So yes, information warfare is real, and yes, foreign powers use propaganda against their adversaries. This is hardly new: in Ancient Greece, the Athenian leader Themistocles engraved stones at a watering hole, encouraging his enemy’s Ionian levies to defect. If, however, the Government is right to combat outside threats, its domestic opponents are equally right to be suspicious about the National Center for Information Defense (NCID). Announced by Andy Burnham on Tuesday, it will disrupt “hostile information attacks” and “deepfakes”, and quash a “distorted and untrue narrative about Britain”. That’s fine as far as it goes — if only the NCID wasn’t conjured in a Whitehall that has proved itself a foe of legitimate criticism. 

Unsurprisingly, Burnham’s announcement first attracted the ire of free-speech campaigners, who quickly noted that the Government already has a bubbling cauldron of acronymic monitoring units at its disposal. The variety here is truly bewildering, from the Media Monitoring Unit to the Defending Democracy Taskforce to the National Cyber Force. At first blush, indeed, NCID seems to be a classically British amalgamation of existing units. By putting them under one roof, the reasoning goes, duplication and waste is avoided. 

The problem is that if Burnham’s innovation promises to save cash and pool ideas, it also concentrates power in the hands of civil servants. That only increases the danger that the NCID “grows arms and legs”, evolving like a fish wriggling out from a swamp, desperate to feed and grow. It hardly helps that interdepartmental rivalries will be triggered among the spooks, cops, civil servants and even soldiers involved in officialdom’s many online media monitoring operations, with the NCID doubtless eager to make its mark too. 

That matters, for the Government can increasingly not be trusted to separate opinion from genuine disinformation. During Covid, to give one example, dissenting voices found themselves on official watchlists, while only last year, Whitehall labeled people concerned with mass migration as “cultural nationalists” potentially worthy of Prevent referrals. To an old Special Branch hand like me, then, the NCID rings a distant Cold War bell. Subversion, it seems, is back in fashion — except this time, the primary “threat actors” are less sweaty Stalinists and more anyone challenging the post-1997 consensus. 

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Having worked in the field, both in monitoring online extremists and actual terrorists, the NCID operation strikes me as pure “parapolitics”. The liminal space between conventional politics, intelligence, security and propaganda, parapolitics is usually the domain of niche sociology journals. Parapolitical activity is sometimes practiced covertly. This time, though, the powers-that-be have decided to hide in plain sight. Yes, the Government seems to be saying, we’re watching. 

Of course, Whitehall has long maintained such capabilities, mashing up civilian media operations with politics long before the internet ever existed. During the Second World War, for instance, it established the Ministry of Information and the Political Warfare Executive, designed to counter Nazi propaganda, undermine enemy morale and — crucially — keep an eye on the home front by monitoring public sentiment. After 1945, the Attlee government created the Information Research Department to combat Soviet disinformation. As ever, the Russian bear looms large in the history of British domestic security, with hybrid capabilities developed to keep him behind the Iron Curtain. 

During the Cold War, monitoring and combating “subversion” became primarily an MI5 and Special Branch problem. The official definition, first introduced in 1972 by MI5, encompassed “activities which threaten the safety or well-being of the state, and are intended to undermine or overthrow parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means”. The civil service effectively withdrew from the field, allowing anti-communist surveillance to become a classic quasi-political, quasi-policing issue. Were operations keeping tabs on communists designed for police action or pure intelligence purposes? In the parapolitical hall of mirrors that was postwar intelligence, no one really seemed to know.

This thinking wouldn’t survive the fall of the Berlin Wall, let alone the towers of 9/11. Nor is this surprising: despite the dangers of jihadi bombs, they hardly subverted the state. There was no overwhelming ideological threat from overseas, no evil empire. Islamist terrorism was too fragmented to seem threatening; to suggest Islamism generally might pose problems was long deemed politically unpalatable. Instead, the police and security services switched to a far more granular role, one encompassing proactive counter-terrorism intelligence and law-enforcement operations. Think less John Le Carré and more Jack Bauer. Not unrelatedly, the post-9/11 “CONTEST” strategy also saw “domestic extremism” downgraded in the face of al-Qaeda threats, with combating the puny far-Right increasingly contracted out to the social services, educational institutions and charities.

