StopDeplatforming.com: “It’s time to fight back for free speech”

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Last week started with a great win for media freedom:

Justin Trudeau’s hand-picked election debates commission, in collusion with the government-funded Parliamentary Press Gallery, had rejected the accreditation requests of two Rebel journalists, Keean Bexte and David Menzies, and our friend Andrew Lawton from True North.

So we went to court to seek an emergency injunction. Trudeau sent five government lawyers to oppose our emergency application. But, miracle of miracles, we won. Justice Russel Zin issued a court order, directing Trudeau’s staff to accredit the three journalists.

And they did a great job.

The politicians — of every party — hadn’t faced such tough questions on the campaign trail in a long time. And of course the meanest reaction was from rival journalists, especially from Trudeau’s CBC state broadcaster.

Now, I don’t care if they’re mad at us. The problem is that, without the court order, we wouldn’t even have been allowed into the process, not even allowed into the building. Trudeau’s commission accredited foreigners, including from the state broadcaster of the OPEC dictatorship, Al Jazeera.

Deplatforming is the tactic of the new authoritarian left — to ban you from even neutral places where you used to have the right to go.

The deplatforming that happened to me on Thursday at Edmonton’s Princess Theatre was the clearest of all cases.

I had a contract with the theatre owner. I had paid the full fee in advance. We’d used that theatre before with great success, a coupe of years ago. I know the owner — he liked doing business with us.

And yet he breached it. Basically, the owner, an immigrant to Canada from India named Mike Brar, told me he was starting to get threats and pressure from NDP activists in Edmonton. And not just from nobodies: the former NDP MLA, Jessica Littlewood, was pressuring the theatre to cancel us, and said no-one should rent to us. An activist from Progress Alberta, Rachel Notley’s pressure group, was doing the same. These are official people, people in high stations in life.

The theatre owner told me he was getting so many hostile phone calls, he couldn’t sleep.

So he cancelled. He breached his contract. I told him he didn’t need to worry: I had worked with the police and they had a big presence nearby, and we hired a private security team to make sure no-one rough came. And no-one did. All those really tough Antifa losers who were really butch online? None of them showed up.

I have a legal remedy against the theatre owner: I can sue him for any damages.

But I can also sue the people who pressured him to break his contract. Here's a link to the relevant law, called inducing to breach of contract.

I met with our Edmonton lawyers, and we came up with a plan:

We’re simply going to sue them all.

They need to be taught that what they did was wrong; and that they can’t do it with impunity. I believe that by suing these people — 10, 20, 50, whatever — they’ll have a real education about right and wrong, and they won’t be so quick to deplatoform anyone again.

We've set up a website: StopDeplatforming.com. But over the weeks and months ahead, it’s where we’ll post all of our news about the lawsuit.

And, it won’t surprise you to hear, we need your help to pay for it. I don’t think we’ll win much in the lawsuit, in terms of damages. It will surely cost us many times that, in terms of legal fees. But this isn’t about money. It’s about stopping the bullies, one at a time, and standing up for platforms for everyone — even people we disagree with.

If you can help chip in, please do, at StopDeplatforming.com.

NEXT: Joel Pollak of Breitbart.com joins me to talks about the state of free speech in America.

 


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