We have followed the evisceration of free speech values in the United Kingdom and other Western nations. Australia has been one of the most chilling examples of how a population can be conditioned over time to view free speech as a threat. The country now criminalizes and regulates an ever-expanding range of speech, including political and religious viewpoints. The most recent example is the Supreme Court of New South Wales upholding a conviction for ‘vilification’ after women’s rights campaigner Kirralie Smith and the publication Binary Australia referred to two transgender individuals as men due to their biological sex. That led not only to $95,000 in fines but also to a sentence of compelled speech.
The complaint was filed in November 2023 by Justin “Riley” Dennis and Nicholas “Stephanie” Blanch after the defendants objected to their inclusion in women’s football.
Rather than engage in that public debate on the merits, Dennis and Blanch also sought to punish the defendants for causing “serious contempt” and “severe ridicule” by refusing to use female pronouns and other identifiers according to their transgender status. The NSW Local Court found Smith and Binary Australia incited hatred and severe ridicule of the two trans women, holding that they exposed the athletes to “a sustained campaign of belittling, harassment and intimidation.”
Found guilty, Smith was given a $55,000 fine for Blanch and another $40,000 fine for Dennis to be paid within the next 28 days.
In an added chilling penalty, the court ordered Smith and Binary to publish a statement that they reject and to keep it featured on social media for three months. The addition of compelled speech makes this a perfect storm of anti-free speech measures.
We have previously written about the free speech nightmare in Australia. Former Australian Attorney-General and Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland has been an enthusiastic champion of censorship. She insisted:
“Misinformation and disinformation pose a serious threat to the safety and wellbeing of Australians, as well as to our democracy, society and economy. Doing nothing and allowing this problem to fester is not an option.”
The lack of free speech protection by the courts has fueled this trend. Previously, the High Court ruled that newspapers and television stations that post articles on social media sites like Facebook are liable for third-party comments on those posts. That exposed publications to crippling costs for allowing free speech exchanges on social media. While there have been occasional wins for free speech litigants, the Australian courts have shown comparably little fealty to free speech.
Polls have shown that many Australians still have concerns about the government’s crackdown, and 45 percent believe that information deemed “misinformation” by the government should still be protected. That is still a sizable portion of the population. With a mere majority supporting free speech principles, there is a sharp disconnect from the extreme anti-free-speech policies passed by the legislature and enforced by the courts.
Christian groups are pushing for a final appeal in the case.
One can disagree with Smith and still support her right to reject transgender status and criticize the inclusion of trans athletes in women’s sports. While I have low expectations for the Australian courts, the Australian people still hold lingering free speech values even after years of crackdowns and prosecutions. However, it will take a major political movement to remove anti-free-speech elements from the country’s legislature and courts.
The blog’s sophists accuse JT of misrepresenting the case against Smith and Binary, and of misreading the Australian law that criminalizes “vilification.” Their manipulations consist of flooding the zone with completely irrelevant details — in the hope that you’re distracted from what is important.
There are only two essential issues in this case:
1) The two were found guilty of the “crime” of vilification. 2) New South Wales description of that “crime:”
“Vilification is a public act that could incite hatred, serious contempt or severe ridicule towards a person or group. Vilification because of certain characteristics is against the law.
“These characteristics include:
race
religion
homosexuality
being transgender
having HIV or AIDS.
“To make a complaint of vilification you must be a member of the group you allege has been vilified. For example, if you argue racial vilification you must be of that race.”
Every word of that “law” screams censorship. To vilify someone means to *say or write* something that makes them feel or look bad. If you don’t like what’s been said about you, then ignore it. Or counter it by exercising your own right to free speech.
“. . . because of certain characteristics is against the law.”
That is *not* a law. That is special favor or special privilege legislation.
The problem is that the New South Wales law enforced used DOES NOT protect everyone equally from cyberbullying. It names select groups (identities) for protection, and to hell with everyone else who is being personally harassed or threatened online.
I think if the law were applied universally to every citizen’s benefit, with the same level of proof of harm, triggered by lawsuit (not prosecution), this might be considered quite differently. It’s because there is a stench of social engineering in the spirit and letter of the law that it’s going to run into trouble.
Who can be opposed to civil (tort) law that protects each of us against intentional, malicious defamation or threats?
The cancer ward only treats people who have cancer. That’s discriminatory against those with ingrown toenails. Maybe. sometimes, special attacks require special defenses.
How simple it would be not to vilify others. To not go out of their way to draw a target on someone else’s head or back.
Individual harassment is already got laws. This is directed at anyone who the attacker stumbles across.
“The cancer ward only treats people who have cancer.”
Nice equivocation between “medicine” and the “law.”
Apparently, you do not realize that Lady Justice is blindfolded, and that her scales do not have “special” or “privileged” people on one side.
“How simple it would be not to vilify others.”
Physician, heal thyself.
I’m sure they would ignore it, were it not for those who take that incitement and make death threats.
Rather than vilification it should carry the correct term – terrorism.
Why am I constantly reminded of PRAVDA when ever I hear of another nation under the lethal grip of progressive ideology?
LOL! You can tell when “rage” is deflated after it has been shown Turley is being dishonest with the facts. Thanks Equire!
All of a sudden the trolls lose interest. Hilarious.
X/George@9:07 says, “Sheesh, Turley is at it again. Being disingenuous. What a surprise (not). This is what Turley left out and what Esquire is pointing out… Turley is big on differentiating speech from conduct and this case clearly becomes an issue of conduct when there is actual intentional harassment and inciting others to harass.”
Esquire @1037 says, “The Professor’s narrative is about mischaracterizing this case as an example of the degradation of free speech in Australia. When in fact it is a case regarding conduct which is not protected speech.”
Actually, I would ask that he/she/they/both carefully read the U.S. case of Snyder v. Phelps to understand the difference between speech and conduct. (Some may recall the case, where Phelps and a large crowd picketed the funeral of a homosexual soldier, with shouts and posters, e.g.,”Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” “Fags Doom Nations,” “America is Doomed,” “Priests Rape Boys,” and “You’re Going to Hell”—) https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/09-751.ZS.html
Accordingly, I personally infer that the good professor was correct in simply comparing this Australian case to our speech protections in the U.S, (Snyder v. Phelps) involving matters of public concern (Snyder: homosexualty; Smith: transsexualism).
(p.s., Australia High Court is the highest court in Australia, which hears appeals from the Supreme Courts (I believe there are more than a dozen Supreme Courts in Australia. Kirralie. Smith and Binary can still appeal this to the High Court).
From Paragraph 4 of Australian Supreme Court decision, this is the subject of punishment:
“On 20 January 2023 the first plaintiff wrote an article concerning Ms Blanch and including a photograph of her (‘the January article’) which was posted by the second plaintiff on its website with other communications by the second plaintiff. Between 20 January and 17 February 2023 the first plaintiff posted to Facebook and Twitter on numerous occasions regarding Ms Blanch, not naming her but including photographs of her and naming her football club, and on a number of these occasions including a link to the January article. Between 29 and 31 March 2023 the first plaintiff posted (to Facebook and Twitter) on a number of occasions regarding Ms Dennis, including naming her by nominating where her name fell on a reproduced leaderboard of sporting results. The posts regarding Ms Blanch and Ms Dennis are referred to as the social media posts.”
