NEW COLUMN, “Ukraine’s Azov Battalion: Nazis Or Just Nationalists?”, is currency featured on WND.COM, the Unz Review, CNSNews and The New American.

Excerpt:

Let us be clear on what free speech truly is. The words people speak, write, tweet; the beliefs they are known to hold, the flags they fly, the symbolic, non-violent ceremonies and rituals they enact, the insignia, paraphernalia, the goose-stepping, Hitler salutes they dick around with—all that is protected speech, licit in natural law.

So long as these oddities and idiosyncrasies, whether performed alone or in groups, thoughts harbored or shared in public—so long as no violence accompanies such speech or behavior (prohibited here is violence visited on animals as well); so long as mitts stop at the next man’s face: SPEECH. It’s all speech. It should be free, unfettered and as wild and as wanton as it can be.

Spoken, written, preached: Impolite and impolitic thoughts are nothing more than thought crimes which ought to be ferociously protected by a free people. By logical extension, any accusations of Naziism—if leveled at a belief system, rather than at palpable violent actions—is suspect.

Thoughts and words spoken or written that are not politically polite—for example, racism; Naziism—ought to retain protected status as speech beyond the adjudication of law-makers, bureaucrats, mediacrats, educrats and technocrats.

In fact, “In the current climate,” I had suggested—and considering the inherently paranoid style of American politics—it’s worth contemplating special protections for politically impolite, racist speech.”

“In 1978, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) ‘took a controversial stand for free speech by defending a neo-Nazi group that wanted to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, where many Holocaust survivors lived.” As a free-speech absolutist, a term Elon Musk has revived, I long for the return of what I shall term here the Skokie Standard of free speech and thinking.

In 2022, the once-grand ACLU, however, no longer vigorously defends marginalized speakers and thinkers. Instead, the ACLU defrauds the public about its mission, devoting its resources to the well-popularized causes of the Left’s privileged populations: LGBTQ demands, illegal immigrant claims-making, seekers of abortion-on-tap, looters of property and destroyers of peace and prosperity (in Orwellian speak, “peaceful protesters”).

Thus, other than that the Azov Battalion, a special unit in the Ukrainian military, is oriented toward the ethnic, white Ukrainian nation; other than that Azov insignia and iconography are rooted in national socialism or Naziism—I did not immediately detect evidence in Nebojsa Malic’s well-researched RT piece, “Western media clubs together to white-wash Ukrainian Neo-Nazis,” that the Azov are currently, actively and violently expunging groups such as, say Jews or Roma, based on typically Nazi eugenic ideation.

Azov’s symbols appear to be Nazi, but their actions appear to be merely nationalist, namely a quest to keep Ukraine Ukrainian.

I therefore questioned, during the Hard Truth broadcast, the Nazi designation attached to the Azov Brigade, suggesting that, if Azov are not engaged in acts of violence against the traditional Nazi victims and other ethnics, and are merely a military battalion fighting in the Russia-Ukraine military theater—then the Nazi insignia and paraphernalia are irrelevant. These symbols then fall into the category of ritualistic, offensive speech—thought crimes—the kind for which the Left criminalizes the Right. …

…THE REST…NEW COLUMN, “Ukraine’s Azov Battalion: Nazis Or Just Nationalists?”, is currency featured on WND.COM, the Unz Review, CNSNews and The New American.