Joel Davis was released on bail yesterday, after spending 133 days in solitary confinement for words he allegedly posted online, that no one is alleging resulted in any real world harm.
Fortunately for Joel, he has thousands of highly motivated friends and supporters worldwide, some with massive platforms in the US and Europe, and was therefore able to crowdfund enough money to pay for a great legal team, and his profile guaranteed media attention.
But even so, it took Joel more than four months, tens of thousands of dollars, and four bail applications before he was let out under extremely strict conditions.
Nor was it a foregone conclusion.
The police and prosecutors used everything they could to keep him in jail, in conditions the NSW prison watchdog recently called “inhumane”, until his trial, which they admitted may not occur until late 2027.
They hit him with nine new related charges late last month, and argued in the Supreme Court that because they charge carry a maximum penalty of five years, Joel should stay in jail until the trial to protect the “emotional safety” of the public and his alleged victims.
They spent weeks going through every personal and group chat message he has ever sent to find the worst jokes and comments possible in order to lay those charges and to paint him as a dangerous and violent extremist. Lots of alleged words, but no evidence of violent acts, or violence resulting from his words.
When asked by the judge if the potential trial delay wasn’t so long that it showed bail should be granted, the prosecution admitted it was a “real factor at play”, but said because it could happen sooner, or Joel could still plead guilty, “that day is not yet here”.
The court also heard sentencing statistics showing that there has only been two people out of 2,000 convicted of the same offence as Joel who have been forced to defend the charges in the District Court, and only 6.5% of all those convicted resulted in any jail time at all.
In other words, they wanted the judge to keep Joel behind bars for a minor charge 93.5% of people spend no time in prison for, knowing he could be there for two years in isolation with sporadic showers and no exercise, because it might not take that long, while at the same time arguing he should be kept in jail that long, because they are going to try to have him jailed for five years, under the same conditions.
We are all becoming so desensitised to police state multiculturalism, pre-crime arrests and jail for “hate speech” that it bears repeating – they are trying their best to jail Joel Davis for five years for words. Words on a screen that are not alleged to have caused any violence or harm. Murderers get lighter sentences all the time.
Joel’s treatment at the hands of the system raises another question – how many more Australians are currently in jail for similar offences, potentially for even longer, because they don’t have the same level of support and the same profile as Joel?
The Australian Federal Police has publicly announced the arrests of a couple of dozen men for similar “carriage service” offences – mainly for alleged threats against MPs made online – and for “violent extremist material” offences, which means people allegedly caught with videos of terror attacks or terrorist groups, and terrorist propaganda videos or books. None of these alleged offences, that we know of, have been alleged to have resulted in any real world harm either.
The police are not required to inform the media of every arrest and charge, and the vast majority of cases go unreported, so the true number could be even higher, although this is unlikely since the AFP has been eager to use the ongoing crackdown as PR to show that is it acting against anti-Semitism and to “maintain social cohesion”.
Regardless, we know very little about any of these cases. Some have been through the courts, some resulted in bail, some didn’t. Some were announced too late for reporters to attend court. At least one resulted in a deportation. Some of the announcements seem deliberately vague. AFP Media does not assist – they don’t even respond to emails.
Meanwhile, the corporate media has little interest in defending people accused of these crimes or hearing their side of the story, and they only give Joel attention to try to demonise him and his associates, shame the mother of his newborn baby, and/or call for more and harsher speech crimes, which the left-wing activist journalist class overwhelmingly support.
Most of the men facing these charges, it is safe to assume, are relying on Legal Aid or lower end lawyers, and are therefore at the mercy of biased magistrates and local courts, and we all saw how that went for Joel.
Aboriginals get special lawyers who are dedicated to keeping their clients out of jail because of the colour of their skin, but White people get no such defenders, and how many social justice warrior Legal Aid lawyers are going to fight hard against a magistrate they have to deal with every day to get an “extremist” out on bail?