No. We all know Esquire is just another one of your sockpuppets. And we never had any interest in what you had to say.
Turley responds to X (pulling an X/Esquire on X by copycatting him),
“X, where was I dishonest with the facts? What facts? I can say whatever I want.”
Before you conclude that cyberbullying, cancel campaigns and doxxing are protected “free speech”, put yourself or a family member as the target of the online harassment. Does the shoe still fit?
I would have to say that calling out two MEN inserting themselves into a women’s sport that appears publicly is a distant stretch from cyber bullying. That would be like calling out Hakeem Jeffro for bringing a baseball bat as a prop to a political rally in a time of civil unrest. They’re all a bunch of self absorbed deviant freaks, who said 5G wouldn’t fl you up in the brain!
OK, but I’m sure you have your own ideosyncracies…maybe not as weird as these two Aussies. What if somebody singled you out for a campaign of online disrespect — mocking you and attempting to soil your reputation. Are you going to defend what they are doing as protected free speech?
You’re “it’ll never happen to me” is naive. It shows you don’t think deeply about free speech — about how defining too permissively can be turned against you.
(Pb) Lead
Read the article, she refused to refer to the two men by their chosen pronouns. The two men are the two men in women’s sports which she is opposed to. That’s not cyber bullying, that’s calling a spade a spade.
The Aussie gender gestapo found this to inflict hatred and emotional pain….boohoo upon these two mentally unstable men resulting in fines.
It’s ridiculous.
“mocking you and attempting to soil your reputation.”
How did the defendant do that by stating the truth? I’m not saying he didn’t; only I haven’t heard the quoted words of what he said that you and others take issue with.
This is what you get without a strong freedom of speech article in their constitution. Props to the USA Founders!
This is beyond my comprehension. This is what happens when a country’s citizens let’s their government take away guns. Never forget that our 2nd Amendment ensures our 1st amendment rights. Molon Labe
Three decades ago or so, Australia was enjoying some buzz about recognizing individual liberties that the US no longer honored, and several of my friends were considering moving there. Well, they certainly have given the lie to that idea in the years since. Woke, Marxist, and authoritarian seem to be the more appropriate descriptions today. Hey, maybe we can convince some of our domestic woke buttholes that it is their conceived Paradise and that they should emigrate there. Hey, George/X/whatever troll name you are posting under today, do you have any interest? Some of us might even chip in for a (one way) ticket… 😎
ROFL!! Your petty insults are hilarious. We all know who you are, Anonymous.
It’s obvious you have no idea what you’re talking about.
“We all know who you are, Anonymous.”
Up to speed, X/George just copycatted this from a comment sent to him.
“Seize the firearms. Then the population will be helpless to fight back. Criminalize speech we don’t like. Fine and punish all dissent. Sieg heil! SIEG HEIL!” said Austrailia’s leftwing politicians.
This is what the democrats in the US want to achieve. We will never give up our right to Keep and Bear Arms. Molon Labe.
Sheesh, Turley is at it again. Being disingenuous. What a surprise (not).
This is what Turley left out and what Esquire is pointing out.
The NSW District Court and Court of Appeal issued the two-year Apprehended Personal Violence Order (APVO) after finding that Kirralie Smith’s online targeted campaign crossed the line from political debate into criminal intimidation and objective harassment..
The court’s specific findings against Smith included:Objectively Threatening and Cruel:
The judges ruled that Smith’s repeated social media posts targeting the local soccer players were “highly intimidatory,” “objectively harassing,” and “unnecessarily cruel”.
Transphobic Belittling: The three-judge panel explicitly concluded that her posts constituted a pattern of “transphobic belittling” aimed directly at private individuals.
Causing Psychological Harm: The court rejected the argument that online speech cannot be considered violent, ruling that sustained online abuse has severe, damaging effects on an individual’s mental health and safety.
Inevitability of Continued Harassment: The District Court judge found that without a formal restraining order, the online harassment would continue and would cause the targets to live in an ongoing state of fear.
As a result, the court legally ordered Smith to stop stalking, harassing, or intimidating the players, and explicitly banned her from approaching or contacting them, as well as the two regional soccer clubs they played for.
Turley is big on differentiating speech from conduct and this case clearly becomes an issue of conduct when there is actual intentional harassment and inciting others to harass.
Sheesh, George is at it again. Being disingenuous. What a surprise (not).
What’s disingenuous about my post? You’re not showing how I’m wrong.
You must be a brainwashed libtard sheep.
Would require a brain to meet that standard of description. X meets all the criteria of a blog fluffer generating responses to opposing views, flawed as they are.
So, you’re thinking that a somewhat less personalized yet blistering criticism of allowing men to play in women’s soccer would have gone unchallenged?….unpunished?
If true, that would at least establish where the line is being crossed — it’s OK to stridently oppose men playing in women’s sports, but to demonize individual players by name goes over the line into incivility / harassment.
Does Turley even recognize that distinction?
That said, the fines are outrageously disproportionate. And the compelled speech is downright fascistic.
Claims Australia’s censor:
“Misinformation and disinformation pose a serious threat to the safety . . .”
While ignoring the demonstrable threat caused by criminalizing dissent:
You leave people with only one means of settling disputes: physical force.
@ Sam,
Under New South Wales law—specifically Section 13 of the Crimes (Domestic and Personal Violence) Act 2007—intimidation is defined as conduct amounting to harassment, molestation, or cyberbullying that causes a person to fear physical or psychological harm.
The law outlines three specific categories of behavior that constitute legal intimidation:
Conduct Amounting to Harassment or Molestation: This includes any repeated, unwanted approach, physical tracking, or persistent communication.
Cyberbullying: Approaching or targeting an individual through electronic media, including emails, text messages, and social media platforms.
Driving Past or Loitering: Repeatedly staying near a person’s home, workplace, or any venue they frequent (such as a local sports club).
The law explicitly states that intimidation does not require a threat of immediate physical violence. Creating an environment that causes psychological harm, severe anxiety, or mental distress is sufficient.
It’s Australian law. And according to Professor Turley’s own views this is conduct not just speech and in his view conduct is not protected speech.
“Esquire”
personae non gratae
@ Sam,
Is that an argument or conceding to the facts?
The article indicated that she voiced her disdain for the practice and simply refused to use the two’s PREFERRED Pronouns. How is simply refusing to use preferred pronouns that are false considered cyber bullying? Actually, had she used them she would then be guilty of falsely reporting the facts.
This is a ridiculous misuse of law and an affront to free speech to further deviant groups.
Oh, look, another one of Xs sockpuppets. Like we do not know who you are.
