By Caitlin Johnstone via Zero Hedge
Today in tyranny we’ve got three stories on the rapidly increasing authoritarian abuses in western “free democracies”.
1. Grayzone reporter detained by British counter-terrorism police for doing journalism.
The Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg was detained by “six anonymous plainclothes counter-terror officers” who “grilled him for over five hours about his reporting” upon returning to Britain on the 17th of May, according to a new report by Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal.
2. South Australia passes draconian anti-protest law.
Reacting to recent inconvenient demonstrations by environmental activists, the state of South Australia has just rapidly shoved through legislation — without consulting the public — to exponentially increase the penalties for unauthorized protesting. Demonstrators will now face up to three months in jail and fines of $50,000 if they are deemed guilty of the extremely vague offense of “obstructing a public place” with their protesting.
The Human Rights Law Center expresses the following:
South Australia is the latest jurisdiction to impose severe penalties on people for engaging in peaceful protest, joining New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria and Queensland who have passed anti-protest laws in the last five years. South Australia’s anti-protest laws carry the harshest financial penalties in Australia.
The Bill is excessive and will have a chilling effect on the right to protest in South Australia. The Bill is also potentially unconstitutional and in clear breach of well-established principles of international human rights law.
…”
3. State Department dismisses questions about Ukrainian imprisonment of US citizen for speech crimes.
At a press conference last week the State Department’s new spokesman Matthew Miller flatly brushed off questions about whether the US government was doing anything about the fact that commentator Gonzalo Lira has been arrested and charged with what amount to speech crimes by the Ukrainian government.
Here’s the State Department’s transcript of the exchange:
QUESTION: Thanks. Liam Cosgrove with Epoch Times. So this was a couple weeks ago, but I haven’t seen an official statement on it. A U.S. citizen who is residing in Ukraine has been arrested and that he was a California-born man; he was in the past like a Business Insider contributor, and he had a YouTube channel. He was an outspoken critic of Zelenskyy’s regime. The Ukrainian SBU released a press release saying he was arrested for justifying Putin’s invasion. So ultimately, it added up to speech. And I spoke with Congressman Ted Lieu, a Democrat, and he said he urges the State Department to engage its authorities to work out some sort of negotiation to get him released. So are you guys aware of this? How do we feel about our allies detaining U.S. citizens for speech abroad?
MR MILLER: So I will say in general that we’re aware of the report. We obviously support the exercise of freedom of speech anywhere in the world, and I’ll leave it at that.
QUESTION: So you guys aren’t working to get him released?
MR MILLER: I’m going to leave my comments where I just left them.
It’s not every day a US spokesperson gets asked a question that’s so inconvenient that they just overtly refuse to answer it without even pretending to provide an explanation for doing so.
