UN Chief’s Shameful Call for Free Speech Crackdown at COP30
In his opening speech to this week’s COP30 conference in Belem, Brazil, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres told attendees that the only way to preserve their increasingly authoritarian movement and save democracy was to invoke a global, digital crackdown on free speech. The UN chief’s call to collectivist action should serve as a wake-up call to anyone who may be thinking that the forces behind the climate alarm movement were in retreat.
Guterres’ remarks fall right in line with authoritarian crackdowns on free speech being invoked in real time in nominal democracies like the UK, Canada, Germany, Australia and Brazil itself. In every case, the policing of free speech online and in public is driven by a collusion between big tech firms and central governments.
It’s the same kind of public/private collusion that was invoked during the early months of the Biden presidency, which led to thousands of conservative voices being suspended or banned by Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms for daring to say things that did not fall in line with the approved narratives of the left. Elon Musk disrupted that effort in the U.S. with his 2022 buyout of Twitter, after which he took action to restore free speech to that platform and told the Biden government to take a hike. Other western countries were not so fortunate.