It goes to intent. Speech intending to silence or intimidate another is conduct, not expressing an opinion. That said, there are better ways to deter harassment / cyberbullying than state prosecution. Private civil lawsuit is a much better approach for these reasons:
• a jury of 12 decides the facts and the extent of damages — not a politically-biased govt. bureaucrat
• consequences are limited to $ damages — not imprisonment
• anyone can sue — govt. uses prosecutorial discretion to let sympathetic figures off the hook
Incivility is a poison that destroys decision-making atmospherics. This has been cited by philosophers of elocution going back to antiquity. The goal of free speech is open-minded inquiry and dispassionate weighing of options to move forward. Realistically, that means some degree of moderation to prevent militancy, inauthenticity, and tribalistic hatred from overtaking the public square.
The way Australia is going about it in this case will eventually backfire.
@ pbinca,
In the U.S. legal system that case would be a good candidate under tort law, Turley’s specialty. If he were honest he would be in a position critical of the defendant in the case.
The Professor’s narrative is about mischaracterizing this case as an example of the degradation of free speech in Australia. When in fact it is a case regarding conduct which is not protected speech.
She simply refused to use their “preferred” pronouns. She used her pronouns that she believes truly and accurately describe their assigned gender. I fully agree with her, this is absolutely ridiculous and disgraceful.
“Transgender dolls to be available for Minnesota schoolchildren as young as 4: report”
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6402217618112
Are you selling or giving them away?
Professor Turley is being dishonest with the facts. Turley is able to frame this as an “evisceration of free speech” because he intentionally strip-mines the case of its specific, local context. By ignoring the real-world intimidation, the targeted cyber-bullying, and the court-issued violence restraining orders, he can falsely present a complex civil harassment case as a simple matter of a woman being fined $95,000 “simply for using the wrong pronouns.” This allows him to neatly fit the case into his broader narrative regarding global censorship while ignoring the legal definitions of conduct and harm that he relies on at home.
The Professor is always making a sharp distinction between conduct and speech. In this case he seems to deliberately leave out important facts like a separate court issued a formal Apprehended Violence Order (AVO) against Smith. Which is based on her previous conduct rather than speech.
When defending controversial American speech, Turley frequently points to the U.S. Supreme Court standard in Brandenburg v. Ohio. He argues that speech can only be restricted if it directly incites “imminent lawless action”.
In the Australian case, the court did not sanction Smith for calmly expressing a political opinion on transgender athletes. They penalized her because her posts targeted individuals to generate mass cyber-abuse, real-world intimidation, and local disruption. Under standard U.S. tort law, generating a targeted campaign that incites third parties to harass an individual crosses from protected expression into actionable conduct (such as intentional infliction of emotional distress or civil harassment). By ignoring the targeted harassment aspect, Turley minimizes actions he would otherwise identify as tortious or unlawful behavior. Professor Turley’s portrayal of the case is not only hypocritical based on his past arguments it is intellectually dishonest.
“dishonest with the facts. ” Its called an opinion silly commenter.
Oh shite! Its George X Jr. now pontificating.
LOL! That wasn’t me. I was just about to comment on his take and it is correct. A cursory search about the case shows there’s a lot more than Turley pointed out about the case.
you fool no one as to your identity, or should we say, identities. How strange that you were following this post closely, waiting to see what kind of immediate response it would get.
Why would that be strange? I follow everyone’s posts. You follow mine all the time.
Cursory search… you mean AI eh? Can you think?
@ Anonymous,
Utilizing AI to research the case brought to light critical context and facts omitted by the Professor. These findings demonstrate that his analysis lacks factual honesty. Do you dispute the evidence presented?
does George/X want us to think that he is an “Esquire?”
@Anonymous,
Professor Turley’s article offers a dishonest portrayal of the case by ignoring critical factual context, presenting a flawed analysis that omits the true story. It’s not mere “opinion”.
George, listen, see if you can understand this, Turley writes opinion. O P I N O N.
An opinion is when you say you don’t like a ruling. A dishonest legal analysis is when a law professor intentionally fabricates the narrative by omitting a court-ordered restraining order and a record of targeted harassment just to fit a political talking point.
You can still criticize his opinion. He’s fair game.
Does Australia have a Disinformation Governance Board?
With that time on your hands, look it up.
How would the public mount a major political movement when the government can prosecute at will the opposition for speaking out? It is bad enough to punish speech but to compel speech is another matter. If you can compel speech, you can compel anything including action. The citizens will have the freedom of cattle, free to roam, feed and breed as long as they stay confined to the ranch and mind their masters. The rise of identity politics gives license to subjugate the public. It can happen here if the public remains complacent.
Insanity
Yes, Australia is in error. File under bizarre.
When a nation welcomes a culture and a faith which will tear one’s arm out by the shoulders in response to criticism the response to same is to pillory the critic. Appeasement never won a conflict. Only emboldened the adversary. Chamberlain.
Give the framers credit. A written First Amendment is worth more than most people realize, especially standing next to a country like Australia that just watched two citizens get hit with $95,000 in fines and ordered to publish a retraction, just for stating a biological fact.
But here’s what should worry us. That protection’s only as real as who’s sitting on the Court interpreting it. The text doesn’t enforce itself. Pack the Court with justices who don’t take the Bill of Rights seriously, and you don’t need to repeal the First Amendment to gut it. You just need judges willing to rule around it instead of on it. The form stays right there on the page. The function that gives it teeth disappears. That’s the real danger in court packing. Not that it erases what’s written, but that it hands the enforcement of your rights over to people who don’t care whether they mean anything at all.
Olly you make a good point. A written law makes all the difference. The so called establishment Dems have been openly advocating for packing the court which would make the founding documents a dead letter. The Democrat party has been moving in this direction for at least the last 20 years attacking the institutions, promoting identity politics and advocating for control of large swaths of the private sector, like health care and energy. There is not much difference between the Democrats and the DSA. The DSA is just more open about their plans. A motivated minority can take away the freedoms,security and prosperity of the majority if the majority lets them. It has happened already many times. Complacency is not an option anymore.
” A written law makes all the difference.” Really, what other kind of laws are there? Imagined?
Unadulterated, appreciate the dead letter line, had to look that one up myself, didn’t go to law school. But it’s exactly what I was trying to describe. A right doesn’t need to be repealed to die. It just needs everyone with the power to enforce it to stop bothering. That’s the real risk sitting behind all of this.
@ Olly,
That’s a crucial point, but it applies differently here. Turley wants his audience to think free speech is becoming a dead letter in Australia because of an ideological crackdown. In reality, the right to voice a political opinion isn’t dead there; what is being enforced is the law against targeted, real-world harassment and stalking. A right to speak should never mean a right to intimidate private citizens until their safety is compromised.
” real-world harassment and stalking. “
There is no harm in using a noun or pronoun that has been used for centuries. For the same reason, I can call you by an alias other than Esquire, and you are not even qualified to go to law school, nor are your actions noble.
