News Round-Up: Debanking of German Opposition Party, von der Leyen Is Urged To Walk Back Petrol Engine Ban and SCOTUS Won’t Hear Censorship Suit Against California
Every week, the editorial team of Freedom Research compiles a round-up of news that caught our eye, or what felt like under-reported aspects of news deserving more attention.
Over the past week, the following topics attracted our attention:
The US Supreme Court won’t hear online commentator’s censorship suit against California.
German minister: not lifting EU combustion engine ban would be ‘electoral fraud’.
German opposition party debanked after pressure from left-wing activists.
Sweden: doubts over the fairness of the EU Parliament elections.
German football star: Germany 'overwhelmed' by immigration, 'not safe'.
The US Supreme Court won’t hear online commentator’s censorship suit against California
The United States Supreme Court denied commentator Rogan O’Handley’s bid to appeal a lower court’s decision, dismissing his lawsuit that claimed California pressured Twitter to censor his election-related posts, The Epoch Times writes. The platform suspended O'Handley, because he made posts about possible rigging of the 2020 US presidential election. The suspension followed the intervention of California state officials who flagged his posts as 'election misinformation'. O'Handley was denied justice by the lower court and appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, however, dismissed the appeal.
After the events that gave rise to O’Handley’s lawsuit, Elon Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022 and began reforming its moderation policies. The social media platform rebranded as X in July 2023. O’Handley, a conservative, is now again active on X under the handle @DC_Draino. He has 1.5 million followers.
While in that case, the Supreme Court did not make up its mind at all, in last week's news round-up we highlighted how in another landmark and substantively similar case, the justices concluded that the plaintiffs failed to prove that they had suffered direct harm as a result of the interaction between federal officials and social media platforms.
The case concerned a lawsuit that began in May 2022, when the attorneys general of the states of Missouri and Louisiana filed a lawsuit against Joe Biden and the officials of his administration, alleging that Biden administration was engaging in censorship by pressuring social media companies to take down or limit the spread of content they disliked, thereby undermining the freedom of expression protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Censorship was used in connection with the Covid crisis, when there were calls for censorship of information that was truthful but, in government’s view, not acceptable for public discussion for some reason. In addition, articles potentially damaging to Joe Biden were prevented from circulating prior to the 2020 presidential election, and posts about potential election fraud were prevented from being made after the election. In the autumn of 2022, private individuals, including several prominent academics, who had been censored on social media under pressure or direction from the government, were added as plaintiffs in the same case. Lower courts granted a preliminary injunction in the case last year, preventing officials from interacting with social media companies in this way, but the Supreme Court did not find the injunction justified. However, substantial debate on the court case continues.
German minister: not lifting EU combustion engine ban would be ‘electoral fraud’
German Transport Minister Volker Wissing warned that if Ursula von der Leyen, who will continue to preside over the European Commission, succumbed to pressure from the Socialists to maintain the ban on new petrol and diesel cars from 2035, it would be a 'gigantic electoral fraud', Euractiv reports. The European People's Party (EPP) is currently negotiating with other political groups to secure sufficient support in EU Parliament for von der Leyen's continuation, and during the negotiations, the Socialists have put forward a demand to maintain the ban. It is clear that the Socialists' support is essential for von der Leyen to continue.
“If von der Leyen once again comes out in favour of a ban on combustion engines, the CDU will lose all its credibility,” Wissing warned. The CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands), or Christian Democrats, is von der Leyen's home party in Germany and is part of the EPP at the European level. Wissing, who is a member of Germany's liberal FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei or Free Democratic Party), points out that one of the CDU's main promises before the elections was to reverse the ban on internal combustion engine cars. However, it is worth recalling that the introduction of the ban last year was the brainchild of a commission chaired by von der Leyen herself and was part of her grand 'Green Deal' plan.
German opposition party debanked after pressure from left-wing activists
Germany's largest regional bank, Berliner Volksbank, recently closed the bank account of the right-wing opposition party Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD), which the party used to collect donations, Remix News reports.
This was due to a campaign by the left-wing group 'Grannies against the Right' (Omas gegen Rechts), which had launched an online petition calling for the closure of the AfD bank account. The petition gathered over 33,500 signatures. The "grannies" also met with Volksbank CEO Carsten Jung and after that, the Volksbank account disappeared from the AfD website.
Sweden: doubts over the fairness of the EU Parliament elections
Swedish national broadcaster SVT has analysed the results of the European elections in the country in June and found that there were 'serious inaccuracies' in the counting of votes at almost half of the polling stations, reports The European Conservative. The most common problem is that more votes were counted than were put in the ballot boxes.
To ensure that each vote is only counted once, each ballot is put into an envelope – one ballot in each. The number of registered voters who submit a ballot envelope is then collated with both the number of envelopes and the number of ballots. The SVT analysis shows that 196 out of 410 polling stations had discrepancies in this count. A total of 213 errors were detected, i.e. one error per 1000 votes for the polling stations audited.
The main problem was that there were more votes in the boxes than envelopes. According to SVT, an explanation could be that voters placed duplicate ballots in envelopes. Although this is not mentioned as a possibility in the article, one can also speculate that someone simply added more ballots with no envelopes when counting the votes.
Sweden's European elections were won by the Social Democrats (Sveriges socialdemokratiska arbetareparti), who beat the liberal-conservative Moderates (Moderaterna), the party that leads the country's current government, as a runner-up. However, the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), known for their anti-immigration stance and strong right-wing views, who had expected a good result before the election, came fourth.
According to SVT, the errors detected are not such as to change the election results. However, such findings undermine the credibility of the electoral system, according to the critics.
German football star: Germany 'overwhelmed' by immigration, 'not safe'
Toni Kroos, the now former midfield ace of the German national football team and Spanish giant Real Madrid, said in a recent interview that Germany has changed significantly over the past decade because of immigration. Kroos said that while he welcomes immigrants and thinks it great how Germany has welcomed them with open arms, the process has been too uncontrolled and the country has not managed it well. “I believe that this control over certain issues has simply slipped away a little over the years and there’s a reason for that. In my opinion, the reason is that people [i.e. the immigrant influx] have overwhelmed them,” Kroos said.
Kroos has been living and playing in Spain for the last ten years and has now announced that he will stay there after his playing career is over. Part of his reasoning for staying in Spain was that Germany has become much less safe in the ten years he has not lived there. Kroos said he was now concerned that his child would not come back “unharmed” from a night out alone. He said that when his seven-year-old daughter gets older, he would rather she goes out in a Spanish city at 11 pm than a German one. He added that this is a feeling he 'wouldn’t have had that 10 years ago'.
Indeed, mass immigration has made Germany less safe than it was before. Germany's inability to control violent crime, including sexual assaults, and its link to mass immigration is something we have also repeatedly written about in our news round-ups (see for example here or here).