Great news; the hero who inspired the best movie to come out in ages may run for the Senate seat to be vacated by liberal RINO Mitt Romney:

Tim Ballard made the announcement during an appearance on the digital show of former Trump White House press secretary Sean Spicer, where he said he had been approached by numerous “influential people” for weeks about a potential run before Romney announced Wednesday he would not be running for re-election.

Let’s provide context for the rest of the story:

YouTube suspended actor and comedian Russell Brand from making money on the platform on Tuesday, days after several women accused him of sexual assault over a decade ago in what Brand has called a “coordinated attack.”

Brand was a member in good standing of the liberal establishment. Then he starting expressing unorthodox views on issues like Ukraine and the Jab. Now,

Brand’s channel with 6.6 million subscribers has been suspended from monetization “following serious allegations against the creator,” YouTube said. …

Brand’s other smaller channels with several hundred thousand subscribers were also suspended from monetization.

The power to cut off revenue is the power to silence.

Brand also makes money as a stand-up comedian. But promoters have postponed his shows in light of the unproven and most likely politically motivated allegations.

At least Rumble is standing up for free speech, despite pressure from the British government to silence Brand.

You can probably guess the rest where Tim Ballard is concerned:

Tim Ballard, the former federal agent who took on child sex-trafficking and inspired the movie “Sound of Freedom,” has denied a report he left his Operation Underground Railroad organization amid multiple claims of sexual misconduct.

We may or may not ever know whether the allegations against Ballard and Brand have any validity. What we do know is that if you are going to get on the wrong side of the liberal establishment, your record had better be squeaky clean — and even if it is, you could be in trouble. Where reputations and careers are concerned, accusation equals guilt when the media is hostile.

Fellow Briton Paul Joseph Watson has more on the #MeToo silencing of Russell Brand:

On tips from seaoh, Ed McAninch, and KirklesWorth.

Covid tyrant Jacinda Ardern is no longer in power. However, she remains a menace to freedom. Watch her hold forth at the comparably pernicious United Nations regarding the need to suppress dissident speech — or as authoritarian moonbats call it, “mis- and disinformation”:

War is peace; freedom is slavery; censorship protects free speech, which must be abolished because it is a weapon of war.

On a tip from Wiggins.

No one can say that Barack Obama didn’t leave a legacy. His community organizer tactics produced the racial strife that led to hundreds of Black Lives Matter riots and continue to have us at each other’s throats. Still more destructively, he weaponized the federal government on behalf of Democratic Party, most famously by siccing the IRS on the Tea Party. Under his idiot sidekick Biden, institutions that now serve party rather than national interests include the FBI and CDC:

The Biden administration likely infringed upon the First Amendment when it leaned on social media companies to remove false or misleading COVID-19 content, a federal court of appeals ruled Friday — narrowing a bombshell district court order that barred several officials and agencies from communicating with the platforms.

Which Covid content was false or misleading is still a matter of dispute — except for the admitted lies told by Tony Fauci. However, the Deep State wouldn’t censor Fauci, because even if he presents himself as Science Incarnate, he is actually Big Government Incarnate. That’s why liberals burn votive candles in devotion to him.

The White House, surgeon general, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI “likely coerced or significantly encouraged social-media platforms to moderate content” and in doing so, “likely violated the First Amendment,” the New Orleans-based Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals determined.

J. Edgar Hoover could never have imagined his agency would one day be used to censor medical information so that a virus could be exploited to inflict tyranny.

On a tip from Bluto.

Harvard is the national leader when it comes to universities. Where it is leading is into leftist authoritarianism, where the free inquiry that is supposed to be the point of universities is no longer possible:

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released its annual college free speech rankings on Wednesday, which dubbed the state of free speech at the Ivy League school “abysmal.” …

Harvard received a 0.00-point free speech ranking on a 100-point scale — a full 11 points behind the next-worst school.

That would be UPenn, also of the Ivy League.

The score is calculated based on factors including how strong the school’s policies in favor of free speech are and how many professors, students and campus speakers have been targeted by authorities for their speech.

The culture of repression goes beyond intolerant educrats and doctrinaire professors:

The rankings also take into account student sentiment about free speech based on polling FIRE conducted in partnership with research firm College Pulse.

Despite the extravagant cost, Harvard is the worst school in the country for students who value the free exchange of ideas. However, the actual purpose of Harvard is to provide credentials to aspiring members of the liberal elite.

Harvard is the premier training academy for the ruling class. Its hostility to the American principle of free speech is unacceptable. We need to look elsewhere for our leaders.

