"What is forbidden offline is forbidden online."
That was European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at this year's Munich Security Conference. A new essay in Foreign Affairs, The End of the Open Internet, measures the distance between that statement and 2012, when the UN affirmed the opposite framing: the rights people hold offline must be protected online. Same idea, inverted. Protection has become prohibition.
Three key arguments:
1/ The tools travel. Real-name internet rules of the kind Germany's Chancellor is now proposing are enforced today in China, Iran, Russia and Vietnam.
2/ Censorship infrastructure outlives its builders. Whoever you trust with these controls now, a government you don't trust will inherit them. That holds whichever side of politics you sit on.
3/ The evidence doesn't match the panic. The research cited finds online misinformation reaches a narrow band of already-convinced partisans, with modest effects on how people actually vote.
New Zealand isn't a bystander to this drift. We have an under-16 social media ban advancing behind the scenes without a Bill of Rights assessment, and a government department positioning itself as online content regulator. The article's alternative is the right standard here too: enforce existing laws against fraud, incitement and exploitation - and don't build the censorship machinery at all.
🔗 Link: https://t.co/tI92v5NMTZ
'If 1.36M people are each saving more than $1,200 a year, the cost of delivering those savings would exceed $1.6B annually -not $65M. But if @nzlabour's $65M cost estimate is correct, then spread across 1.36M public transport users, the av. benefit is less than a dollar a week.'
ALERT🚨🚨🚨
Tonight TVNZ's @1newsnz showed its true colours.
They appeared to stand with the Sudanese knife-wielding maniac who tried to hack an Irishman’s head off in the streets of Belfast yesterday.
They called the people fighting back “Far Right” activists. No. Bullshit. These are everyday men and women who are sick to death of immigrant crime, sick of being ignored, and sick of watching their streets turn into war zones.
The gutless propagandists at TVNZ aren’t journalists — they’re terrorist enablers and a national disgrace.
Today, we woke to the sickening scenes of a Sudanese man attempting to behead another man on the streets of Belfast.
In the aftermath, we’ve seen the all-too-familiar damage-control operation from the authorities.
People are being urged not to share the footage or comment on the incident because it may cause division, distress the family, or fuel the “far right”.
In a democratic society, people have the right to share footage of events that take place in public and to discuss why such horrific acts keep happening in our country.
Hear from FSU Case Management Director @BenBarryJones 👇
REMINDER:
It wasn’t just Rotherham.
It wasn’t just Rochdale.
It wasn’t just Telford.
Pakistani-Muslim men have been raping, brutalising and abusing little girls in every corner of the British Isles. And those in power have known about it for decades.
They knew, and they turned a blind eye. They knew, and they covered up the atrocities that were occurring in their own backyards. They knew, and they did worse than nothing.
Aberdeen City
Angus
Antrim and Newtownabbey
Argyll and Bute
Barnsley
Bexley
Birmingham
Blackburn with Darwen
Blackpool
Bradford
Brent
Bristol, City of
Bromley
Buckinghamshire
Burnley
Calderdale
Camden
Canterbury
Chelmsford
Cherwell
Cheshire East
Cheshire West and Chester
City of Edinburgh
Coventry
Croydon
Cumberland
Dacorum
Derby
Doncaster
Dorset
East Hertfordshire
East Staffordshire
Glasgow City
Greenwich
Hammersmith and Fulham
Havering
Hillingdon
Hounslow
Kingston upon Hull, City of
Kirklees
Lambeth
Leeds
Leicester
Lewisham
Luton
Manchester
Medway
Merton
Middlesbrough
Monmouthshire
Newcastle upon Tyne
Newham
North Tyneside
North Yorkshire
Northumberland
Norwich
Nottingham
Oldham
Oxford
Pembrokeshire
Peterborough
Plymouth
Preston
Redbridge
Rochdale
Rossendale
Rotherham
Sheffield
Somerset
Stockport
Stoke-on-Trent
Swansea
Telford and Wrekin
Tower Hamlets
Vale of White Horse
Wakefield
Wandsworth
Warrington
Watford
West Berkshire
Westmorland and Furness
Wirral
Worcester
Wyre Forest
And these are just the first 85 areas identified.
Who knows how many innocent children have suffered and been silenced for the sake of ‘community cohesion’ and ‘racial sensitivies’.
Grooming gangs aren’t rare, nor are they only active in a few small towns. Little girls have been groomed, raped, exploited and murdered by Pakistani-Muslim men across the country.
And they are still.
To this very day.
A Somali man tried to behead a white British man on the street of Belfast last night. That is what genocidal violence looks like.
We cannot live like this. This is why we started @SaveEuropeAct. We need Remigration now and that British man needed remigration yesterday.
Enough.
An Iranian woman in Germany says:
“I came from Iran and I am in Germany because Islam destroyed my life there. Now, I am afraid that Sharia will come here too.”