@ S. Meyer,
You are trying to make this about grammar to avoid talking about a court-ordered restraining order. The New South Wales court did not issue an Apprehended Personal Violence Order because of a pronoun. It issued the order because the defendant launched a coordinated online mob, doxxed private citizens, and fabricated safety-related lies—explicitly claiming a player sent multiple women to the hospital when she knew they hadn’t. In both Australia and the United States, weaponizing lies to incite an online and real-world mob against private citizens is legally defined as harassment, regardless of what parts of speech you use to do it.
Call me what you wish, but it won’t change the facts of the case and the dishonest characterization of the case by Professor Turley.
Despite what you believe, it is mostly about grammar and genetic truths. The laws in Australia were molded to create untrue abstractions. Truthful statements about biological sex and broad safety concerns in sports are not inherently harmful or criminal. The law is penalizing honest and law-abiding citizens concerned with the safety and well-being of others.
If you have direct statements written or said by the defendant that show something different, let’s hear it.
Olly
So, you had to look up the meaning of “dead letter”, just like you had to look up the meaning of “ad valorem”.
For someone who opines so widely on the Constitution and the law in general with such an authoritative tone and demeanor, you sure have to “look up” a lot of stuff, which simply proves that most of the time you are opining from a position of great ignorance.
We can add to that your complete ignorance and misunderstanding of proposed tax changes in California, your home state, that I pointed out a while ago.
I am not a lawyer either, but I know the meaning of “dead letter” in the law, and “ad valorem”, just from general knowledge.
You clearly have a very limited general knowledge, and a closed mind, with opinions not based in reality.
You are not to be taken seriously by anyone with actual knowledge of the real world.
Looking something up before I speak on it is the opposite of opining from ignorance. It’s what stops opinions from becoming ignorance in the first place. I’d rather check a term and get it right than assume I already know it and get it wrong. And when I’m shown I made an error, like I was earlier in this thread on the two cases, I said so and corrected it.
What you haven’t done, in this comment or any other, is cite a single piece of evidence against the formation argument itself. Not one. Just commentary about me, never the substance. That’s usually what it looks like when someone’s got nothing to argue with the actual point, so they argue with the person making it instead.
Olly
I am not saying that the formation argument is not valid. I am saying that you have a very narrow view of that concept, and you keep applying it to any and all situations. You are a one-trick pony. You have only that one tool, that you do not fully understand, and you use it over and over again to try to explain many varied situations. It’s all you ever talk about. You shoe horn every situation into the concept of “formation” often in an inappropriate manner. When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
The fact that you admit to not understanding basic terms is simply proof that you are not intellectually curious, and have limited general knowledge. The terms “ad valorem” and “dead letter” are not obscure terms of art known only to a very small cohort of highly specialized experts. They are common terms known to people who are intellectually curious and read widely.
And I hardly need repeat your ignorance of tax propositions in your own state.
You do not exhibit any intellectual curiosity, and leap to unfounded conclusions based on a lack of general knowledge.
Your admitted lack of general knowledge and one track arguments makes it almost impossible to engage in any rational and meaningful discussion about ANYTHING, let alone the concept of formation.
My argument is either valid or it isn’t. That’s the whole test. Citizen formation sits upstream of every other problem in this country, and I’ve grounded that in documented evidence going back to Cicero, through Montesquieu, Madison, and Tocqueville, and in the framers’ own words.
One thing worth correcting directly. Calling this a narrow view has it backwards. A systems approach is what got me here in the first place, and systems thinking is the opposite of narrow. It’s what forces you to stop looking at problems in isolation and start tracing the actual connections between them. If anything, formation is the wide lens. It’s what let me see the same root cause running underneath a dozen problems most people treat as unrelated.
So here’s a real challenge instead of another round of this. Name one problem in this country that isn’t downstream of citizen formation. Not a symptom of it, an actual exception to it. If you’ve got one, I’ll take it seriously. If you don’t, the argument stands on its own regardless of what you think of me personally.
@ Olly,
If might interject, your argument isn’t valid because it relies on a classic tautology. If you define every single national issue—from macroeconomics to infrastructure—as a ‘symptom’ of citizen formation, you’ve created an unfalsifiable hypothesis. For example, a sudden global pandemic or a supply chain collapse triggered by an overseas war is not downstream of American civic formation; it is an external systemic shock. Claiming that the country’s reaction to the shock is the only thing that matters is just a semantic trick to keep your theory right. Real systems thinking accounts for external inputs; your model ignores them.
As to your challenge? The exception; Geographic and resource distribution. The geographic reality that the U.S. controls the Mississippi River basin and lacks immediate, hostile land borders is a foundational driver of American stability and wealth. That is an existential, material reality that exists entirely independent of ‘citizen formation.’ No amount of civic virtue or philosophical formation can change a drought, a natural harbor, or geopolitical geography. By treating physical, material realities as mere ‘downstream symptoms’ of a moral philosophy, your wide lens is completely missing the physical bedrock of the system. I hope that makes sense to you.
Esquire, here’s the actual misunderstanding. Formation isn’t a claim about whether a mountain, a river, or a border exists. Those stand on their own, completely independent of any citizen, any government, any philosophy. Nobody’s arguing otherwise.
Formation is about capacity for self-governance, and self-governance is an action taken in response to a problem. A river existing isn’t a problem to respond to. What a nation does with that river, who manages it, how it gets governed, whether the response comes from local capability or centralized control, that’s the action. That’s where formation applies. It was never in the business of explaining physical facts. It’s in the business of explaining human response to them.
So the challenge stands as originally stated. Name a governance response, not a physical fact, that isn’t downstream of citizen formation. A river isn’t an exception to the theory. It was never inside its scope to begin with.
@ Olly,
You cannot claim to use a ‘wide-lens systems approach’ while simultaneously defining the most critical components of that system—the physical geography, resource inputs, and existential crises—as ‘outside its scope.’ In real systems thinking, a governance response is a secondary output, not the primary input. If a nation is physically choked by a lack of access to trade routes or devastated by a natural disaster, its administrative response is constrained by those material limits, not its philosophical virtue. By asserting that human response sits entirely upstream, you are advocating for absolute voluntarism, which is the exact opposite of how complex socio-economic systems actually operate.
You went from a “wide lens” to a linear, one-way causal arrow that violates true systems thinking. A governance response is not a purely autonomous moral choice born out of philosophical formation; it is a forced, structural reaction to material limits. You’re moving the goalposts in an attempt to salvage an ineffective argument.
Esquire, you said the governance response is “a forced, structural reaction to material limits,” not an autonomous moral choice. Fine, test that claim against the examples.
The American and French Revolutions faced nearly identical material limits, concentrated power, unaccountable rulers, financial crisis. Same category of shock. If governance response were purely a forced reaction to material conditions, those two nations should have produced similar outcomes, since the structural pressures were nearly the same. They didn’t. One produced a constitutional republic that’s lasted 250 years. The other produced the Reign of Terror and Napoleon. Same shock, opposite outcome. Material limits don’t explain that gap. Formation does.
Same test with natural disasters right now. Different states face the same category of material limit, wildfire, flood, drought, and manage it with wildly different levels of competence and public trust. The disaster itself doesn’t change based on which state it hits. The response does, and that variance traces back to formation, not to the material event.
