Free Speech For Everybody Who Agrees

Author: James Collins

Peter Reynolds is a man of strong opinions.  He will tell you that himself.  He will tell you he believes in the right to free speech.  He will tell you he is a libertarian that believes people have the responsibility to discern truth from fiction on their own.  He’ll say expression is fundamental to a free society.

He’ll do it while he’s on the phone with the Dorset police filing another baseless complaint of malicious communications.

Peter “The Redactor” Reynolds is not one to tolerate opposing opinions or evidence of his own hate speech.  He’ll phone the police.  He will claim that if you step into the UK after you have done this to him, you will be arrested at the airport.  The authorities in the United Kingdom have nothing better to do than police the self-proclaimed rights of some wingnut to control all speech which concerns him or his record of outrageous statements.

First Peter claimed he stands by his words, and then he promptly changes them.  He says he sticks to everything he has said in his blog, or at least the stuff he didn’t delete and change, and the stuff he did delete and change was like that all along.  All evidence which states otherwise is a forgery.  Don’t worry, fair-minded reader, I’ll give you the links to see what has changed yourself.  If you want to think that I have hacked and edited the web archives of Peter’s blog, well, thanks a bundle, but that is far more credit than I deserve.  I can also state categorically that I have never travelled through time, nor am I aware of anyone who has.

Before:

After:

If you’ll peruse Peter’s blog, aside from the grandiose and rather dated language he uses, you will note that he is very opinionated.  He even bothered to write a letter to Gordon Brown at one point declaring that he would be crushed, which he then posted online as though it was to be taken seriously.  This is at a stage when public opinion had long since turned against Gordon Brown, but one almost suspects that Peter tells himself this letter was the last nail in the Prime Minister’s coffin.   He actually bothered to write the Prime Minister of Great Britain and inform him that he had personally lost the support of a man who never supported him in the first place, and even levels what sounds like thinly-veiled threats.

This letter is the raving of a drunken megalomaniac.  That isn’t my opinion; any qualified psychiatrist would tell you the same.  Peter compares his own personal sense of outrage with the oppression felt by those living in the Gaza Strip.  Blogs posted by Peter compare the conflict in Israel directly to the Holocaust and refers to “evil Jews” and “Zionist Nazis”.  Is somebody shelling Kensington with white phosphorus shells that I am not aware of?  He writes as though he has been put to the task by the entire population of the United Kingdom.  Did I miss some sort of ceremony where Peter was declared the Grand Poobah of Olde Britannia?  Who does this guy think he is?

He not only speaks on behalf of others, but levels threats in their name with the statement “we will crush you”.  Who the hell is “we” and what precisely does he mean by “crush”?  This is a pattern with Peter, completely over the top rhetoric combined with sweeping declarations about what the “people of Britain” think and feel.  Peter really believes that he personally is empowered to speak for the people of a nation and lay claim to some of the greatest hardship and suffering in human history.

What kind of narcissist thinks that way?

Peter doesn’t like to let half-truths and full lies stand.  He even has his “Comment Warriors”, an unidentified group of people that he encourages to post comments assailing media sources which post articles he finds unfavorable.  He wishes to shout down all opposition with a chorus of voices chanting his every word in unison.  He likes open debate.  He likes open debate, that is, unless you disagree with him in a location he can police your statements.  While he would lambast the press for editing their comments section to weed out trouble makers, he is not so generous with his own publications.  Peter does not allow comment warriors of another tribe to post on the CLEAR UK website or their Facebook page.  Go ahead, try it out.  If he’s drunk enough, he’ll engage you at first.  When you poke holes in his argument he will eventually sober up and delete the entire thread, maintaining the appearance of parrot-like nodding on the home front.

In the worst cases, when you do something like call him on his lies, he will threaten you with police action.  He is within his rights to file police complaints.  The police are then within their scope of discretion to file charges or simply throw the complaint on the “looneys and fruitcakes” pile and let it gather dust.  Being as the number of arrests that have resulted from Peter’s complaints is zero, I’ve deduced that the good fellows at the Dorset Police are far more patient than they could be expected to be.  It’s a wonder they haven’t found cause to arrest the man, if only to shut him up for a few hours.

Naturally, Peter’s election bid in the Corby by-election is not a serious one.  He is merely making another megalomaniacal attempt to overinflate his own ego and support his own protracted notions of grandeur.  That’s the sad thing.  He isn’t going to hold public office, he isn’t going to make a serious contender in an election with nearly a dozen candidates, and he openly admits in an online comment that one of his primary motivations is free postal service for registered candidates.

Peter Reynolds wants you to spend your money supporting his effort to get free postal service in order to send junk mail that the people of Corby will line bird cages with in a season when political flyers are in abundance.  This will bolster his ego, do nothing for the cause of anti-prohibitionists, and you’ll be out a few quid that you could have spent on something useful like a spliff to help you enjoy the comedy that is Peter Reynolds and CLEAR UK.