Britain is no longer a democracy. A UK woman claims she was repeatedly harassed outside her own home by a group of migrants. Despite multiple complaints, police allegedly took no action.
When she threatened to go to the media, officers reportedly warned her she could be arrested for “inciting racial hatred.”
The situation worsened when a man who helped expose the case was reportedly arrested and handcuffed. This is classic two-tier policing, protecting the perpetrators while silencing British citizens.
In 22 Grant Robertson described opponents of Sport NZ’s transgender guiding principles as “petty & small-minded”. He abuses his positions of power by trying to gaslight those who disagree with him into silence -as he did last week with female students & academics at the @otago.
Last week, the Free Speech Union raised concerns after former Labour Minister, and current University of Otago Vice-Chancellor Grant Robertson, expressed partisan political views in an email sent to staff and students in his official capacity as Vice-Chancellor.
While Robertson began by describing his comments as being made "on a personal level", he then shifted to statements beginning with "As a University we...", blurring the distinction between his personal political views and the position of the University itself.
Universities have a responsibility to foster open inquiry and intellectual diversity. When senior leaders appear to conflate their own political opinions with the institution they lead, it risks undermining confidence in neutrality and its commitment to serving students and staff with a wide range of perspectives.
If you think things couldn't get any worse over the horrific murder of Henry Nowak.
It's now been revealed that Hampshire police were going to release a statement warning the public not to talk about it online and paint Henry as the aggressor before Digwa's trial!
🚨BREAKING: Sir Malcolm Walker, founder of Iceland supermarket, has come out to say "two-tier policing exists," revealing police arrived instantly to one of his stores after a fake accusation of racism, but didn't attend when staff were seriously hurt by shoplifters
Shocking.
No law. No legal advice. No risk assessment.
Yet $30.7 million has already been allocated.
Documents obtained by the Free Speech Union via the Official Information Act reveal planning was underway to establish and operationalise an under-16 social media regulatory regime before Parliament had debated or passed the legislation required to create it.
Process matters. In a democracy, laws should be passed before governments begin building the systems to enforce them.
Christian community police officer wins settlement after being forced out of his role for questioning and criticising Islam during diversity training.
Luke Salmons, who has been supported by the Christian Legal Centre, was suspended for six months, forced to resign and put on a police barring list after he had questioned radical Islam in a training session.
He had been told that the session was a 'safe place' for discussion, but after expressing his beliefs, the consequences were devastating.
After taking legal action, his case has now been settled on confidential terms, however his story raises serious concerns about free speech and religious freedom in UK policing.
- @CConcern
Criticising Islam is within the British tradition of people
discussing the merits of religions, and I can scarcely believe that some faceless authoritarian should be allowed to punish a person for doing so
Should I expect to be punished for Life of Brian ?
Absolutely disgraceful
The University of Otago adopted a position of institutional neutrality in 2024. Last year Parliament wrote the same principle into law: universities, as institutions, should not take public positions on matters that don't concern their role or functions.
So when Vice-Chancellor Grant Robertson emailed the Otago community calling the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill "unnecessary and disturbing," does the "personal level" framing hold?
He sent it from the his official email, signed it with his title, and used channels he can reach only because he is the Vice-Chancellor.
To the staff and students who opened it, the institution spoke - and anyone who takes a different view on a Bill now before Parliament is left on the wrong side of an official line.
Here's the test. Would it be neutral if a Vice-Chancellor used the same email to call the Bill necessary and welcome? If that wouldn't be neutral, neither is this. The principle doesn't change with which side you're on.
We take no position on the Bill itself. But institutional neutrality within academia is a bedrock of freedom of speech.
Read our earlier media release: https://t.co/fOsPXophbd
A lot of people feel uncomfortable about saying this publicly but there is simply no denying it.
We have to speak honestly about this issue: equalities legislation, which was ostensibly about making sure there were no second class citizens created a racial hierarchy of citizenship where people are treated differently because of the colour of their skin.
Some of us have been pointing this out for a long time. I believe the evidence for this claim is now incontrovertible, no matter how uncomfortable the subject may be for some people.
Equalities legislation must be amended or scrapped and replaced with something that restores the principle of equality before the law. Indeed, you'd think equality before the law would be the very central principle of any law on equality.
This must become a minimum basic commitment for any party that seeks to form the next Government. Any party that fails to make this commitment has failed in its basic duty of understanding the catastrophic damage that has been done to race relations in this country by a decade of woke insanity.
As of 2025 the police force were told NOT to treat everyone the same. They were told NOT to be colour blind.
Two-tier policing is explicit in the 2025 Police Race Action Plan
A girl raped by 700 men over three years.
Jack Daniel bottle shoved into a 12-year-old girl in course of rape.
Girls kept in dog cages.
Girls raped by dogs, men betting on the act.
~ @RupertLowe10 narrates what Pakistani rape gangs did to British girls.