If governance were only a forced structural reaction, identical material limits would produce identical responses. They don’t. That’s the actual proof the response isn’t purely forced. Something upstream of the material shock is doing real work, and that something is formation.
@ Olly,
Your argument falls apart because you are treating completely different material conditions as ‘identical.’ The American and French Revolutions did not face the same structural pressures. America was an agrarian, land-rich colony with an ocean separating it from its ruler, zero domestic feudal aristocracy, a hyper-abundant frontier, and food security. France was a hyper-dense European superpower suffering from acute, localized famine, an entrenched feudal class system, and immediate, existential threats of invasion from surrounding monarchies. Their governance responses weren’t different because of ‘moral formation’; they were different because their material, economic, and geopolitical realities were completely distinct. You are flattening complex material structures to manufacture a philosophical victory.
We have already established why your argument is incorrect. There is no sense in constantly moving the goalposts to justify a proven bad argument.
Esquire, who’s “we”? Might be you and whatever AI you’re drafting these with, but nobody else in this thread has agreed to anything being settled.
And on “moral formation,” that’s your term, not mine. I never said it. I said citizen formation, and morality is one component of it, not the whole of it. You’re the one narrowing the goalposts here, not me. I haven’t moved a single one all thread.
On the substance, you’re right that America and France faced different material conditions, different geography, different feudal structure, different food security, none of that’s in dispute. But I never claimed the material conditions were identical. I said both nations faced the same category of pressure, a crisis of legitimacy against concentrated, unaccountable power, and each responded according to how its own citizens were formed to meet that pressure. Different starting points, same category of challenge, and the outcome traced to formation.
Turley’s blog illustrates exactly what I mean by citizen formation. The blog itself is the input. Formation is the filter. Before we ever reach a conclusion, years of family, education, culture, religion, media, experience, and civic habits have already shaped how we process what we’re reading. The same article enters two different minds and produces two entirely different judgments, not because the facts changed, but because the people did.
@ Olly,
The use of ‘we’ was entirely rhetorical, meant to reference the points already established in our discussion. Regarding your filter analogy: if ‘citizen formation’ is entirely subjective—dependent on individual media consumption, culture, and experience—then it is an inconsistent and unreliable predictor of a collective governance response. A nation cannot build a stable, 250-year constitutional republic on a fractured mosaic of individual mental filters. What actually stabilizes a governance response over centuries is a robust framework of material incentives, geographic security, and institutional wealth that forces cooperation regardless of how differently two individual citizens process a blog post.
A nation cannot build a stable, 250-year constitutional republic on a fractured mosaic of individual mental filters.
Esquire, that line has it backwards. The republic wasn’t built on a fractured mosaic of individual mental filters. It was built on thirteen colonies with citizens formed, consistently enough, for self-government. That coherence is exactly what made 1787 possible.
What my thesis actually shows is what happens when that shared formation erodes into something closer to a fractured mosaic, citizens no longer formed around a common civic baseline, each shaped by wildly different inputs with no shared floor underneath them. That’s not the founding condition. That’s the drift away from it. And it’s exactly why we’ve ended up here, a constitutional republic in form, an administrative oligarchy in function. The fracturing isn’t the foundation of my argument. It’s the diagnosis.
Olly
You are trying to frame my pointing out of your ignorance of simple terminology and ignorance of tax proposals in your own state as somehow being errors or mistakes that you subsequently corrected.
You were not making errors or mistakes. You were displaying ignorance of factual information. You did not correct errors or mistakes. You admitted ignorance.
You are quite disingenuously trying to frame your admissions of ignorance as some noble act of correcting errors.
You displayed ignorance of factual information, and I corrected your ignorance. I am the one who is doing the correcting, not you.
Semantics aside, not knowing something and then learning it isn’t a character flaw, it’s the entire process of getting things right. Call it ignorance corrected or an error fixed, the outcome’s the same either way, and it’s the opposite of the “closed mind” you accused me of earlier.
Notice something else too. You’ve fully abandoned the formation argument. Not one word on it in your last two replies. Went from geography and material conditions straight to litigating a vocabulary word from weeks ago. That’s not a coincidence. When the actual argument stops being useful, the conversation quietly moves somewhere else.
Talk about moving the goalposts. You’re still stuck on a thread that wrapped up a week or two ago. Meanwhile today we went through the vilification ruling line by line, the actual judgment, the actual test the magistrate applied, and you came up with nothing that touched any of it. So instead you’re back to a vocabulary word from two weeks back. That’s not a rebuttal. That’s just changing the channel because the current one isn’t going your way.
I take Olly very seriously precisely because he admits his mistakes. You lie and disparage while seldom adhering to the truth. Should one take you seriously? Obviously not, because you are a fool who has destroyed your reputation. Now run away. That is your method of dealing with your foolishness
Olly is not “making mistakes”. He is not “admitting his mistakes’, for the simple reason that he is not making mistakes. He is displaying ignorance of terminology well known to intellectually curious and well-read people, and ignorance of the details of tax proposals that are taking place in his own state. When I pointed this out to him, I was not correcting his “mistakes”. I was pointing out his ignorance. He admitted his ignorance and then disingenuously tried to frame these admissions as admissions of “mistakes”.
So the reality here is that you take Olly seriously because he is ignorant, by his own admission.
This is a highly illogical position to take.
Now let’s move on to the rest of your highly illogical comment.
You say that I “lie and disparage while seldom adhering to the truth”. You start with the declarative statement that I lie and disparage but you also say “while seldom adhering to the truth”. Obviously then, your statement that I lie is not logical if I do sometimes adhere to the truth. I cannot simultaneously lie, while seldom adhering to the truth. This is a totally illogical statement. Someone who lies cannot also tell the truth.
And last, but not least, you make the absurd assertion that I am “a fool who has destroyed my reputation”. Really? Surely a fool has no good reputation that can be destroyed. And if that reputation was as a fool, then in destroying that reputation, I am no longer a fool.
Your comment is nothing more than a rambling, incoherent, illogical statement from an individual of very low intellect, vainly trying to sound much more intelligent and erudite than your limited intellect allows, and then falling flat on your face in an embarrassingly illogical word salad of nonsense.
“You make the absurd assertion…”
Sigmund the Fraud, you are down to playing dictionary games with the word “fool” because you have nowhere left to run. Watching you stare into a mirror and project your own insecurities onto everyone else isn’t clever; it’s just plain boring.
Final Grade: Boring Pedant, Self-Obsessed Mirror-Gazer, and Permanent Baffoon.
Where do you come up with such stupid, useless, bizarre stuff? Your childish hypotheticals are laughable.
Judges are the soles arbiters of the rule of law. Think the Shiloh Hendrix case. Stick to facts not fantasies.
The Hendrix case is a massive
miscarriage of justice that I hope is quickly corrected by a higher court.