On a tip from Mr. Freemarket.

Muslims have a way to go to achieve majority status in Denmark, but they may already have achieved hegemony:

Amid growing pressure and threats of terrorist retaliation, officials in Denmark have caved and called for burning the Quran to be made a crime after such acts sparked protests domestically and around the Muslim world.

For centuries, Europeans fought to achieve and defend fundamental rights like free speech. A single generation of cowards could undo their accomplishment.

Free speech is guaranteed by the Danish constitution — and yet:

According to Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard, the new law would be written into existing legislation banning the desecration of other nations’ flags, and would “prohibit the inappropriate treatment of objects of significant religious importance to a religious community.”

He added that the primary purpose of the legislation was to target those who publicly disrespect such objects, and that anyone who violates the law could face up to two years in prison, or a fine.

Sniffs Hummelgaard:

“I fundamentally believe there are more civilized ways to express one’s views than burning things.”

Yet Hummelgaard is participating in the dismantling of civilization by allowing a backward alien culture to deny Europeans their rights.

On a tip from Occam’s Stubble.

X’s ownership is an improvement on the repressive leftists who ran Twitter on behalf of the liberal establishment. But don’t expect an online utopia where free speech is sacrosanct:

X CEO Linda Yaccarino said during an interview this week that the company has new hate speech policies that “deamplify” content that is deemed to be “lawful but awful.”

According to the media, “hate speech” is why we should be denied our fundamental right of free expression.

Yaccarino, the former advertising head at NBCUniversal, made the remarks during a CNBC interview with Sara Eisen on “Squawk on the Street.”

Personnel is policy. Take personnel from NBC, and you can guess what the policy will be.

Yaccarino said that X has “introduced a new policy to your specific point about hate speech called freedom of speech, not reach. …if you are going to post something that is lawful but it’s awful, you get labeled, you get labeled, you get deamplified, which means it cannot be shared. And it is certainly demonetized.”

The purpose of the First Amendment is to protect speech that is “awful.” Speech that no one objects to requires no protection.

On a tip from ABC of the ANC.

As RFK Jr learned when his fellow Democrats tried to censor him at a censorship hearing, one way to get suppressed by leftists is to sound the alarm on leftist suppression. In Canada, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) is suing the University of Leftbridge I mean Lethbridge (UofL) over the cancelation of a speech by Dr. Frances Widdowson on “How Woke-ism Threatens Academic Freedom.”

Per the JCCF:

“Dr. Paul Viminitz, a UofL philosophy professor, invited Dr. Widdowson to speak at UofL on the topic of how woke ideology is hostile to free speech, open inquiry and dissent, which are essential components and conditions of universities.”

Widdowson has personal experience on the topic:

Widdowson had been a tenured professor at Mount Royal University (MRU) in the Department of Economics, Justice, and policy studies until she was fired in late 2021.

She lost her job over thought infractions.

She has spent much of her academic career focused on public policy in relation to indigenous people, including the causes of massive socioeconomic disparities between indigenous and other Canadians. She said her research has led her to what some deem ‘politically incorrect’ conclusions which do not conform with ‘woke’ ideas.

She had been approved to speak, but then leftist thugs stamped their feet. As usual, sympathetic educrats caved.

Despite the cancellation, Widdowson chose to attend the UofL on Feb. 1 and speak in the UofL Atrium.

However, a moonbat mob descended. She was “drowned out by shouting, drumming, and chanting” lest anyone be exposed to views that do not comply with leftist orthodoxy.

Laments Widdowson,

“Instead of encouraging faculty and students to engage with my ideas in order to reach a better understanding of totalitarian identity politics’ impact on the academy, the University of Lethbridge created an ‘unsafe space’ for critical thinking and open inquiry.”

Rebel News has more:

Adam Soos is onto something:

The laws follow the culture, but the culture is often set by academics.

The mind viruses destroying Western Civilization were engineered in the Ivory Tower, which we are forced to fund. Unsurprisingly, that is where we see the most alarming attacks on free speech.

On a tip from Rob A.

You don’t need a seat at the table of the liberal establishment to make a difference. You just need the guts to serve as an inspiration to others. You might own a hair salon in Traverse City, Michigan:

“If a human identifies as anything other than a man/woman, please seek services at a local pet groomer,” Christine Geiger wrote disparagingly on a since-deleted Facebook page. “You are not welcome at this salon. Period.”

“This is America; free speech. This small business has the right to refuse services,” she added.