All the same, that didn’t stop the powers-that-be from gradually developing a digital panopticon, one capable of using content aggregation tools to harvest the internet for dissenting material. Online monitoring units would keep tabs on groups and individuals, flagging “actionable” content for removal, for intelligence purposes, and, occasionally, for criminal prosecutions. 

The Coalition government seemed perfectly happy with this Blair-era arrangement, and little changed until the late 2010s. Since then, the surveillance state’s appetite has only grown — especially with the development of new tools like AI, and especially now that, unlike in the 2000s, powerful anti-establishment forces really are on the march. Sure enough, every protest, riot and politically charged furore sees ministers, civil servants and chief constables demanding instant information, as if their intelligence minions possessed scrying balls and oracles. In their own way, populist protest movements have the potential to disrupt key infrastructure, as seen in Dover. They can also potentially incubate lone-wolf extremists. Before he became an infamous nail bomber, David Copeland had dabbled in the BNP.

And so the post-Southport disturbances, anti-immigration protests and “Patriot Platform” blockades have triggered, once more, Whitehall’s hunger for counter-subversion. The issue that concerns me here is proportionality. Where, in the end, is the line between lawful and unlawful protest? This, remember, is the era of non-crime hate incidents and knocks on doors, of journalists being warned of harassment for pursuing legitimate stories like Jason Arday’s. Then there’s interpretation. Does genuinely agreeing with a Kremlin-funded troll make one a dupe or a shill? Or, indeed, a traitor? Managing such questions is work for skilled investigators, not algorithms or quangos. 

The Government doesn’t seem completely oblivious to the dangers here. As Defence Secretary Wes Streeting put it yesterday, the new unit wouldn’t infringe upon “the freedom to disagree, the freedom for people to challenge their Government, to challenge Government policy, to criticise robustly what we are doing, and then to have the opportunity to choose a different Government”.

Yet the party Streeting serves has previous for its own information-warfare shenanigans. One example is Labour Together. It shared an address with the Center for Countering Digital Hate, whose stated objective was to “Kill Musk’s Twitter?” Parapolitical indeed. And how many meetings or cutaways are there between Hope Not Hate and its former director of communications Matthew McGregor: now the head of political strategy at No. 10? It isn’t hard to see how such relationships could be exploited by Westminster’s mini Machiavellis. 

No genuinely free democracy has successfully managed to entirely censor the internet. British attempts so far have been more farcical than sinister, not least Ofcom’s quixotic attempt to silence 4chan, that venerable US shitposting site. Yet downstream from such debacles come the “ think of the children” excesses of the Online Safety Act, with the mandatory age-gating of content the preferred, if unspoken, option of politicians. I am prepared to bet the new disinformation unit will soon be forming working groups to wargame these “tactical options” for countering disinformation. Yet without transparent frameworks, for instance around who to target and when, we will never know how these ideas are formed. National security is a convenient firewall for policymaking on the sly, with technical possibilities around internet censorship occasionally “run up the flagpole” with investigators. 

There’s a broader point here too. Assuming the new agency is successful in identifying online content made in good faith from foreign propaganda — even if they happen to tally — how will they police one against the other? Kremlin trolls do tell outrageous lies, but some of the best information warfare is material that subtly toys with reality. The challenge is to know the difference and act on it accordingly. Most reasonable people want to see foreign propaganda called out for what it is. But I’m not convinced the threat is concomitant with the solutions proposed. Blurring the lines of legitimate debate is unlikely to soften the genuine anger that exists over issues like small boats. 

Again, these are matters of judgment. I remember monitoring Twitter one night when Tommy Robinson posted a copy of a hastily scrawled “Osman Notice” — informing him of a threat to his physical safety — pushed by police through his front door. Robinson contrasted it with the apparently favorable treatment of a Muslim cleric who’d been similarly threatened. “Can you get that taken off the Internet?” a senior police officer asked me of Robinson’s posts. Why? “Because it’s embarrassing and the chief constable doesn’t like it,” came the reply. I refused, having neither the power nor desire to involve myself in something so trivial. Yet these, more or less, will be the people in charge of the NCID. And I have no reason to believe they’re much better now. 