@Olly,
The New South Wales court did not focus merely on Smith’s words; it looked at her physical and online conduct. Smith’s real-world actions were severe enough that a separate court issued a formal Apprehended Violence Order (AVO) against her, legally barring her from stalking, harassing, or approaching the athletes and their soccer clubs. By Turley’s own January 6th logic—where a speaker is protected but the surrounding unlawful conduct is punishable—Smith’s real-world harassment and violation of personal space constitute unprotected conduct, not protected speech.
Australia is not the U.S. and comparing it to our standards, especially when particular facts are left out, is not the proper way to judge this case. Turley left out a lot of information that undermines his claim.
In the Smith case, the court found that the defendants did not just share opinions; they published fabricated safety-related misinformation and doxxed private citizens to fuel an online hate campaign. Turley ignores the fact that fabricating a malicious lie to damage a private citizen’s life and safety is a punishable offense in almost every democratic legal framework, including the United States. A glaring fact Turley clearly left out.
In his books, like The Indispensable Right Free Speech in an Age of Rage, and his frequent media appearances, Turley relies heavily on a rigid, classic American legal distinction that speech is highly protected, but illegal conduct is not. However, by defending Kirralie Smith’s campaign as pure “speech,” Turley completely glosses over and leaves out actions that he would typically classify as punishable criminal or civil conduct under his own view.
Because that conduct changes the whole context of the case and the judge’s reason for the harsh punishment.
Esquire, I’m not buying it. Bundling the AVO into a defense of the vilification ruling isn’t clearing anything up, and honestly it’s worse than either of us first framed it. That $95,000 fine and the compelled speech order came out of a separate proceeding, the vilification case, decided under NSW’s Anti-Discrimination Act, for calling someone by their biological sex.
Here’s what actually happened. The judge in that case didn’t pull evidence from the AVO case. She pulled its legal reasoning. On the question of whether restricting this kind of speech violates the implied freedom of political communication, she leaned on the Court of Appeal’s reasoning from the AVO case, a harassment order, to help clear that hurdle in a case that was only ever about stating someone’s biological sex. Two separate courts, two separate questions, and the weaker one got propped up by borrowing from the stronger one. That’s not context. That’s a court reaching outside its own case to get around the free speech problem
@ Olly,
You’re trying to separate the facts from the law to preserve Turley’s narrative. The vilification case wasn’t ‘only ever about stating biological sex’—the court explicitly found that Smith published fabricated safety claims, specifically accusing a player of sending multiple women to the hospital, to incite public hostility. When the Supreme Court reviewed whether the vilification law impermissibly restricted political communication, it referenced the established legal framework on harassment because harassment was the mechanism of the vilification. It’s not ‘reaching outside the case’ to use established appellate definitions of what constitutes a proportionate restriction on speech.
Esquire, I appreciate you trying to draw a line between political speech and harassment, but the judge’s own words don’t support that distinction here. The operative finding in the ruling reads: “I am satisfied that the defendant unlawfully vilified the Plaintiff… when she referred to the plaintiff as a male or a man.” That’s the court’s own language describing what crossed the line. Not stalking. Not intimidation. The act of using the word “man.”
If the ruling had turned on real-world harassment, the judge would have said so in the operative finding, the way the separate AVO ruling did in its own case. It didn’t. It named the speech itself as the violation. That’s the part that should trouble anyone who cares about free expression, regardless of what else happened in a different courtroom under a different order.
@ Olly,
You are conflating the subject matter of the speech with the legal threshold of the ruling. Under NSW law, a court cannot just rule that a word is illegal. The judge explicitly had to find that using those words in that specific, targeted manner met the statutory definition of vilification—which means it actively incited hatred, severe ridicule, or serious contempt. The court didn’t ban the word ‘man’; it penalized a coordinated, bad-faith public campaign that weaponized those words alongside fabricated injury claims to invite mass hostility against private individuals. Isolating one sentence completely ignores the legal element of incitement required to make it a violation.
@ Olly,
If we were to apply this case to U.S. law it would not be a free speech case. It would be under tort law. Because the defendant admitted to falsifying claims of injured players being hospitalized and the defendant admitted as much. These facts are important and shows why the Professor’s characterization of the case is dishonest.
The U.S. legal system would penalize the case based on tortious conduct: the malicious fabrication of a defamatory lie (the fake hospitalizations) and the intentional deployment of an online mob to harass private individuals.
This is what happened in Australia. They are applying their version of a tortious conduct. It has nothing to do with speech.
“That protection’s only as real as who’s sitting on the Court interpreting it”
Olly, you and Ben Franklin agree. “A republic, if you can keep it.” Can we keep it? Not if we throw away the Constitution. Let there be no doubt, the hard left intends to destroy the country while it has nothing to replace it with. To date, their ideas have failed everywhere, bringing with them death and destruction.
Free speech is an amendment to the Constitution, but look no further than Australia; everyone should worry. Laws are frequently ambiguous, so the rulings of different judges can substantially vary. How should we adjust to the different viewpoints? Where a viewpoint concerning a law is overly broad, the courts should rule in favor of individual freedom. The government wrote the law and can write a new law that further regulates if it chooses; that is something the individual cannot do.
SM, good comment. That Franklin quote gets misread constantly. People treat “if you can keep it” as a warning about vigilance alone. It’s actually implying something sharper. This Constitution was written for citizens formed with the capacity for self-government, not citizens in general. That capacity was itself a specific, definable set of habits and expectations the founding generation carried into 1787, not something automatic or guaranteed to transfer forward.
Trace that capacity across the eras since and the change is stunning. 250 years ago we could self-govern as citizens. Today the formation on display looks a lot more like subjects prepared to be managed by an administrative state than citizens prepared to govern themselves. Franklin wasn’t just warning us to stay alert. He was pointing at exactly what “keeping it” would actually require, and that requirement is the part most people skip right past.
Nonsensical gibberish.
Why are you whining about the far left wanting to throw away the Constitution based on a story from Australia? You say that the ideas of the far left have failed everywhere as if that is an explanation for what happens in Australia.
And you say, free speech is an amendment to the Constitution. That would be the US Constitution. Then you say “but look no further than Australia”.
Why?
Why should we look at Australia at all, let alone “no further than Australia”. The US Constitution has no relevance to any other country. Why do you think it can be applied to foreign countries. If you believe that the US Constitution should apply in foreign countries, then why shouldn’t the constitutions of other countries apply here. Fair is fair after all. Why don’t you argue that the constitutions of China or Russia should apply here.
You are an idiot. You simply trot out the same tired old comments about the “far left”, no matter what the topic of discussion. Reading your comments is a waste of time, and you are a waste of space that could otherwise be occupied by a thinking, rational human being.
The Australia comparison isn’t claiming the US Constitution applies there. Nobody said that. It’s a comparison of outcomes. What happens to free speech in a country with no written First Amendment, versus what we’ve got here. That’s how you find out what a protection is actually worth.