This is America to the extent we stand up for inalienable rights like free speech and freedom of association.

Geiger, who owns Studio 8 Hair Lab, appeared to be responding to a Michigan house bill that would expand the state’s hate-crime law to include harassment or intimidation on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation.

“Harassment or intimidation” are to be determined by the alleged victims. After the state’s cartoonishly tyrannical Disney witch of a governor signs the bill into law, remarks like Geiger’s will constitute a felony in Michigan, as will literally any statement the Alphabet People regard as unsupportive of their lifestyle and ideology.

Already the fist of Big Government is poised to crash down on her:

Geiger’s comments … were condemned by a spokesman for Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel. “The Attorney General finds the comments to be hateful, reprehensible remarks,” the spokesman told the Independent, adding that Geiger is likely to face legal consequences.

When it comes to suppressing free speech, turn to the experts at the ACLU:

Nathan Triplett, president of the Michigan ACLU, explained on Twitter that Geiger is in violation of the state’s Elliot-Larsen Civil Rights Act, which was recently amended to also prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

The same sort of corporate moonbats who thought it was a good idea to put Dylan Mulvaney’s face on Bud Light cans also want to punish her:

On Wednesday, hair product manufacturer Jack Winn Pro withdrew its products from Geiger’s salon, writing in a statement that it “reject[s] hate speech in any form” and that Geiger “no longer has authorization to represent our brand or products.”

The leftist Gorgons on The View have set to work whipping up the mob against her:

Goldberg, 67, said ‘you can’t make fun and say rude stuff about people’ in reference to the controversial comment by salon owner Christine Geiger.

Or at least, you can’t about special people. Not unless you have a lot of nerve — which will be required to prevent the country from continuing to slide into straightforward tyranny.

On tips from Varla and The Great Cornholio.

It’s not as if we didn’t see this coming. The tolerant, open-minded liberals who rule over us have managed to ban the Bible in Utah’s second largest school district:

Officials in the Davis district – a 72,000-student district north of Salt Lake City – removed the religious text from elementary and middle schools but will keep it in high schools.

A committee with the district reviewed The Good Book after a complaint by a parent, and district officials say the committee is made up of parents, teachers and administrators.

There was also a complaint to remove the Book of Mormon from younger students’ libraries.

Such complaints come in response to countermoonbat attempts to remove homosexual child pornography from public schools, which liberals have characterized as book banning.

Even if the objective was only to make an idiotic point, denouncing the Bible as vulgar and violent resulted in the book that has provided the moral framework for Western Civilization for the past 2,000 years being removed from schools.

Liberals will shift their emphasis to the many passages in the Bible proscribing homosexuality when they ban the Bible at the federal level on the grounds that it is hate speech. Be sure you have a secure place to hide yours when we get to the point of Cultural Revolution-style house-to-house searches.

On tips from Barry A and Ed McAninch.

Until such a time as Democrats can pack the Supreme Court and thereby render the Constitution moot, the First Amendment limits the political censorship that can be imposed directly by the federal government. So censorship is outsourced to NGOs and the leftist authoritarians who control universities — although taxpayers still pick up the tab:

The State Department-funded Global Disinformation Index paid the University of Texas at Austin to conduct research for a heavily scrutinized report that took aim at conservative media outlets, documents show.

GDI has come under scrutiny from Republican lawmakers and watchdogs following multiple Washington Examiner reports starting in February on its covert operation of feeding conservative website blacklists to advertisers with the intent of shutting down disfavored speech. The self-styled British “disinformation” tracker steered $90,810 to UT-Austin’s Global Disinformation Lab for a December 2022 report that alleged the “riskiest” websites were the New York Post, the Blaze, RealClearPolitics, and other conservative websites, according to contracts obtained by the Washington Examiner.

The New York Post is risky, all right. It broke the Hunter Biden laptop story, which implicated Joe Biden in influence peddling to our communist Chinese adversaries right before the 2020 election — which he would have lost if Big Tech, the Deep State, and the liberal establishment media had not aggressively acted in concert to keep this “disinformation” from the public.

It is not only through state-funded schools like University of Texas that authoritarians force us to finance the suppression of our own free speech.

The State Department and a nonprofit group that it funds called the National Endowment for Democracy granted roughly $960,000 between 2020 and 2022 to GDI — which has resulted in GOP members of Congress, including House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), launching investigations. The NED has since announced it won’t grant any more money to GDI, while the State Department has defended its grant.

The State Department is under the control of a slimy mollusk who had a notable role in Biden’s election campaign — specifically in the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop revelations.