So says Samuel Samson, a 27-year-old deputy assistant secretary in the US State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, or DRL. As used in this sense, the term “natural rights” derives from the early-modern age, when thinkers like Hobbes and Locke radically reprogrammed Western political philosophy. Where ancient and medieval thought had viewed the human subject as naturally social — naturally inclined to cooperate for the good — the moderns framed him as naturally turbulent and self-seeking, and forced into a social contract in order to protect his life and property from his equally violent, turbulent neighbors. Life and property were his natural rights, in this telling, and government’s job was to protect them. This new conception formed what the philosopher Leo Strauss called the “low but solid ground” of modernity — and came to shape the American founding.

Samson says natural rights are a cornerstone of his mission at DRL — a directional change that he describes as “anthropological.” This, even as he wants to link natural rights back to the much older account of natural law, developed first by the ancient Greeks and then absorbed by historic Christianity. Heady stuff, now at work (sort of) at the heart of Trumpian soft power and diplomacy.

His branch of the State Department, the DRL, was established in 1977 under a slightly different name, with the mandate of promoting democracy and American values around the world amid the Cold War. Back then, with Soviet Communism still standing as a universalist rival vying for hegemony, American values mostly meant modern liberalism. But now, under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Samson’s boss, it is charged with implementing the Trump administration’s ideological pivot towards “tradition” in American foreign policy. 

In the abstract, this has meant embracing the principles of Western civilization and the ideals of the nation’s founders — as if the two were perfectly in accord, with each other and with Trumpism — on topics such as nationhood, immigration control, free speech, and democracy. 

In practical terms, Samson’s work has heralded a change in what kind of causes the US government funds abroad, as well as a shift in emphasis from the developing world to the mostly European countries that Rubio designated America’s “civilizational allies” in remarks at the Munich Security Conference in February 2026. 

Not surprisingly, Samson has become something of a lightning rod for the administration’s new philosophy. A Catholic from Houston, the son of a Filipino mother and an American father of European ancestry, he arrived in Washington in 2021 and soon accrued a formidable Right-wing intellectual pedigree: a master’s degree in government from Hillsdale College, the evangelical-ish college that declines government funding in order to preserve its cultural and academic integrity, and a fellowship at the Thomistic Institute at the Dominican House of Studies in DC, with plans for a doctorate to follow. “I thought I was going to be a professor,” he says.

However, “there were exciting things happening in the conservative intellectual space,” and he was drawn to the NGO sector and was eventually offered a role in government. An acquaintanceship with Vice President JD Vance probably didn’t hurt. “Some have tried to spin me as having some particular or personal connection” with Vance, he says. The reality is that Samson has met the vice president a few times, and that he’s a young idealist, enthusiastic to work on causes he considers “critical issues at this critical moment in our country’s history.” 

If Trumpian foreign policy’s “civilizationalist” tilt — viewing the world as divided between large civilizational blocs, with Washington obliged to favor the West — has an architect, Samson has a good claim to being it. A blog post he published on the State Department’s website under the headline “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe” came a full year before Rubio’s remarks in Munich, in which the secretary of state said that post-Cold War the West had succumbed to the “dangerous delusion … that every nation would now be a liberal democracy … and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world.” Rubio announced an American return to national autonomy and expressed the wish that Europeans, with whom “we are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally,” join us in being “unapologetic in our heritage” and proud of our “common inheritance.”

In a sense, Samson’s rejiggering of DRL has saved it from the administration’s penchant for slashing government agencies that the Trumpians view, not unjustly, as ideological jobs programs for credentialed progressives. DRL, like the former USAID, is an American governmental channel for ideological advocacy abroad, dispensing about $190 million in funding every year, for the promotion of causes that have come to fall under the rubric of human rights but which Samson describes as “progressive social engineering or Leftist conditioning around the world.” DRL, he says, “was using its mandate as a skin suit to promote ideological Leftism that often ran contrary to the defense of democracy and human rights, and beyond that, just at a practical level, would often get involved in foreign-policy issues in ways that would actually undermine the national interest.” 