People compare systems all the time to learn something real. Look at a country without the safeguard, see what fills the gap instead, and you learn exactly what that safeguard was doing for you. Australia shows what happens when regular folks still have decent instincts about free speech, 45 percent still say government shouldn’t get to slap the label “misinformation” on something and shut it down, but there’s no document forcing the courts to actually honor that instinct. That’s dead relevant to a warning about court packing here. It shows you exactly what our own First Amendment turns into the second nobody’s left enforcing it. This was never about whose laws apply where. It’s about what happens to a right once the mechanism protecting it quits working.
@ Olly,
The comparison still fails because you are misidentifying what ‘mechanism’ actually broke down. The outcome in the Australian case didn’t happen because they lacked a First Amendment mechanism; it happened because the defendant engaged in tortious, real-world conduct—specifically, fabricating malicious lies about physical injuries and deploying an online mob to stalk private citizens. If that exact case happened in the United States, a court would bypass the First Amendment entirely to rule on civil defamation, cyber-harassment, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Your comparison is broken because you are viewing a standard civil harassment judgment through a ‘free speech’ lens that wouldn’t even protect that behavior under U.S. law.
This is not about speech. It’s about conduct.
Esquire/Equire, we’ve been over this ground, and the judgment itself still says what it says. The operative finding, the actual legal basis the magistrate cited for the vilification ruling, is that Smith “unlawfully vilified the plaintiff… when she referred to the plaintiff as a male or a man.” That’s not my framing. That’s the court’s own language, straight from the ruling.
The unverified hospital claim is part of the broader evidentiary record. It isn’t cited as the legal basis for the $95,000 fine or the compelled speech order. If it were, the judgment would say so, the same way the separate AVO ruling explicitly grounded its own finding in harassment and stalking. It doesn’t. Two different courts asked two different legal questions and reached two different conclusions on two different grounds. You can believe the fabricated claim should have been the basis for punishment. It wasn’t. The court punished the words themselves, and said so in its own ruling.
If the US had a case that actually hinged on a fabricated, provably false claim naming real people and causing real reputational harm, that’s a defamation case, and I’d agree with you completely. That’s not the case that produced this fine. This one is on record as being about calling someone “a man.”
@ Olly,
This case did produce evidence of a fabricated, provably false claim. The injury that required hospitalization. The defendant admitted to the court the claim was false. In Australia this IS the case. It’s also in conjunction with the cyber bullying and inciting others to join in on it. That’s conduct and that is not protected speech.
Your argument is fundamentally misrepresenting how a judicial ruling works by confusing the subject matter of the offense with the legal elements required to prove it. In a civil vilification judgment, the operative finding names the speech—’referred to the plaintiff as a man’—because that identifies the specific public act being challenged under the statute. However, a court cannot legally fine someone just for uttering a word. To reach that operative finding, the magistrate explicitly had to rule that the manner in which those words were used met the legal threshold of inciting hatred, severe ridicule, or serious contempt. The fabricated hospital claims were not just ‘background evidence’; they were the exact vehicle used to prove the legal element of incitement. You cannot separate the verdict from the very facts required to legally trigger it.
Esquire, I went and found the specific paragraph the magistrate actually relied on for incitement, and it isn’t the hospital claim. A detailed legal review of the ruling identifies the key evidence the magistrate cited as third party reactions to Smith’s article, specifically a public comment quoted directly in the judgment: “This loser was born male, is male, will die a male.” That’s what the court pointed to as the incitement. Not the fabricated injury detail.
That same legal analysis also flags something worth noting on its own. The magistrate applied the wrong legal standard, asking whether the words were merely “capable” of inciting hatred rather than proving they actually did, which is the correct statutory test. That’s a documented flaw in the ruling’s reasoning, and it has nothing to do with the hospital claim either.
So I can separate the facts, because the judgment itself already did. The operative reasoning for incitement traces to public reaction over being told a male was playing on a women’s team, not to the unverified injury claim. You’re welcome to think the fabricated claim should have mattered more. It’s on record that it wasn’t what the court actually leaned on.
@ Olly,
You are confusing the proof of effect with the cause of the incitement. Pointing to a third-party comment like ‘born male, will die male’ is how the magistrate legally proved that Smith’s posts successfully achieved the statutory requirement of inciting public contempt and severe ridicule. But a crowd doesn’t generate that level of targeted vitriol in a vacuum. They were whipped into that state because Smith explicitly stoked safety fears by publishing fabricated, unverified claims that the player physically injured women and sent them to the hospital. The court used the public comments to prove the audience was successfully incited, but the match that lit the fire was the fabricated injury claim. You cannot separate the reaction from the lie that generated it.
Under Section 49ZT of the Anti-Discrimination Act, the legal test for civil vilification is objective: it checks whether the publication is capable of inciting a reasonable ordinary reader to hatred or serious contempt, not whether every single reader became violent. When the NSW Supreme Court dismissed Smith’s appeal on July 24, 2026, Justice Belinda Rigg explicitly rejected these exact arguments and upheld the lower court’s reasoning. The appellate court confirmed that using fabricated safety threats to generate public contempt is the exact definition of unlawful vilification, completely invalidating Turley’s ‘just grammar’ defense.
Olly, you’re only succeeding at proving your arguments are weak.
Esquire, I looked closely at what Justice Rigg’s ruling actually addressed on appeal, and the fabricated hospital claim isn’t part of her reasoning. The two grounds she ruled on were whether an ordinary reader would have been spurred to share Smith’s fairness concerns rather than feel hatred, and whether Smith’s posts qualified for the good-faith public debate exception. Rigg found the relevant audience was Smith’s own following, not the public, and that her commentary was disproportionate to the debate exception. Neither ground involves the hospital claim as the cause of anything.
Even critics of the ruling read it the same way. Family First’s statement after the appeal, the finding stands: calling a man a man is unlawful vilification in this state, is their summary of what got confirmed. Not the fabricated claim. The act of calling someone a man.
You’re welcome to argue the hospital claim should have mattered more to the reasoning. But it’s not what Justice Rigg’s ruling on appeal actually turned on, and that’s what the record of the case shows.
I’m beginning to think that you (Esquire) and Olly are the same bot or person experimenting and trying out AI arguing against itself.
Structure, phraseology, and argument (“it’s not this; it is that”) are too similar for comfort.
If you’re “beginning to think” that, I’d recommend either finishing the thought or abandoning the process altogether. Half-formed theories don’t hold up much better than half-formed arguments.
@ Olly,
Your argument defeats itself. You note that Justice Rigg pointed to the audience’s reaction (‘born male, will die male’) to establish incitement. But why did that audience react with such vitriol? Because Smith explicitly told them that this private individual was a physical danger who was actively hospitalizing women. The fabricated claim is the context that gave the words their vilifying power. Furthermore, Justice Rigg’s ruling on the ‘capable of inciting’ standard confirmed that a publisher is legally responsible for the predictable, hostile reactions of their target audience. The ruling doesn’t hide the hospital claim; it assumes it as the literal fuel that made the public campaign a violation of the Anti-Discrimination Act.
You’re ignoring the totality of the context the judge is applying. You keel narrowing the ruling so everything else doesn’t matter. That’s not how judges operate.
