Roger Franklin is the editor of Australia’s Quadrant Online. Please check it out!
He writes to advise that Australia’s eSafety Commissioner (good grief) — one Julie Inman Grant — was recently revealed by our own House Judiciary committee to have endorsed efforts to bankrupt X and other “hate sites” by driving away advertisers. See the “damning” (Mr. Franklin’s word) committee staff report Exporting Censorship: How GARM’s Advertising Cartel Helped Corporations Collude With Foreign Governments to Silence American Speech.
Mr. Franklin takes on Grant in the Quadrant essay “Yankee, please go home.” In his message to us he writes:
As both major Australian parties — Labor and the nominally “conservative” Coalition — support Inman Grant’s grand scheme to demand age-verification for teen web surfers (which effectively means everyone will have to ID themselves before going online), the only hope to preserve free speech in Australia is that President Trump and Veep Vance will honour their words that the US has no truck with opponents of the First Amendment.
Seattle-born Inman Grant is on record as saying, “The First Amendment does not apply to Australians.” That comment came, by the way, at a World Economic Forum powwow, so you know where she is coming from and where she seeks to take Australia.
Our go-along-to-get along local media, even more craven, slanted and spineless than its American counterpart, is ignoring the story. So anything that could bring this to the attention of Trump & Co., would be very helpful.
Once again, see Mr. Franklin’s essay “Yankee, please go home.” On a related note, we have our own problems — see John Rosenthal’s current CRB essay “Make speech free again” (“How the U.S. can defeat E.U. censorship”).
Let me put it this way. Dear President Trump: Thank you for your attention to this matter.