These efforts included, he says, “conditioning populations to adopt particular Leftist premises about promoting LGBT; normalizing things like transgenderism and gender surgery, including for children; promoting abortion around the world as if it’s some sort of settled moral question; and facilitating mass migration and elevating mass migration as a humanitarian obligation that developed countries have.” He adds: “All of these things are deeply radical.” In his time at DRL, it has shut down 80% of existing grants, and is currently offering money for causes more aligned with the Western tradition or Trumpian politics, depending on whom you ask.  

On that latter point: the observer would be forgiven for viewing most of its initiatives as narrowly political. In Britain and Europe, for example, Samson’s work has raised grumbles for favoring one side in the continent’s partisan battles, and the fact that some recipients of DRL largesse tend to go silent when it comes to criticizing the Trumpians’ own encroachments on free speech and other rights. Accordingly, Samson has been roundly vilified in the media. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has published a feature on him. The New York Times in April said he’s “the 27-year-old diplomat waging Trump’s cultural war with Europe” and referred pointedly to his Catholic religion in a hit-piece on him. The progressive-leaning investigative site ProPublica criticized his championing of the State Department’s program to protect white Afrikaners under the rubric “the end of aid.” 

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Samson, however, refers to the agenda as one that prioritizes natural rights, and proffers a return to a conservative view of humanity and its purpose. He originally tried to change the bureau’s name to reflect the new orientation but settled for setting up an Office of Natural Rights instead, which he describes as intended to “defend America’s national interest and security by defending the unalienable rights and dignity of American citizens, and championing those same rights around the world.” 

The natural-rights theory of the Enlightenment came as a shock to the upholders of the West’s old order, not least Samson’s Catholic Church. Enlightenment philosophy, and the 18th-century revolutions that sought to bring it to life, shifted the end goal of politics, away from the common good of the whole — as the likes of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas had had it — and toward individual autonomy. In the classical frame, moreover, the happiness of the individual and the community had an objective content. But under the new dispensation, this was much more contested, with modern political orders leaving it up to each person to determine for herself what it meant to pursue happiness.

“Nature” was the common denominator of both natural law (the old view) and natural right (the new one). Yet the substantive content of human nature shifted dramatically in the transition between the premodern world and the modern, concurrent with the collapse of feudal orders and the rise of early market societies.

Natural law, the older vision, first appeared in ancient Greece. Heraclitus, a forerunner of Plato, held that “man’s nature as well as his ethical goal consists in the subordination or conformity of individual and social life to the general law of the universe,” as explained by the German lawyer and theorist Heinrich A. Rommen in his authoritative survey The Natural Law, first published in 1936. (Rest assured, Rommen opposed the Nazis and eventually immigrated to the United States to escape their clutches.) 

The premise was then developed by Aristotle, and later by the medieval Christian Scholastics, and might broadly be described as the proposition that right and wrong, good and evil exist as unchanging ontological truths in the same manner as what we observe in the natural world. A tree exists to fulfill a certain end or range of ends: to grow and bear fruit. Just so, our purpose as human beings is to strive towards the “good and the true,” as Samson puts it. And our laws and social institutions are good or bad, legitimate or not, in so far as they promote these ends.

If human beings are made to strive toward certain kinds of goods, it follows that they have certain rights, also ontologically determined, that will promote this quest. These rights “belong to all people by our nature as human beings — that is what makes them natural,” Samson says. As he puts it, “perhaps in the Aristotelian sense, [man’s nature is that he is] a rational, social being made in the image of God. Some of the foremost natural rights that come from that nature are the rights to life, sovereignty (and security), speech, religion, and life in the polis.”

He goes on: “Natural rights are a much older, more profound conception of human rights — one espoused by America’s founders, and certainly in our founding documents.” Samson argues that his office’s focus on nationhood, immigration control, free speech, and democracy “tend back to those core tenets of human nature and are necessary for human flourishing.”

What Samson is doing here is subtly blending the older, natural-law or Aristotelian worldview into the early-modern, Enlightenment-derived one enshrined in America’s founding documents, now with a dash of 21st-century populism. For the premoderns, for example, there was no general right to free speech as such, except insofar as speaking freely corresponded with a particular citizen’s duties and stature. Freedom of religion was rare, to put it gently; “error has no rights,” the Catholic Church long taught, and often used the business end of the secular state to make sure things stayed that way. And the classical and medieval world that nurtured this tradition was, by and large, dominated by large, multinational empires. Nationalism and nation-states with borders and immigration laws that the Trumpians wish to harden — all these came much later: in the 18th and 19th centuries, right about when the modern vision took hold.

