{"id":1472971,"date":"2024-06-24T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-24T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1472971"},"modified":"2024-06-24T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2024-06-24T13:00:00","slug":"wales-moves-forward-with-plan-to-punish-politicians-for-telling-lies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wales-moves-forward-with-plan-to-punish-politicians-for-telling-lies\/1472971\/","title":{"rendered":"Wales Moves Forward With Plan To Punish Politicians For Telling Lies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wales Moves Forward With Plan To Punish Politicians For Telling Lies<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Jonathan Turley,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Will Rogers once said that \u201cif you ever injected truth into politics, you\u2019d have no politics.\u201d<\/strong><\/em> In Wales, it appears that the government is challenging that assessment. However, if the\u00a0new legislation<\/a>\u00a0criminalizing political lies is successful, the Welsh are likely to find themselves with the same abundance of lies but little free speech.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

A proposal in the Welsh parliament (or the Senedd) would make it the first country in the world to impose criminal sanctions for lying politicians.<\/strong> Adam Price, the former leader of the liberal Plaid Cymru Party is pushing for the criminalization,\u00a0citing<\/a>\u00a0a \u201ccredibility gap\u201d in UK politics.<\/p>\n

Astonishingly, this uniquely bad idea has received support from a key committee. Once on track for adoption, this is the type of law that can become self-propelling through the legislature.<\/strong> Few politicians want to go on record voting against a law banning political lies. The free speech implications are easily lost in the coverage.<\/p>\n

The new law would make it a criminal offense for a member of the Senedd, or a candidate for election to the Senedd, to wilfully, or with intent to mislead, make or publish a statement that is known to be false or deceptive. There is a six-month period for challenges to be brought.<\/p>\n

The law allows a defense that a statement could be \u201creasonably inferred\u201d to be a statement of opinion, or if it were retracted with an apology within 14 days. If guilty, the politician would be disqualified from being a Senedd member.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The defense is hardly helpful.<\/p>\n

It creates an uncertainty as to which statements would be deemed an opinion and which would be treated as a statement of fact. It invites selective and biased prosecutions. After all, what does it mean to accuse a politician of trying to \u201cmislead\u201d the public?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Winston Churchill said \u201ca politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn\u2019t happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is a standard heavily laden with subjectivity and potential selectivity in prosecution. It is more likely to determine not whether lies can be told but which lies can be told. The government and the majority of the public are likely to hold certain \u201cmisleading\u201d claims of politicians to be true or opinion while holding a harsher view of the claims of the opposition.<\/p>\n

Consider the massive censorship system in our own country. <\/strong><\/p>\n

During Covid, you were labeled a liar, conspiracist, or racist for holding views now viewed as credible.<\/p>\n

For example, academics joined this chorus in marginalizing anyone raising the lab theory.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

One study<\/a>\u00a0cited the theory as an example of \u201canti-Chinese racism\u201d and \u201ctoxic white masculinity.\u201d<\/p>\n

As late as May 2021<\/a>, the New York Times\u2019 Science and Health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli was calling any mention of the lab theory as \u201cracist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mandavilli and others made clear that reporters covering the theory were Covid\u2019s little Bull Connors. She tweeted wistfully \u201csomeday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now federal agencies have stated that they believe that the origin of the virus was indeed the Chinese lab.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If this law were in place, politicians could have been charged with lying and barred from the legislature \u2014 would have only served to diminish dissenting views further in the government.<\/p>\n

Politicians have long been accused of lying to the public.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this country, presidents routinely lie on matters great and small. Many of those lies cost citizens dearly, from\u00a0\u201ckeeping your doctor\u201d under ObamaCare<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0losing your life in Vietnam<\/a>. Criminalizing lies in campaigns because of the spread of disinformation or disorder is a slippery slope that vests unprecedented power in the Justice Department.<\/p>\n

There is obviously an abundance of statements from politicians that could be deemed as intentionally misleading. Officials can then simply pick and choose which politicians they want to tar with the allegation and potentially bar from office.<\/p>\n

The proposed law is a continuation of the assault on free speech in the United Kingdom.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A man was\u00a0convicted for sending a tweet while drunk referring to dead soldiers<\/a>. Another was arrested for an\u00a0anti-police t-shirt.<\/a>\u00a0Another was arrested for\u00a0calling the Irish boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend a \u201cleprechaun.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Yet another was arrested for\u00a0singing \u201cKung Fu Fighting.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0A teenager was arrested for\u00a0protesting outside of a Scientology center<\/a>\u00a0with a sign calling the religion a \u201ccult.\u201d<\/p>\n

We also\u00a0discussed<\/a>\u00a0the arrest of a woman who was praying to herself near an abortion clinic.\u00a0English courts have seen\u00a0criminalized \u201ctoxic ideologies\u201d<\/a>\u00a0as part of this crackdown on free speech.<\/p>\n

Scotland recently passed\u00a0a new crime<\/a>\u00a0law covering \u201cstirring up hatred\u201d relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex. That crime covers insulting comments and anything \u201cthat a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Free speech is in a free fall after years of criminalization of speech. Generations have been shaped in the educational system to fear free speech. The alliance of government, media, and academic forces have created generations of speech phobics.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The anti-free speech movement in the United Kingdom should be a cautionary tale for every American. The tide of this movement has reached our shores and the same alliance is working to reduce the protections for free speech.<\/p>\n

As I discuss in my new book,\u00a0The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage<\/a>, this international movement has left free speech in tatters in the West. Now there are\u00a0law professors calling for the First Amendment to be rewritten to remove its \u201cexcessively individualistic\u201d protections.<\/p>\n

The free speech community in the United Kingdom has fought bravely to preserve this right against all odds. Wales is a reminder that this remains a global struggle that requires free speech advocates to unite against this rising tide.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nMon, 06\/24\/2024 – 05:00<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/political\/wales-moves-forward-plan-punish-politicians-telling-lies<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wales Moves Forward With Plan To Punish Politicians For Telling Lies Authored by Jonathan Turley, Will Rogers once said that \u201cif you ever injected truth…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1472972,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1472971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1472971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1472971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1472971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1472972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1472971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1472971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1472971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}