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New Conservative peer Toby Young has announced what he hopes will be the first of many legal collaborations between Elon Musk‘s X and his Free Speech Union (FSU).
X is providing financial support to a discrimination claim backed by the FSU against education company Pearson by Lisa Shalet, who says she was forced to resign due to her personal posts on X voicing what she describes as “personal beliefs supporting Israel and over the spread of radical ideologies and the impact they are having on British Values”.
The case is a further example of how Musk can exert influence in the UK and comes amid suggestions he could make a sizeable donation to Reform UK.
The collaboration also demonstrates how close Young and the FSU are to the MAGA/Musk agenda. BylineTimes has previously reported how the FSU was founded with the support of Musk’s tech-ally billionaire Peter Thiel, and how the FSU is linked to the National Conservatism (NatCon) movement.
The FSU recently launched a sister organisation in Canada which will join five other chapters; US, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, South Africa and South Korea, under the banner of Free Speech International, an umbrella organisation incorporated in August 2024.
Those involved with Free Speech Union Canada (FSUC) have links to culture war-orientated organisations similar to UK counterparts and demonstrate how the culture wars infrastructure resembles a franchise system of interlinked organisations dedicated to each aspect of the radical right narrative.
FSU Canada’s advisory board member, Kulvinder Kaur Gill, for example, is a prominent source of COVID disinformation and founded Concerned Ontario Doctors (COD), the Canadian equivalent of America’s Frontline Doctors in the US and HART in the UK.
COD members likened COVID vaccines to the Holocaust, promoted and in some cases prescribed fake COVID cures such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. Gill was disciplined by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) in March 2021.
In 2022, Gill filed a $12-million libel suit against 23 of her critics. The defendants filed a successful anti-SLAPP motion, a legal move to stop lawsuits that curb discussion in the public interest, and Gill was ordered to pay substantial legal costs. Gill also appealed three disciplinary cautions, and with legal costs mounting and a crowdfunder failing, she reached out to Musk.
As with the collaboration with Young, X announced it would finance Gill’s campaign so that she could pay her $300,000 judgment and legal costs, stating: “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and a critical defence against totalitarianism in all forms.”
In 2023, after COD dropped further disciplinary action against Gill, her legal support came from The Democracy Fund (TDF), Lisa Bildy and Bruce Pardy.
TDF is a Canadian charitable foundation created in 2021 to “support access to justice initiatives” to those “infringed” by lockdowns and the pandemic response.
Bildy is executive director of FSUC and Pardy is a director. As with Gill, Bildy and Pardy are well-established culture war characters who worked with TDF on legal challenges against vaccine mandates in hospitals and universities.
Bildy is a Canadian lawyer associated with campaigns against “DEI ideology”, and the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, an opaquely funded charity previously listed as a global partner of the Atlas Network which has been involved in gender-critical legal challenges and represented churches opposing covid measures.
Bildy also sits on the board of The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), an American nonprofit founded in 2021 that campaigns against diversity and inclusion programmes, describing antiracism initiatives as “critical race theory”.
FAIR has also opposed policies in schools around gender on the grounds of free speech and religious freedoms. Don’t Divide Us and the Equinano Project which was also founded in 2021 as a counter-response to Black Lives Matter drives the same narratives in the UK.
Pardy is a senior fellow of the Fraiser Institute, a libertarian think tank which was co-founded by Anthony Fisher, who also founded the Tufton Street-based Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in the UK and the international ATLAS network of organisations that the Fraiser Institute and IEA are members of.
Pardy is the executive director of Rights Probe, which calls to “defend and promote the classical liberal conception of individual rights and the rule of law,” in a similar vein to the UK’s Big Brother Watch, previously based in Tufton Street. Rights Probe also supports the break up of Canada, calling for Alberta and other provinces to “become an independent country or join the United States”.
FSUC advisory board member Jonathan Kay is also an advisor to FAIR and is an editor and reporter at Quillette, a libertarian-leaning online magazine that Young was previously an associate editor for.
Gabrielle Bauer who runs FSUC’s communications team is a writer and journalist based in Toronto. Her most recent book, Blindsight Is 2020 was published by the opaquely funded Brownstone Institute, a successor organisation to the Great Barrington Declaration led by Jeffery Tucker who backed RFK Jr’s presidential bid.
Advisory board member Dr Chris Milburn lost his job as director of emergency medicine for the Eastern Zone of the Nova Scotia Health Authority due to COVID controversies and has also questioned flu vaccination. He has recently launched a Free Speech in Medicine conference.
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Some FSU Canada advisory board members have direct links to the UK.
Advisory board member Dr Eric Kaufmann is a Professor at the privately run University of Buckingham, where he is Director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science, an initiative to develop more conservative sociologists. He’s also on FSU UK’s board and has spoken at NatCon.
FSUC director Dr Simon Fox is a former NHS consultant who after refusing to be vaccinated against COVID, appeared on GB News, Julia Hartley-Brewer’s TalkTV show, wrote an article for Young’s Daily Sceptic and appeared in the Telegraph.