One of Joel’s Legal Aid lawyers was obese and unkempt, turned up late with his shoelaces untied, and made no effort to get his client granted bail. No one batted an eyelid. Some magistrates felt the need to virtue signal at length in the courtroom, and wax lyrical about how awful Joel’s alleged words were, not bothering to hide their personal feelings despite being under media scrutiny.
If it wasn’t for the money Joel’s supporters raised for a top barrister to take his case to a higher court, he’d still be locked up. If it wasn’t for the fact that he’s a public-facing political activist, which they are also trying to use against him in court, no one would know he was locked up in the first place.
The remaining political prisoners have no such luck.
None of this passes the pub test – the average Aussie believes in “sticks and stones”.
When Australians last went to the ballot box, they weren’t voting for the government to pass laws preventing them from expressing their political opinions, and allowing the political police to lock up people for years for words on social media.
In reality, everyday Aussies are fed-up with weak sentences for violent criminals and paedophiles, and don’t want people locked up for words at all. We are not traditionally an easily offended people.
The system is working in the opposite way to how most people think it should, but if we complain about the system or what it does we risk being jailed for “breaching social cohesion” or “undermining democracy”.
The Victorian Attorney-General’s lawyers told Jacob Hersant’s Nazi salute appeal last year that his implied right to freedom of political communication under the Constitution should be overridden by the rights of minorities not to be offended, essentially saying to Australians: “We have imported millions of immigrants against your will, but now that they are here you have to surrender your political rights”.
Her representatives argued, without evidence, that “hate speech” makes minorities scared to vote, and therefore any form of political communication that offends minorities should be illegal – a true tyranny of the minority. He who is most offended gets to decide what everyone else is allowed to say. That’s democracy in “modern Australia”.
They bolstered that argument with a second one claiming that because the laws were passed by parliament, they have the support of the people by default, and therefore are emblematic of representative democracy itself, meaning the implied right to political communication does not apply. This is clearly absurd, but the judge found against Jacob anyway, and he went to jail for one month for raising his arm in the air for a split second.
This circular reasoning was also on display in Brandan Koschel’s recent “inciting racial hatred” case in NSW, which landed him in jail for a year, later reduced to 10 months, for words said in a speech, rather than online. Like in Joel’s case, it was not necessary for the prosecution to show that his 40 seconds of speech caused any real world harm, and no evidence was presented that a single person felt offended, harassed, intimidated or fearful of their safety.
The magistrates and judge hearing Brandan’s case has no precedent to rely on, so they all cited the government’s stated justifications for passing the “hate speech” laws in declaring that it was the expectation of the community that “hate speech” be punished harshly and that people be protected from it – community safety, deterrence, and denunciation were all said to be “paramount”.
None mentioned that the laws were rammed through by NSW Premier Chris Minns based on the Dural Caravan Hoax, that there were calls for him to repeal the legislation as a result, that there has been an inquiry (yet to deliver findings) about whether he deliberately misled parliament, and that the government is hiding the results of another report on “hate speech” laws, presumably because it says they shouldn’t have been passed.
In summary, what is happening here is that the government is passing unpopular and unwanted laws that they are using to target people who hold opposing views for words that have caused no harm, and then the courts are using the fact that the laws were passed to justify bail denial, convictions, jail sentences, and to override constitutional defences, all to protect the feelings of minority groups.
This is police state multiculturalism, a term coined, ironically, by Joel Davis himself.
How many Aussies are currently rotting in jail for words? How many more Joel Davises are there who none of us have heard of because they have no platform?
How long will some of these men caught with videos and PDFs, or who fedposted in the Prime Minister’s comment section, spend in jail on remand? Six months? Two years? Five years?
How long will they be convicted for? Five years for a Facebook comment? Five years for a video police found on a phone? Will we ever know?
The treatment of these men, most of them whose identities we will never know, is cruel and undemocratic, and will ultimately do nothing but undermine the system’s legitimacy.
If our political representatives really cared about democracy and social cohesion as much as they claim to, they’d scrap all of these laws and disband the associated police taskforces immediately.
Header image: Joel Davis walking out of Long Bay jail (9News).
The post How many Aussies are rotting in jail for words? first appeared on The Noticer.
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