Lance Banson

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

People tell me they like suits but dont have occasions to wear one. You can wear a suit to court, funerals, and religious services. Doesn't have to be your trial, friend's burial, or religion you believe in. Go to random trials, attend a stranger's burial, join multiple religions

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

I am bewildered, and not very impressed, by the visceral, naked, irrational hatred spat out by some defenders of Jason Arday. If a Cambridge professor is accused of being an unqualified charlatan, the accusation might be racially motivated. On the other hand it might not, depending on the evidence. The correct question to ask is not, ”What is the colour of his skin” but “Is it in fact true that he is an unqualified charlatan?” Please examine the evidence before leaping to the assumption of racism.
As for the idea that journalists “piled in on him” and “hounded him to his death”, most attacks were against Cambridge University. Jason himself was widely regarded as an unfortunate victim of foolish promotion way beyond his ability to cope. In appointing him to a professorship for which he was manifestly unqualified – in ludicrously describing him as “the best in the world” – certain senior members of the university showed a level of patronising condescension towards black people that could fairly be described as racism, while at the same time making him tragically vulnerable to such attacks as came his way.

[Anonymous @YourAnonOne]

Elon Musk confirmed that all government censorship requests are now publicly visible in X’s open-source algorithm.

[The Free Speech Union @SpeechUnion]

🚨🚨 BREAKING NEWS: Blasphemy law is back — but it only applies to Muslims.

FSU member and retired police officer Stephen Gray was found guilty of being "grossly offensive", a criminal offence under s127 of the Communications Act 2003, for repeating a joke about Mohammed.

Stephen reposted a message he saw on Facebook that said: “Fun facts about bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9 year old!”

While giving evidence, Stephen explained that the post was a reference to the marriage between the Prophet Mohammed and Aisha — which was consummated when she was just nine years old, after he married her when she was six.

Stephen said the post was intended to be satirical but he also hoped it would spark a serious debate: did that marriage, as recorded in the Hadiths, contribute to the acceptability of child marriage in Muslim countries?

District Judge Steven Hood found the post to be “grossly offensive” and dismissed Stephen's defence that it was making a serious political point about the acceptability of child marriage. He found that the post was designed to be offensive and could not be making a serious point because it was light-hearted in nature. He concluded that a conviction would not amount to a disproportionate interference with Stephen’s right to freedom of expression.

The Free Speech Union is helping Stephen appeal his conviction and has instructed a top criminal silk, John Beggs KC, to act for him.

With your support, we hope to be able to pay for Stephen’s legal defence in the Crown Court and meet the costs of any further appeals. Please donate Stephen's crowdfunder in the link below.

Earlier this year, the FSU paid for the defence of Hamit Coskun, who burnt a copy of the Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London. He was initially convicted, but we managed to get that conviction overturned on appeal. When the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) then tried to appeal the acquittal, we took them on and won again.

More recently, the Free Speech Union threatened South Wales Police with legal action after it adopted a draconian version of the Government’s definition of anti-Muslim hostility, instructing officers to record any comment that went beyond “legitimate” discussion of Islam as a 'non-crime hate incident'. We won, and the force withdrew the guidance.

Stephen’s case gives us another opportunity to reaffirm the principle that there is nothing illegal about criticising any religion, including Islam.

It should not be a criminal offence to repost jokes about Islam that some Muslims find offensive.

Read more below and please donate to our Crowdfunder 👇

[Luís Figo @LuisFigo]

Today I join others from across our game and call for Gianni Infantino to resign as FIFA President.

Infantino has debased the office that he promised to elevate. He has lied, deceived and tried to feather his own nest at the expense of the game he is supposed to serve. 

He has lost the support of his senior staff, his closest advisers, the vast majority of people who devote their lives to this sport and even, it would seem, the FIFA Peace Prize winner. 

It is too late to save his dignity but it is not too late to save football. He should go. Now.

#Infantinout

https://t.co/j93k5MnlK2

[Billy Rice @dangerrice]

FIFA to investigate Argentina as they make another Falklands gesture by having no shots on target.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The West has created an utterly evil state religion where an accusation of “racism” is the gravest offense that can be committed, even worse than rape or murder!

So if police show up at a crime scene and a British boy is bleeding out and an immigrant says the British boy is racist the cops will cuff the dying British boy.

[Professor Dr King Mike 🤴 @MikeSouthWestUK]

Dear @HantsPolice, I have a quiz for you:

Of the two, which one is more important to investigate first?

1: “he’s a racist”

2: “I have been stabbed”

Take all the time you need….

[Wings Over Scotland @WingsScotland]

This is one of the most terrifying things I've ever read.

[Dries Van Langenhove @DVanLangenhove]

A very sad announcement.

I have just been convicted a second time for 'hate speech' and it is only due to a technicality that I could not immediately be sent to jail —to the judge's frustration.

In an ironic turn of events it's actually thanks to my previous prison sentence (for memes in a private group chat) that I am now still free —in a physical sense, at least.

Call me naive but I didn't think they would take it this far, given that this precedent criminalises many of the arguments used by even the most moderate politicians critical of mass migration.

In February 2024 I gave a lecture at Catholic University Leuven wherein I linked mass migration to crime and a deterioration of our quality of life. Every single point I made was 100% the truth and based on scientific evidence.

Cynically, even the judge that convicted me admits as much by writing in his verdict: “Even if all of the statements made by Van Langenhove are based on scientific evidence and statistics, it makes no difference to the criminal intent. Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred against persons on the grounds of one or more of the protected criteria in the Anti-Racism Law.”

That's a lot of words just to say he wants to send me to prison for speaking the truth.

