In writing about the slow, sad decline of Britain’s economy the other day I ignored the cultural rot that’s accompanied it, even as more news appears every day to support that argument, with one of the latest being the revelation that the “Far Right, Racist mobs” in Southport had it right after all, that the killer of three little girls was an Islamic extremist.

Two years ago a woman was arrested in Britain for silently praying near an abortion clinic, just another example of Airstrip One in real life. At that link you can find news that a couple of years later the charges were dropped and she won a settlement of £13,000 from the Midlands Police. However, despite being acquitted of all charges in February 2023, she was arrested again a few weeks later for the same offence and that time getting the charges dropped required the intervention of the Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman, which suggested that the authorities were not going to stop.

It turns out that people were correct to assume this:

A British army veteran who served in Afghanistan was found guilty today of praying silently near an abortion clinic in England….Smith-Connor had slightly bowed his head and clasped his hands in prayer on a public green in a buffer zone near the abortion facility in Orphir Road, Bournemouth in November 2022. During a confrontation with police officers that he recorded, they asked him, “What is the nature of your prayer?” 

It’s the same question that was asked of Isabel Vaughan-Spruce. The court also ordered the father of two children to pay prosecution costs amounting to £9,000, although he won’t go to jail unless he commits the same offence again within the next two years. Yay!

He must wonder what the hell he was fighting for in Afghanistan? The question many Leftists also asked about that war – but I doubt they’d be pleased if that were his reason. I already encountered one nasty old Far Lefter over on Trotter’s blog who dismissed Vaughan-Spruce’s arrest as a mere piffle.

That Left-Wing reaction shows that these Stasi actions will become normalised. Perhaps they already have been, as young Scottish woman who is opposed to abortion

The UK’s brand-new “Safe Access” law, which came into effect September 24 and made it a criminal offense to do anything within 200 meters of an abortion facility that could “influence” someone’s decision to access, provide, or facilitate an abortion. In the Scottish government’s letter, Emma read that even “activities in a private place (such as a house) within the area could be an offence if they can be seen or heard within the Zone and are done intentionally or recklessly.”
…
The law carries a maximum fine of £10,000. In June, it passed in the Scottish Parliament by 118 votes to one, following in the footsteps of Northern Ireland, which became the first country in the UK to enforce abortion censorship legislation last year. The rest of the UK is doing the same: On October 31, a similar law will come into effect in England and Wales; it was passed by Parliament in 2023. In these countries, the fine will be unlimited.

118 votes to 1! That’s a lost country, possibly even more so than Britain.

There is more protection for prayer in the USA, as the Supreme Court established two years ago:

The case is about a high school coach who used to go out to the middle of the field and offer a private prayer after a game. He did this alone and without inviting anyone to join him. However, some students and players did wind up joining him, as did players from the other team. The prayers were short.

The District he worked for forbade him from doing this, claiming that the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, and the Lemon “endorsement” test, required them to forbid him from privately praying. He did it anyway, and the District dropped him as an employee.

The “Lemon test” – it even sounds stupid but was merely one of the parties to SCOTUS case decades ago where “Right-Wing Apppointed” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor tripped all over herself trying to establish how a court could test whether the government, via funding, might actually be breaching the constitution by establishing a religion.

You can read the details and the history at the link, but basically it turned into an argument that said that the government would be “endorsing religion” if it did not affirmatively discriminate against the religious and affirmatively attempt to stamp religion out. In this case the school was saying that it had to fire the coach or it would be in breech of the Constitution and lose its Federal funding.

Orwell again.

The test has been whittled down by SCOTUS over the years, who in a number of cases warned lower courts not to use the stupid thing, but this case effectively destroyed it.

Gorsuch gives Lemon its final burial, in an opinion joined by Roberts, Barrett, Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh, at least for most of the opinion. Gorsuch says he’s not formally overruling Lemon, but Sotomayor, in the dissent, says he is. I don’t know why he says he’s not overruling it; he says that courts should no longer follow it. He says it’s no longer law. That sounds like an over-rule to me.

But then you see something like the following you realise that a British situation could happen elsewhere, even in the US :

That last link also has news of a link between the USA and Britain on the matter of censorship, with Elon Musk and his X company first in the firing line:

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a pro-censorship charity and campaign group co-founded in 2018 by Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney….Imran Ahmed, a former Parliamentary aide who also co-founded the CCDH and serves as its chief executive, said a number of things that free speech advocates less radical than Elon Musk may find worrying.

He spoke of his “five-year plan” to make social media platforms “accountable” for their content, and to make it impossible for anyone to generate revenue from what the CCDH classes as “hate speech”. By this term, Ahmed doesn’t just mean overt expressions of racism or other prejudices, but rather what he calls “lies” and “disinformation”. In his view, “lies and hate are inextricably linked.”
….
Thacker and Taibbi’s smoking gun was a set of leaked CCDH documents suggesting that “killing” Twitter/X really is high on its agenda, and has been for months. In April, a US federal judge dismissed a lawsuit Musk brought against the CCDH for supposedly costing it tens of millions of dollars in revenue after it exposed alleged “lies and misinformation” on X. This — with no irony intended — Ahmed portrayed as a famous victory for free speech.

Orwell strikes again.

Also, if you’re really concerned about Fascism, you should know that another giant corporation, Microsoft, is eagerly doing the bidding of the US government, using a guy who has done it before in other areas:

Some readers have probably noticed that Microsoft has recently become one of the leading retailers of lurid allegations about “Russian influence operations targeting U.S. elections”. What is being overlooked is the lead author of the Microsoft articles is none other than Clint Watts, the founder of the infamous Hamilton 68 dashboard, which was exposed by [Matt Taibbi in Twiter Files #15] as the “next great media fraud”.

Taibbi comprehensively exposed the total sham of the Hamilton 68 dashboard. Nonetheless, Clint Watts, the main proponent of the sham Hamilton 68 dashboard, has risen to a more lucrative and more prominent platform at Microsoft, where he continues to propagate the same war mongering claims as he has for more than a decade.

You can read about the Hamilton 68 propaganda effort here. It was the scale of its success in seeding stories in the MSM that made it stand out. Now their main man has got an even bigger platform.