The State Department used to confront America’s enemies abroad. However, our worst enemies now operate within our own borders.

On a tip from ABC of the ANC.

Monty Python is a remnant of a better culture, before wokeness canceled our sense of humor:

Monty Python stars John Cleese and Eric Idle have been workshopping new scenes and plotlines for a blockbuster stage show based on the classic 1979 film Life Of Brian.

Cleese says he has “changed certain things.”

One exchange which has had to come out is the discussion between People’s Front of Judea members Stan (played by Idle) and Reg (Cleese). Stan says that he wants to be known as Loretta and to have babies. ‘It’s every man’s right to have babies if you want them,’ says Stan. Reg counters: ‘But — you can’t have babies.’ At which Stan responds: ‘Don’t you oppress me.’

What was comedy in the 1970s is now reality. It is currently forbidden in the entertainment industry to acknowledge that men cannot have babies, for the same reason that Winston Smith was not allowed to acknowledge that 2 + 2 = 4.

Cleese told an audience at his one-man show last week that when the scene (co-written with the late Graham Chapman) was performed at a read-through for the new show in New York last year, doubts emerged. ‘At the end, I said to the American actors: ‘What do you think?’ And they said: ‘We love the script, but you can’t do that stuff about Loretta nowadays.’

Watch the forbidden scene before Google’s YouTube stuffs it down the memory hole:

On a tip from Occam’s Stubble. Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.

Dylan Mulvaney comes across as a parody of a transsexual, so it isn’t easy to take him seriously. Yet the liberal establishment that showers fortunes upon him (through more than a dozen belligerently woke corporations like Anheuser-Busch and through academia) has appointed him primary figurehead for an ideology that as a threat to freedom is very serious indeed:

Mulvaney would love the impending South African law that could mean 8 years in prison for committing “hate speech.” When Democrats introduce their own version of it, they should employ Mulvaney to promote it, considering what a good job he has done of selling Bud Light.

In 1984, it isn’t enough for Winston Smith to say 2 + 2 = 5. The authorities do not let him out of Room 101 until they are convinced his mind has been so broken that he actually believes it. Because many are cowardly enough to outwardly submit to LGBTism while inwardly aware that it is a depraved lie, Democrats need to develop a means to determine who really is psychotic enough to believe this guy is a woman so they can put everyone else in gulags.

On a tip from Chris Neilson.

FDR was a disaster when it came to economics, but you can’t say he wasn’t good at politics. One of his insights:

“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”

For an example of this, today we learned that Fox News cut its own throat by dropping its most popular anchor, costing itself $690 million. The day before,

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said over the weekend that Fox News was responsible for inciting violence and that it was the Congress’ job to explore ways to regulate Fox News.

“Violence” in this context means speech leftists don’t want heard.

Ocasio-Cortez made the remarks during an interview Sunday on MSNBC with Jen Psaki while discussing Fox News’ recent $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems.

Likely dumping Tucker was an act of appeasement intended to avoid getting sued out of existence by the liberal establishment. Or maybe we have descended to a more direct form of tyranny.

“We have very real issues with what is permissible on air, and we saw that with January 6th and we saw that in the lead up to January 6th, and how we navigate questions, not just a freedom of speech but also accountability for incitement of violence,” AOC said. “This is the role we have to really explore through law as well.”

We may already have reached a point where if the malevolent idiot regarded as the Future of the Democratic Party wants you to shut up, you are made to shut up.

On tips from MrRightWingDave and Chuck A.

Considering that lawfare might have been used to knock Tucker Carlson off Fox News, why not deploy it against problematic congressional representatives?

Attorney Abbe Lowell sent letters asking the Treasury Department’s inspector general to investigate how former Donald Trump loyalists obtained reports of Biden’s alleged “suspicious activity” and seeking a congressional ethics review of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s public attacks against President Joe Biden’s family, reported Politico’s Playbook.

Abbe Lowell serves as the attorney for the skeevy degenerate Hunter Biden, who in turn apparently serves as the primary bagman for Joe Biden’s influence peddling enterprise.

MTG isn’t the only target:

Lowell also wrote that former Trump White House official Garrett Ziegler did not have a First Amendment defense for obtaining and publishing confidential Treasury Department records regarding the president’s son, and he said those actions may have violated the Bank Secrecy Act.

If the lawfare strategy is successful, you can be sure Joe Biden will double down on his stated plan to use it to render the Second Amendment moot.

On a tip from Bluto.