I won’t go there. Too much Bruce Lehrmann angst already in the building. But the points made at the time by Assange’s Swedish lawyers suggest dubious charges at best.

Former One Nation MP George Christensen not only visited Assange, but introduced a private member’s bill into parliament in 2020 to have the Australian authorities seek his release.

He has been a key part of the “quiet diplomacy” referred to by Assange’s mother that got his release over the line.

Christensen states: “I want to make it clear: I have read this case thoroughly, and Assange is not guilty of anything.”

ANGRY

He remains angry, despite Assange’s release: “The claims of conspiracy boiled down to the fact that Assange’s news outlet Wikileaks solicited for secret information from whistleblowers and that the leaker (Bradley Manning) was advised how they could get the information to Wikileaks.

“This is akin to a newspaper reporter asking publicly for tip-offs and then telling someone how they can email or post the information to their newspaper.

“That Assange is now being charged with mishandling classified information is an affront to national sovereignty.

“He is not a US citizen, nor was he in the United States when the alleged crime was being committed, and thus, he shouldn’t be subject to US laws.”

Indeed, he shouldn’t. Why he should be caught up in the toilet that is America’s law enforcement and judicial system is not even a question.

The indispensable Tucker Carlson, now creating havoc among all sorts of po-faced progressives down under, visited Julian Assange in prison in November 2023.

Carlson highlighted the relief among Australians familiar with the case, denouncing those who still believe Assange should be imprisoned as “the enemy of human freedom and flourishing”.

He added: “It was monstrous that he spent 12 years locked away for exposing other people’s crimes.”

Always to the point.

The Liberal wet, Republican stalwart and Tasmanian legal eagle, Greg Barns, refers to a “rainbow coalition” of Assange supporters, including Bob Carr, Adam Bandt, Matt Canavan, George Christensen, Barnaby Joyce and Andrew Wilkie.

He is right about that. Some, like Christensen and Wilkie, visited Assange in prison in London.

Barns states: “The Australian political environment has changed enormously since I began campaigning for Assange 11 years ago.

“Then, the Labor government of Julia Gillard not only showed no sympathy for Assange but ordered an investigation into whether he had broken any Australian laws in publishing the material.

“It was an absurd proposition and one that was quickly dismissed by commonwealth law officers. There seemed to be little interest on the part of the Coalition Parties, and many in the Australian media saw Assange as a dangerous impostor.”

NOBLE

Barns, to his eternal credit, was in the Assange camp from the get-go. These accidental co-advocates were doing noble work here, whatever the other political deformities of some of them.

Julian Assange’s wife has alleged that former CIA Director Mike Pompeo approved plans for an assassination.

No surprises there. They killed their own president in the autumn of 1963, after all.

In the case of Wikileaks, it all started with American military atrocities in Middle Eastern wars. In his own way, Assange has blown the lid on the practices and decisions of elected governments that do, or sanction, or cover up, things for which they were not mandated.

There have been a number of reasons for taking up the case in support of Julian Assange.

Here are my arguments for cheering him on:

• The modern State, including the modern “democratic” State, has ceded all rights to claiming the allegiance of its citizens;
• Citizens have a moral obligation to oppose evil regimes and evil laws;
• Anyone who pushes back against the deep State is a hero;
• Anyone who exposes the American military-industrial complex in any or all of its dimensions is a hero.

To claim that those who aggressively expose the crimes and generally malodorous malfeasance of the deep State are somehow traitors is risible.

The work of the whistleblowers, always important, is, in our times, indispensable.

We live in an era where governments are routinely elected with little over one third of the primary vote, and, hence, where most people do not want them to be the government.

Certainly, this is the case in first-past-the-post systems, and arguably, in preferential systems as well. Where Parties cheat their way into office. See under Joe Biden, 2020.

There is no longer something recognisably called democratic legitimacy. Voting is utterly pointless for many. But the culture, upstream from politics, is thoroughly diseased too.

NAKED

There is no longer a “naked public square”, a neutral space where competing ideas and visions of the good life can take their place without cancellation, censorship, threats and violent opposition.

A whole bunch of us have literally no stake in the modern polity.

They took away everything we cherish about liberal democracy, didn’t bother to apologise, and have not been held to account. End of story. We owe the political class nothing.

There is no implied social contract of the kind envisioned by the fathers of modern liberal democratic theory such a Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

There is a legitimacy crisis, far worse than the one imagined two generations ago by the European leftist Jurgen Habermas.

The whole basis of political obligation is out the window.

So, in response, what is a poor tech savvy Western boy or girl to do?

Expose the bastards whenever and wherever and however and whyever possible, should be our mantra.

Raise a glass of something special to the freedom, at, last of Julian Assange.PC

– Paul Collits