Musk vs. Australia’s “You Can’t Say That” Surveillance State
Australia’s Labor/Green “you can’t say that” surveillance state is being challenged by Elon Musk in a lawsuit over bureaucratic bullying.
Musk’s team will challenge Labor e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant’s demand to remove a post from Chris Elston featuring a Daily Mail article.
Elston’s original tweet linked concerns about Australian LGBTQ+ activist Teddy Cook with an overall critique of transgenderism.
Elston’s alleged crime wasn’t just quipping that the inmates are running the asylum.
He voiced concerns about an LGBTQ+ activist being referred to as an expert advising the United Nations on health policies.
As The Post Millennial recalled, Cook, a trans-identifying biological male, is known for posting graphic LGBTQ+ content online.
Ignoring Cook, the Australian government went after Elston’s instead, labelling Elston’s concerns ‘deliberately degrading’.
Overreach
A big part of the heat seems to be Elston – who is not an Australian citizen – refusing an order from the Australian government to delete the tweet.
That tweet, now blocked for Australian users, read,
“This woman (yes, she’s female) is part of a panel of 20 ‘experts’ hired by the WHO to draft their policy on caring for ‘trans’ people.
“People who belong in psychiatric wards are writing the guidelines for people who belong in psychiatric wards.”
Acting on the complaint against Elston, in late March, the e-Safety department told X to remove the ‘harmful’ post, citing Section 88 of the Online Safety Act 2021.
Failure to comply would have landed Musk with an AUD $782,500 fine.
Consequently, X said, it was, ‘withholding the post in Australia in compliance with the order but intends to file a legal challenge to the order to protect its user’s right to free speech.’
Earlier this week, X was ordered by the Australian E-Safety Commissioner, subject to an approximately $800,000 AUD fine, to remove a user’s post. The post had criticized an individual appointed by the World Health Organization to serve as an expert on transgender issues.
X is…
— Global Government Affairs (@GlobalAffairs) March 29, 2024
Australia’s e-Safety Commission is regarded as the ‘world’s first regulatory agency committed to keeping its citizens safe online.’
Agency head Julie Inman Grant is an American import from Washington DC, with ‘agenda contributor’ ties to the World Economic Forum (WEF), and Twitter’s former Twitterarti.
Grant was employed by Twitter for approximately two years prior to Musk buying the platform.
Notably, in November 2022, she expressed apprehensions about Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
Before a senate hearing, Grant reassured a terrified Greens senator, Sarah Hanson-Young, that she wanted reassurances from Musk.
Specifically, the ex-Twitter e-Safety Commissioner wanted to know if Musk would “continue” to enforce “Australian laws, by responding to regulatory requests, and maintaining escalation paths.”
By regulatory requests, she, in all likelihood, also meant censoring accounts the Australian government considered “problematic”.
Double Standards
While I wouldn’t say Grant was being spiteful, it’s worth asking about her agenda.
Could Chris Elston be a convenient pawn whom the unelected globalist bureaucratic caste is using to coerce and control Musk?
If you’ve sensed a whiff of woke hypocrisy, you’d be right.
Part of the e-Safety agency’s role is countering cyberbullying. This includes ‘coercive control’.
Labor’s e-Safety Ministry of Forced Speech defines coercive control as, ‘a pattern of abusive behaviour used to control someone within a relationship through manipulation, pressure, and fear.’
Further, ‘an abuser can use technology, or stop another person using it, as a ‘weapon’ to gain and keep control over them.’
The relationship and pattern are easily recognised.
State overreach on free speech and its burden on the citizen-state relationship are well-established facts.
Exhibit A: Covid Communist censorship of accounts and “wrong think.”
Exhibit B: “Anti-vaxxer” misnomer campaigns.
Exhibit C: The LGBTQ+ political protection racket, whereby defenders of women’s rights are falsely labelled “transphobes,” and Nazis.
All three weigh in on the scale of concern, pattern, and problem.
In the United States, it was proven via the Twitter Files that disinformation Democrats used Big Tech to censor political opponents.
Who polices the “you can’t say that” surveillance state?
Surely cyberbullying laws include protecting citizens from the state?
Free Speech Union Australia’s formal request to Grant illustrated this point.
They’re suggesting Elston’s alleged “anti-trans” post is ‘protected political communication.’
State Control
More concerning is how Chris Elston’s case correlates to the “it’s not compulsory, but it is” Digital ID bill.
If you’re wondering how Labor could have jammed that drongo of a bill through the Senate, it’s because the Greens hold the balance of power.
The Labor/Green Socialist bloc, along with sympathetic, self-seeking independents, outnumber the rest.
They also crashed the ID bill through the Senate without any real debate.
As I argued in July last year, if an e-Safety department has to exist, it should only be concerned with:
- Protecting children online from sex predators.
- Stopping online scams.
- Restraining provable foreign enemy psyops and disinformation.
- Protecting free and fair elections, as well as freedom of speech.
- Keeping governments accountable.
Operating outside these parameters negates its reason for existence.
This fight between X and the socialist surveillance state isn’t just a fight for Chris Elston’s freedom of speech; it’s a fight for a free and fair Australia.
I don’t think many would, or could write this off as an exaggeration.
Only bullies would demand everyone “go along to get along”, and silence those who refused to look the other way.
___
Originally published at Caldron Pool. Photo: Daniel Oberhaus/Wikimedia Commons
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For the origins of State coercive control look no further than Article 58 of the Soviet 1922 Criminal Code. Lenin expresses the intent succinctly to Comrade Kursky, People’s Commissar for Justice:
As a sequel to our conversation, I am sending you an outline of a supplementary paragraph for the Criminal Code. . . . The basic concept, I hope, is clear, notwithstanding all the shortcomings of the rough draft: openly to set forth a statute which is both principled and politically truthful (and not just juridically narrow) to supply the motivation for the essence and the justification of terror, its necessity, its limits.
The court must not exclude terror. It would be self-deception or deceit to promise this, and in order to provide it with a foundation and to legalize it in. a principled way, clearly and without hypocrisy and without embellishment, it is necessary to formulate it as broadly as possible, for only revolutionary righteousness and a revolutionary conscience will provide the conditions for applying it more or less broadly in practice.
With Communist greetings,
LENIN
[17th May 1922]