First they came for the Nazis, but I was silent because I wasn’t a Nazi
On December 23rd of this year, two days before Christmas, Joel Davis will again ask a judge to be freed from jail.
He was suddenly arrested by Federal Police while eating breakfast at a café with his pregnant girlfriend in November.
It’s unclear how the Feds knew where Joel was eating breakfast that morning. I can only assume they were watching his house then followed him to the café and decided to make the arrest there for dramatic effect.
In his book The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes about the Soviet secret police making similar moves in USSR back in the day. They called it “the psychology of arrest” and would suddenly detain people at dinner, at work, at train stations or at any other place and time of the day. The idea was to produce general paranoia and a perpetual fear of arrest, which kept the citizenry tense and quiet: “You never know when they might come.”
Police detained Joel for “using a carriage service to menace or harass” after his choice of words allegedly directing his followers to leave critical comments about a standing politician in a Telegram post.
“Using a carriage service to menace or harass” normally results in a criminal charge only if it’s extensive and continuous harassment or relatively severe resulting in quantifiable damages.
But in the case of Joel Davis, the victim is a female politician and Joel is a “Nazi”, so the usual rules don’t apply.
When you’re a designated social villain like Joel, there’s no presumption of innocence and basic legal ethics are out the window.
You can have no notable criminal history, no intent to harm anybody and a heavily pregnant girlfriend who actually births your first son into the world while you’re in a jail cell. None of that seemed to matter to the last judge who refused to release Joel on bail, citing his “unacceptable risk of re-offending”.
It remains unproven that Joel even committed an offence in the first place. Nonetheless, he remains in solitary confinement as a high-profile political offender for a single statement allegedly posted to his public Telegram channel.
As far as I’m aware nothing like this has ever happened before in Australia, and when you look at the facts it’s actually pretty embarrassing. It strikes you as a story you’d expect to hear coming out of a third world shithole, like a scheme set up by a low-grade corrupt government trying to intimidate its own citizens.
But I’m not going to spend any time ranting about the absolute state of Australia’s political class. Everyone knows how bad it is already.
It’s actually so bad that a National Socialist party openly calling itself White Australia is likely to get a lot of votes if they register before the next election.
And White Australia won’t necessarily win elections due to Thomas Sewell’s infallible leadership, or the refined propaganda of Jacob Hersant, or the intellectual prowess of Joel Davis. They’ll win elections because every other major party and politician is contemptibly boring, corrupt and absolutely incompetent.
White Australia, if it’s registered, will be the punishment Australia’s political class deserves.
But there’s a serious problem in the right-wing community that could unnecessarily delay or even prevent the process of this punishment, which stems from their individualism.
If, for example, Joel Davis was a Marxist and was just suddenly imprisoned for a social media post, what could we imagine the response from the overall left-wing community would be?
Would any centre-leftist liberal stay silent and refuse to condemn the police because he’s not actually a Marxist, he’s not that radical, so it’s not his problem?
It’s pretty obvious that the entire leftist community including its lawyers and academics would be united in hysterical outrage amplified by their journalists and political reps.
The right by comparison hasn’t said or done much at all in response to Joel’s arrest.
If Joel is lucky, one sympathetic legal advisor will very quietly come forward to “help out” (so long as he’s not seen doing it).
But “free speech advocates” are too worried about social consequences to condemn the arrest while other influential figures go about their business farming clicks and appearing in podcasts, barely mentioning Joel or just ignoring his situation altogether.
I realise the show must go on, and considering the system is stacked against the right there’s obviously going to be casualties, but here I’m addressing a destructive sort of individualism and what sometimes seems like a passive and autistic martyrdom.
I think the right has been led to accept a level of suffering and discrimination that it doesn’t need to accept.
Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease and having a united front ready to throw real and aggressive support behind any and all of its allies regardless of their individualist spectral positions, in spite of whether they’re technically “right or wrong”, that kind of hive-mind forms the basis of real social-political power.
Joel would aggressively support any influential person on the right jailed for a social media post. And I know Joel has networked around the world with other reputable speakers and activists, but the majority of them are today unwilling to publicly acknowledge his imprisonment as simply cruel and unnecessary.
Some influentials on the right probably even regard Joel’s arrest as a personal ideological victory of some sort. “Well, that’s what happens when you go full Nazi,” they’d be saying, “He should have taken a more moderate position”.
And this has always been the problem that holds the right back and perpetually delays the process of real national justice. New legal precedents for discrimination and malicious prosecution of advocates for nationalism are set all the time due to the unwillingness of the right to resist these precedents as a unified front.
The more support Joel has across the board, the more likely he’ll be released before Christmas and the more difficult it’ll be for police to throw the next guy in jail for offending a politician online.
He shouldn’t have been jailed in the first place and this message should be echoed across the entire right side of politics.
To keep a father from meeting and spending Christmas with his newborn son over a social media post for which there’s no provable, quantifiable damage, while violent foreign criminals run through people’s homes with machetes on their fourth count of bail, is nothing short of ideologically motivated judicial cruelty.
Those close to Joel have confirmed his newborn son is perfectly healthy and strongly resembles his dad.
Joel’s partner and family stand by him and are battling to support him in every way they can, but more than anything they just want Joel to meet his son – we need more noise out there on this one.
