John Bolton - November 14, 2024


The Cost Of Free Speech Could Soon Be Very High

Topics
non-crime hate incidents
Hosted by
John Bolton
Mentioned
Alison Pearson Christopher Hitchens George Washington Amira El-Gawabi George Orwell Orwellian Voltaire John
D-E-I must D-I-E Mr. Poilievre Call Kevin We Need A Dept Of Government Efficiency

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

182.87

Word count

1,074

Sentence count

86

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A woman in England is being charged with a non-crime hate incident, and a group in Canada wants to make all pro-Israel speech illegal. A woman has written a report on residential school denialism in Canada, and the government wants to shut down online freedom of speech.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.560 Hi, it's John down in the basement enjoying a cup of coffee just after 5 o'clock in the morning
00:00:05.780 and just checking out what's going on in the world.
00:00:08.340 And a couple of things have popped up over the last few days that have had my interest.
00:00:13.240 They're not from the same place, but they are connected.
00:00:16.300 There's a common thread with these things.
00:00:18.340 Wanted to start off with a quote this morning.
00:00:20.460 George Washington said, 0.98
00:00:22.300 If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter. 0.93
00:00:29.520 Freedom of speech in Western society is incredibly important.
00:00:33.340 In fact, in the United States, it's the very First Amendment of the Constitution.
00:00:36.920 Number one, freedom of speech.
00:00:39.040 And it's slowly being eroded away under the guise of misinformation and disinformation by governments around the world.
00:00:46.680 Now, I want to talk about Alison Pearson.
00:00:49.420 Do you know who Alison Pearson is?
00:00:51.700 Alison Pearson is a journalist over in England.
00:00:55.100 And the other day, she was going out for Remembrance Sunday.
00:00:58.580 In England, out to a ceremony, when the police showed up at her door.
00:01:04.200 And she said, Why are you here?
00:01:06.440 And they said, You're being charged with a non-crime hate incident.
00:01:11.660 A non-crime hate incident.
00:01:13.440 Sounds rather Orwellian, doesn't it?
00:01:15.260 Well, we'll get to Orwell in just a moment.
00:01:16.740 I'm going to end with an Orwell quote here in a moment.
00:01:20.380 But yeah, a non-crime hate incident.
00:01:22.180 So she said to them, What have I done?
00:01:24.680 And they said, Well, we can't tell you.
00:01:26.340 Other than that, about a year ago, you tweeted something and somebody reported it.
00:01:31.580 Well, who reported it?
00:01:32.940 We can't tell you who that is.
00:01:34.560 Well, what did I say?
00:01:35.540 We can't tell you that either.
00:01:37.660 So she's being charged with a non-crime hate incident.
00:01:40.640 So it's not a crime.
00:01:42.020 So that's okay then, right?
00:01:43.820 No, it isn't.
00:01:45.140 Apparently, it will go on your record.
00:01:46.800 And if you were charged with a non-crime hate incident, the police may not even have showed
00:01:51.260 up at your door, but it's on your record.
00:01:53.340 So you go for a job, and then they do a background check on you, and then you lose the job because
00:01:57.640 you've been charged with a non-crime hate incident.
00:02:00.920 It's disgusting.
00:02:02.080 And it's a big story in England right now. 0.56
00:02:03.860 A real big one.
00:02:04.880 And there are thousands, tens of thousands of people I understand over in England that have
00:02:09.420 had the same thing happen to them.
00:02:11.140 Meanwhile, police can't solve any crimes.
00:02:15.500 They're solving virtually nothing, but it seems they're running around going after people
00:02:20.940 who tweet something that somebody found offensive.
00:02:23.600 So that's where we are over in England.
00:02:25.360 Now, here in Canada, National Post is running a story, and this is bubbling under, and it's
00:02:29.320 connected with another story.
00:02:30.880 And I don't want to get too deep into the weeds with this, so this will go on forever.
00:02:34.360 Ottawa is asked to adopt an anti-Palestinian racism approach, alarming Jewish groups worried
00:02:40.100 about pro-Israel speech.
00:02:41.660 Now, we have in Canada, believe it or not, an anti-Islamophobia representative named Amira
00:02:47.500 Al-Gawabi.
00:02:48.940 Now, this woman is a real piece of work. 1.00
00:02:51.260 She's been rather controversial since she got this post.
00:02:54.760 I think it was Christopher Hitchens said that Islamophobia is a word created by fascists, 1.00
00:03:00.360 used by cowards to manipulate morons. 1.00
00:03:02.700 And what they basically want to do is make it illegal in Canada, take away the speech 1.00
00:03:07.620 of people who want to be critical of what's going on over in Palestine right now, or at
00:03:13.660 least the Palestinian people, Palestinian people.
00:03:17.260 Jewish groups are upset about this because they're worried that their defense of Israel
00:03:21.920 could be considered a crime very soon.
00:03:23.640 Another thing that's happening here in Canada is a group, a woman has written a 600-page report
00:03:29.980 on residential school denialism. 0.75
00:03:32.440 They want to make that illegal as well, which is absolutely ridiculous.
00:03:37.280 Now, if you haven't been following what's going on here in Canada, we had schools, natives
00:03:41.880 were taken to these schools by the government years ago, and a lot of these children were
00:03:46.340 abused and had awful experiences there.
00:03:49.300 And I don't think many people deny that that actually happened.
00:03:52.020 I have read reports where people said this was a good experience for them.
00:03:56.700 You may be aware of a story that ran rampant several years ago about mass graves of children
00:04:03.060 at these residential schools.
00:04:05.040 And so far, after about three years and millions upon millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars
00:04:10.660 being spent on this, nobody decided to go out and buy a $9 shovel to dig a hole to find
00:04:16.100 out if anybody's in the graves.
00:04:17.440 Not a single body has been found at this point.
00:04:20.420 But this really scares me.
00:04:21.980 Here in Canada, a number of bills are going through Parliament that will shut down speech
00:04:26.020 online, and these things, this is creeping authoritarianism, and the government seems to
00:04:31.480 think that it is the only entity that can tell you what is true and what isn't.
00:04:37.600 You need to find out what the truth is yourself.
00:04:39.880 And the words misinformation and disinformation, those are the buzzwords they're using to shut
00:04:45.240 down your free speech.
00:04:46.520 I'm a free speech absolutist.
00:04:48.680 I think you should be able to say anything you want.
00:04:51.960 You know, I don't know if it was Voltaire.
00:04:53.740 I think it's been credited to him.
00:04:55.120 I think he said, you know, I may not agree with your speech, but I'll fight to the death
00:04:59.200 for your right to say it.
00:05:00.820 As long as you're not calling for the death of somebody or calling for violence, you should
00:05:05.020 be able to say anything you want.
00:05:06.860 I want to end with George Orwell.
00:05:09.200 You know, Orwell wrote a book of fiction, but it's being used as a guidebook for governments
00:05:13.340 and people around the world right now.
00:05:14.840 And this is what he said.
00:05:16.200 Everything faded into mist.
00:05:18.600 The past was erased.
00:05:20.060 The erasure was forgotten.
00:05:21.620 The lie became the truth.
00:05:23.740 Every record has been destroyed or falsified.
00:05:27.080 Every book has been rewritten.
00:05:29.320 Every picture has been repainted.
00:05:31.820 Every statue and street and building has been renamed.
00:05:36.240 Every date has been altered.
00:05:38.280 And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.
00:05:43.180 History has stopped.
00:05:44.360 Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right.
00:05:50.880 Thanks for watching.