Even the regime media write: "It did not matter to the court that Van Langenhove was quoting scientific sources. The judge argued that Van Langenhove's main message was that a big part of the societal problems like insecurity, housing shortages and lowering educational standards are due to mass migration."

You may think the regime media are being sympathetic to me in the first sentence, but in reality they are warning people: even if you speak the truth, if you go against our narrative, we will crush you in every way possible.

Both the public prosecutor and the judge did not present a single real argument as to how or against whom I would have incited hatred. So even if I would accept their crazy, dystopic law, I still did not break it.

The only argument they present is that I created a "hostile atmosphere of us versus them” in regards to migrants. But even this silly argument (which is not even a punishable offence) is not true. To me, the deadly disease is self-hatred and one of its worst symptoms is replacement migration. My enemy is thus NOT the migrants themselves but those orchestrating the mass migration.

Sadly, in Belgium, evidence is not needed and ‘vibes’ are enough to put someone in jail.

Given the fact that I have another court case coming up in September and that I have a dozen active criminal investigations for hate speech, time is running out for me. I have already paid more than €420,000 in legal fees and there is no ending in sight. I have been in an intense battle of attrition for eight years and must now regroup to make sure I can still win.

If you want to help me, you can do so via the links below. If you can help in other ways, please contact me via DM.

If you live in a country that still has free speech, never let them touch it, however noble they make the motives sound, because this is where it leads to.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

I was socially murdered once when I was told to stay out of the penguin enclosure at the zoo. I literally died of their refusal to throw me a herring.

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

The leader of the Lib Dems, and the leader and deputy leader of the Green party, think some women have penises. In itself, it seems like a relatively unimportant matter. But it is symptomatic of a contempt for science and evidence-based truth. Could you vote for a flat-Earther?

[Richard Ferrer @richferrer]

Dear @owenjonesjourno. As editor of Jewish News, I was appalled by the language my deputy used towards you. There is no excuse for the unnecessary use of a full stop before a coordinating conjunction. The sentence should, of course, have read:

“I am Deputy Editor of Jewish News and I’m respectfully asking you to fuck right off.”

[Steve Cooke @Steve_Cooke]

Newcastle Green Party election candidate Tina Ion’s racist anti-Jewish and anti-Afghan posts are shocking enough, but she is also behind a spoof Anne Frank account on Meta’s Threads platform that takes her antisemitic bile to another level altogether. 🧵 1/4

[Mushtaq Bilal, PhD @MushtaqBilalPhD]

> be Alexandra Elbakyan
> be born in Kazakhstan in 1988
> start coding at 12
> hack your internet provider at 14
> hack MIT Press at 16 to download neuroscience books you can't afford
> get a CS degree from Satbayev University
> intern in neuroscience at Georgia Tech
> speak at Harvard on brain-computer interfaces
> notice researchers can't read the papers they need
> notice academic publishers charging $30 a paper
> notice peer reviewers worked for free
> notice editors worked for free
> notice universities funded the research with billions of dollars of public money
> build Sci-Hub in 2011
> upload nearly every paywalled research paper ever published
> give it away for free
> get sued by Elsevier
> get hit with a $15 million judgment
> don't give a flying f*ck
> keep Sci-Hub up
> get domain after domain seized
> register a new one
> keep Sci-Hub up
> get investigated by the US Department of Justice
> don't give a flying f*ck
> get accused of working for Russian intelligence
> don't give a flying f*ck
> have the FBI subpoena your iCloud
> get named one of Nature's ten people who mattered in science
> get a parasitoid wasp named after you
> get a deep-sea snail named after you
> get the Electronic Frontier Foundation Award for Access to Scientific Knowledge
> become a legend

[BowTiedMeatHead 🥩💪 @bowtiedmeathead]

Things Retards Say:

Free Palestine
Nobody is illegal on stolen land
Trans women ARE women
Trump is a fascist
Biden is as sharp as a tack
Diversity is our strength
Black Lives Matter
Voter ID is racist
Abortion is healthcare
Words are violence
My pronouns are

[Lance Banson @Lance_Banson]

@berbzz_ @MushtaqBilalPhD It's unfortunate. 10 is not good enough :/ but getting an LLM to only pull knowledge from your own collection would be game changing

[The Free Speech Union @SpeechUnion]

Zack Polanski has shown why Britain has never needed an official definition of Islamophobia less.

The leader of the Green Party branded the Prime Minister “Islamophobic” for daring to criticise Mothin Ali — the Greens’ deputy leader.

Polanski has confirmed what many people already suspect: accusations of Islamophobia are too often used cynically to shut down legitimate public debate.

Keir Starmer — as Prime Minister, leader of the Labour Party, and as an individual — is well within his rights to criticise a fellow politician who attended a demonstration where the Ayatollah and Iran’s brutal regime were cheered.

While we believe this government has shown worrying authoritarian instincts, Polanski has let the mask slip on his own party.

Mothin Ali has called the criticism of him “inherently racist”. There was nothing racist about Starmer’s comments.

The Free Speech Union hopes the Prime Minister will now rethink his plan to introduce an official definition of Islamophobia — repackaged as “anti-Muslim hostility”.

Such a definition will make matters worse. It risks chilling free speech by discouraging criticism of Islam and its practices. Most concerningly, it will deter people — including those in public office — from speaking out about the serious problem of Islamist extremism.

Parliament abolished blasphemy laws in 2008. In a free society, no religion or ideology should be beyond criticism, challenge or debate.

Read more in @Spectator 👇

[Jeff Kirdeikis @JeffKirdeikis]

Netherlands 36% unrealized gain tax