The title comes from Mark Steyn’s recent remarks regarding Frau Merkel’s lynching of comedian Jan Boehmermann, for making a joke about the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan didn’t like it. Merkel has set the German Shepherds courts on Boehmermann, and set whatever still passes for free speech in Germany on an even steeper downward slide into obscurity.
So Jan Boehmermann will be put on trial pour encourager les autres. As Barbara Amiel well understood, for every protracted expensive court battle that ends in a free-speech victory there are thousands and thousands of other publishers, editors, writers, comedians, film-makers, playwrights, directors, producers, cartoonists, artists who get the message that discretion is the better part of valour. In my book Lights Out: Free Speech, Islam and the Twilight of the West, I put it this way:
These are the books we will never read, the plays we will never see, the movies that will never be made…
The lamps are going out all over the world – one distributor, one publisher, one silenced novelist, one cartoonist in hiding, one sued radio host, one murdered film director at a time.
Add to that daily lengthening list a German satirist on trial for mocking an authoritarian thug.
We’ve got our fair share of thugs here at home, in all shapes and sizes.
The newest example is the NH AG’s office, which has considered joining the anti-speech Climate Witch hunt against large businesses, alongside the AG of New York State and others. No, they are not doing it because they care about the climate. This is not about any misleading marketing or reporting. This presents an opportunity to further fleece big businesses that are already taxed and regulated, for monster-cash settlements. They are all grifters using the force of government to silence monied-opposition while fishing for a big payday, probably because it might temporarily plug an institutional hole in their perennially mismanaged state budgets.
Before the ink is even dry on the settlement check, the message will have been sent. Corrupt government seeks bailouts. Watch what you say or you could be next. Everyone else, cower in your respective silence. We’re not above making an example of you either.
