Categories
First Amendment rights international affairs social media

Germany Versus X

The question is freedom of speech. Many German officials are opposed. Twitter-X, or X, is in favor.

As Reclaim the Net summarizes the case, “German prosecutors are testing whether the reach of their censorship laws can outstrip the guardrails of international treaties.”

These prosecutors have been going after three X managers for alleged “obstruction of justice.” This obstruction consisted of refusing to immediately give prosecutors data on users who utter government-disapproved speech.

The X managers have been adhering to the provisions of a bilateral treaty, the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, under which the German requests are to be reviewed in U.S. legal channels before X can be forced to comply. Which increases the chances that X will not be forced to comply.

The prosecutors regard the managers’ refusals as a form of criminal interference. The legal and constitutional issues are now being battled over in German courts.

This is the German government which has been in the news for raiding the homes of people who post sentiments online of which the government disapproves.

That X is not meekly obeying orders to violate the trust of account holders and turn over their private information has upset German advocates of censorship. One MP, Anna Lührmann of the Green Party, says that X’s resistance to censorship is a “scandal” that “goes against fair competition and puts our democracy at risk.”

I don’t think, though, that democracies fail to be robust as they become more like dictatorships. Germany has it all inverted.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

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Categories
Thought

Agatha Christie

Understand this, I mean to arrive at the truth. The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it.

Hercule Poirot, the detective in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926).
Categories
Today

State

September 15, 1789, the United States “Department of Foreign Affairs,” established by law in July, was renamed the Department of State and assigned a variety of domestic duties. Thomas Jefferson was the the department’s first secretary.

Categories
Update

The Great UFO Trickle

For several years now, Paul Jacob had applied his demand for government transparency to the UFO topic. While for decades there has been a big cultural divide on the subject, between the Sophisticated Scoffers (who think there is absolutely nothing to the UFO issue) and the UFO Nuts (who express a range of opinion, from the suspicion that “there’s something to this” to the belief that “the aliens are here and running the Bilderberg Group”), in the last few years a number of government officials, military leaders, whistleblowers and pencil pushers have affirmed that some Unidentified Flying (and Submersible) Objects are puzzling and disturbing and somehow real, no matter how odd. To protect themselves they’ve re-dubbed the issue as one of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP, previously “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”) and have set up official inquiries and congressional investigations.

Some disclosure is ongoing.

And the House Committee run by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R‑Fla.) has made some progress, even in this past week of tumultuous socio-political turmoil. Consider a recent installment of Clayton Morris’s Redacted show:

The new UFO telemetry video is interesting, if not exactly knock-down. Historian Richard Dolan covered the mid-week hearing live:

Categories
Thought

Edmund Burke

It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the publick to be the most anxious for its welfare.

Edmund Burke, Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769).

Categories
Today

Oratorio

On September 14, 1741, George Frideric Handel completed his oratorio Messiah, one of the most widely beloved masterworks of western music.

Categories
Update

Charlie Kirk

On Thursday and Friday, Paul Jacob addressed two elements of the Charlie Kirk assassination. But much more has happened, especially since writing these two Common Sense commentaries.

First, Mr. Kirk’s wife, Erika, addressed the public:

Good evening. My name is Erika Kirk. Charlie Kirk is my husband. I first want to thank the local, state, and federal law enforcement who worked tirelessly to capture my husband’s assassin so that he can be brought to justice.

I want to thank the first responders who struggled heroically to save Charles’ life, and the police who acted bravely to make sure that there were no other victims on that terrible afternoon. I want to thank the officers who have protected our Turning Point USA family these past two days, and I want to thank the Turning Point USA board, the COO, Justin Streiff, and my husband’s chief of staff, the amazing Mikey McCoy, for all their work in these terrible days to be the stability for our family, and for the wider Turning Point USA family as well.

My heart is with every one of my husband’s employees who lost a friend and a mentor. I want to thank the staffers of his amazing Charlie Kirk show, who helped him broadcast from this studio, this chair. Every day, he loved it. He loved what he did.

