restoring free speech, we will begin to reclaim our democracy, and save our nation.’ It will make it a whole lot harder for Labor to censor US social media giants and it can’t come a moment too soon.

Author: Rebecca Weisser