“Nonsensical gibberish.”
Sigmund the Fraud is again obfuscating and making statements that only confirm he is a Fraud. That is what happens every time he feels intellectually cornered. He bitterly complains about “a story from Australia,” not recognizing my comment was a warning and misinterpreting it in such a literal sense that it demonstrates he can only parrot memorized words, but cannot think. If he wasn’t so ignorant, I would say he was just a pedantic literalist.
Final Grade: Pseudo-Intellectual Pedant, Pugnacious Pretender, and Obfuscating Amateur”
@ S. Meyer,
I have pointed out this case is not about free speech only. It involves conduct and behavior which under Australian law deems it sufficient to categorize this as harassment and intimidation. It’s not protected speech. There’s also the issue of the defendant admitting in court claims of injury and hospitalization were false. The Professor was dishonest with the characterization of the case to readers by leaving out these important facts. Plus it is also contrary to his own views about speech and conduct.
“I have pointed out this case is not about free speech only. “
Is this an excuse or an apology?
It’s an explanation.
Your comprehension is a separate issue.
It is apparent have no cogent explanations and were just tossing BS around the table.
Instead of getting into an insult match, I’ll make it clear. If the case were reversed and transsexuality were illegal in Australia, would you charge the transsexuals if the reverse occurred?
So, you want to play the reductio ad absurdum game with a completely absurd and irrelevant hypothetical argument that simply proves you have nothing rational or relevant to say.
OK, I’ll play along.
Before I answer your question, kindly answer the following:
If a transsexual woman dates another woman, is that person gay, or not really a transsexual in the first place?
“So, you want to play the reductio ad absurdum game”
No, I am playing the game of “putting the shoe on the other foot”.
You misunderstand what these 2 Aussies were fined for. It wasn’t “just stating a biological fact”. Anybody in Australia can do that.
It was personally cyberbullying and harassing a fellow Aussie. That goes well past “stating an opinion” (that men shouldn’t be allowed to play in women’s soccer). It’s vicious. It’s intending to bully.
Stop trying to defend the indefensible. Free speech is not “anything goes” — why? — because some will abuse public speech to attack the person rather than the idea. Suppose somebody living in your street suddenly decides to scapegoat you for something they don’t like. Suppose they spread falsehoods about you online as a measure of their hatred and will to harm. Are you going to defend them? Say they’re just exercising their free speech?
Common sense does not extend the concept of free speech that far.
pbinca, in this specific case, that’s exactly what they were fined for. The magistrate’s own words: I am satisfied that the defendant unlawfully vilified the Plaintiff… when she referred to the plaintiff as a male or a man. That’s the operative finding. Not a characterization of it. The court’s own language. I’m not defending anyone here, and I’m not calling this vicious or not vicious.
The other evidence you and Esquire keep raising, the harassment, the Wingham incident, the men showing up, all of that is real, and it was the basis for a separate case, decided under a completely different law, personal safety and harassment, not vilification. That evidence wasn’t used to rule in this case. It ruled in a different one. This ruling stands on what the judge said it stood on, and what she said it stood on was the words themselves.
“The other evidence you . . .”
Thank you for doing all of that legwork.
The facts you discovered won’t move them. But they will move an honestly confused person.
Thanks Sam. You’re right and the operative word here is honestly.
@ Olly, no, you keep missing the point in order to justify your weak argument. The evidence I’m pointing out was indeed used in to arrive at the ruling.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding how civil litigation works by assuming that because facts were used in one case, they magically disappear from another. The harassment, the Wingham incident, and the environment of intimidation were absolutely part of the evidentiary record in the vilification case. To prove unlawful vilification under the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act, a plaintiff must prove the defendant’s public act incited hatred, serious contempt, or severe ridicule. The court didn’t rule that the words ‘male’ or ‘man’ are inherently illegal. It ruled that when Smith used those words in the context of that aggressive public campaign, she successfully incited public contempt. The operative finding names the words because they are the subject matter, but the surrounding conduct is what legally transformed those words into an actionable civil offense.
Isolating one sentence from a judgment to claim context doesn’t matter is a completely flawed reading of the law. If the court punished the words ‘themselves’ in a vacuum, then any news report or sports policy debate using the word ‘man’ would be illegal in Australia—but it isn’t.
The reason the judgment notes she vilified the plaintiff when she called her a man is because that was the theme of her harassment campaign, not because the grammar itself is a fineable offense.
Compelled speech in Australia and Europe is reminiscent of the Catholic Inquisition of hundreds years past. The case here was of famed astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei, who in 1633 was forced to publicly recant his heliocentric (sun centered) views about the solar system, and then to live under permanent house arrest (in lieu of a fine)..
A point of note is that Galileo’s Inquisitors were very conscious of making his conviction scrupulously legal – just like now.
“reminiscent of the Catholic Inquisition of hundreds years past.” No it is not. The Inquisition focused on religious doctrine not defamation cases in Australia 2026.
Galileo never recanted and house arrest was in lieu of prison.
“Galileo never recanted . . .”
You are mistaken.
We have his recantation in writing. The document is titled “The Abjuration of Galileo Galilei.” (1633).
“. . . house arrest was in lieu of prison.”
Is that supposed to make the Church’s monstrous crime palatable?
To compound that crime, the Church banned Galileo’s books. Before Galileo’s trial, the Italian Renaissance was ascending. Science was flourishing. The Church’s tyrannical mystics killed them both.
It has been years since we were in Australia, but my recollection is of strong, independent people. It is appalling what a handful of people can do to a society.
The “strong, independent people” must be asleep to allow such rulings. God help them.
Communists cannot take over while free speech exists.
…except propaganda is not the same tool as censorship. You have to take away the ability to propagandize the population. Remember, Joe Biden got help getting elected by pushing out a false narrative about his son’s laptop. His whopper was crafted by ex-CIA professionals with PsyOps training paid for by us taxpayers. Together, they relied on sympathetic media to amplify the falsehood.
Biden, Blinken and Morrell to this day (and the media who ran with their whopper) insist they were exercising their public fraud was protected by 1A.
When James Madison spoke about “the consent of the governed” as expressed in elections, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about consent obtained through trickery and deceit.
Fortunately, 1A only constrains government officials and prosecutors. Our system of civil lawsuits gives the power to any citizen(s) to challenge candidates and officials whose instinct is to dupe the public. We are beginning to expand defamation law to cover public frauds waged for political effect.
Pres. Trump’s lawsuit against CBS, Dominion Voting Systems suit against Fox, and Nicholas Sandmann’s win over CNN/WaPo are great models for how to tame media operators who step over the line into propaganda. These lawsuits need to be sped up, so that consequences are almost immediate.
With the 1st Amendment, and public frauds lawsuits to deter flagrant political propaganda, we have everything it takes to prevent a Communist of fascist takeover.
(I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about consent obtained through trickery and deceit.) Excellent iteration of what happened then and what happened in NYC and all the other recent victories of socialists running under the guise of democrat.
Really? Take you head out of the sand. They’re already here.