I want to thank the millions of people who have shown their love for Charlie here in Phoenix, across America, and worldwide. I want to thank my husband’s dear friend, Vice President Vance, and his phenomenal wife, Usha, for their love and support. You guys honored my husband so well, bringing him home. You both are tremendous.

I want to thank President Trump and his incredible family for the same. Mr. President, my husband loved you, and he knew that you loved him too.

Transcript: “Mrs. Erika Kirk Delivers Public Address: ‘His Movement Will Go On,’” The Single Post (September 13, 2025).

One of the more prominent commenters on X, horror writer Stephen King, apologized and retracted his egregious comment on Kirk and his assassination: “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays. What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages,” tweeted Mr. King. Uh, OK.

The apparent assassin, a 22-year-old Utah native, has been the subject of much speculation and inquiry. “His father sells granite kitchen countertops, his mother is a healthcare provider for handicapped people — and they are members of the Mormon church, but inactive,” reports KTen News.

According to NPR News, “The arrest of Tyler Robinson sent shockwaves through the small community where his family lives. Washington, a city of around 30,000, sits next to St. George in Utah’s southwest corner. It’s a 3 ½-hour drive from the Utah Valley University campus” where the shooting occurred.

The 22-year-old is the suspect in the killing of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk during a Wednesday event at the campus in Orem. After a 33-hour manhunt, Robinson’s family helped turn him in the following day.

On Friday morning, after law enforcement released Robinson’s name, officers from the Washington City Police and Washington County Sheriff’s Office patrolled a quiet street, preventing onlookers from approaching the family’s two-story gray stucco home.

But it is hard to forget that many news sources’ tilted coverage against the victim. The Guardian’s coverage is typical: “Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy,’” runs the headline; the blurb is perhaps worse: “The far-right commentator didn’t pull his punches when discussing his bigoted views on current events.”

Categories
Thought

Random X

Call me old-fashioned, but I remember when we used to be okay with shooting Nazis.

Random post on X, immediately after the September 10th, 2025, assassination of Charlie Kirk; screen capture. Note that the last time it was “okay” to shoot Nazis was in World War II. And also note that Mr. Kirk was not a Nazi.
Categories
Today

John Calvin Returns

John Calvin returned to Geneva on September 13, 1541, after three years of exile. His subsequent work in church reform and theology became known as Calvinism, and profoundly influenced the course of European and (eventually) American culture, including several concepts of servitude and liberty.


On the same date in 1989, Desmond Tutu led South Africa’s largest march aganst Apartheid.

Categories
ideological culture media and media people social media

Horrors Made Visible

Nearly all major Democratic elected officials publicly expressed their sorrow over the death of Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated on Wednesday. They condemned the shooting and declared that political violence has no place in a democracy.

But to anyone who’s looked online at the cruel comments, jubilation, and sick jokes about the murder and about Mr. Kirk, the idea that Democrats are of one mind about the corrosiveness and injustice of killing ideological opponents just because you disagree with them falls to pieces. One popular thread included jokes of the sound the victim made after being shot in the neck, a lot of talk about Kirk’s gun control opposition (and the “irony” of him being shot), and the like — but when I went back to look, the posts had been taken down.

Thankfully (?), the UK’s Daily Mail collected some of the most egregious:

  • One wrote: ‘I don’t know I think getting killed by your favorite thing in the world is sweet. It [is] a nice gesture.’
  • Others mocked Mr. Kirk’s steadfast commitment to open debate and exchange of ideas: ‘Why didn’t Charlie Kirk just debate the bullet? he would have easily deflected.’
  • ‘Hollow Point USA,’ said another, parodying the organization Kirk devoted his life to.

People have always been like this, I remind myself: partisan hatred and mockery are as old as politics. Yet, on the Internet folks too often don’t even hesitate to shout their darkest thoughts as if they were gems of wit and righteousness. This leads to . . . well, “Violence leads to more violence,” as respectable Democrats said.

Too many activists and “influencers” seem heedless of the consequences of ideological brinksmanship, of taking the nastiness in their minds and spewing it to the masses.

It’s horrific, but maybe we, as individuals in a culture at a perilous moment in history, should acknowledge what horrors always hide in the dark. Now made visible.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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