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Yet if the attempt to discern an Aristotle or Aquinas in the figure of Locke or Jefferson is theoretically tenuous, Samson is far from the first to attempt it. The project has a serious lineage and worthwhile aspirations. Plus, it may just work in practice. While we must be thankful for the more capacious rights theorized by the modern thinkers and secured by the American founders, there are ways in which the older, natural-law account can help us today: by elevating our rights discourse, and reminding us what rights are for. 

It sounds good, but the Trump administration’s attempts to promote Western civilization so far have failed to escape accusations of bad faith, and haven’t been taken seriously outside of the most credulous elements of the MAGA base.

Anyone trying to seize the moral high ground and promote the good and the true will have a difficult time explaining many elements of Trump administration policy, from the brutalities of ICE to the betrayal of the America First base represented by a unilateral war with Iran. And Western civilization-focused executive orders, such as one decreeing that all federal buildings should be constructed in a classical style of architecture, are performative and flimsy. You can order a certain style, but intelligent observers understand that it won’t make the buildings resemble the architecture of the classical period unless they’re also designed and constructed beautifully — which is unlikely, given the aesthetics of the Trump administration. In the same vein, you can withhold federal funding for schools teaching racial “indoctrination” and promote “a patriotic” curriculum, but only if you have a plan for how to replace the old ideas with better ones, organically, within the American academic culture — without bowdlerization or hiding the country’s dark side in a mirror image of the woke who hid the noble side. 

The State Department’s activities also leave it open to accusations of being more politically motivated than virtuous, even when the cause of virtue is being served. Samson declined to comment on new grants actively under consideration, however ProPublica has reported that they include one to the Free Speech Union, a British organization founded in 2020, which references the “spirit of the Enlightenment” in its statement of values, and defends people “who get into trouble for exercising their right to lawful free speech, whether in the workplace, at university or on social media.” Others are a reported $40 million slated for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation; and a reported $7 million for “878” — a new, Washington, DC-based British think tank, whose focus areas include “renewing our Judeo-Christian culture” and “ending mass immigration and deporting illegal immigrants” (as if the two obviously go hand-in-hand). 

These are popular causes on the Right, but how are they being executed? Free speech in Europe has been a marquee initiative. The State Department has declared an erosion of European civil rights, due to limitations on free speech imposed by Britain’s 2023 Online Safety Act; and by the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which, among other powers, can fine companies for violation of its standards for up to 6% of global revenue, and which recently went after Elon Musk’s X on transparently thin grounds. 

Both pieces of legislation contain language that can be — and occasionally is — used to suppress conservative speech. In a recent case in Britain, the comedian Graham Linehan was arrested for X posts critical of transgenderism. Defenders, however, claim the laws are necessary to prevent sexual abuse, threats of violence, and actual sexual harassment — forms of speech that are proscribed even under the US Constitution and its First Amendment. In Britain, supporters of the law contend that political arrests are usually a result of bungling execution and affect only a tiny minority of cases. The Free Speech Union itself cites only 300 people arrested under the UK’s law since 2023, and is vague about how many of those arrests were political. 

“At the end of the day, a lot of this is going to be prudential judgment,” Samson says. “No one actually believes in an anarchistic free-speech utopia, right? There is such a thing as harmful content, but we want to defer to the side of speech as much as we can.” (It’s worth noting, again, that you will find no defense for such an expansive libertarian view in Aristotle or Aquinas — or even in the early American tradition, which tolerated blasphemy laws as compatible with the First Amendment.) 

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Presented with the perception of American hypocrisy, regarding the United States’ own suppression of pro-Palestinian speech on campuses, he says that “we have a substantial legal tradition and also practical tradition that says that incitement to violence is a problem. There’s a categorical difference between grandmas praying outside of an abortion clinic, and violent Leftist groups that are calling for the extermination of our civilization.” Many of those facing such restrictions from the Trumpians did no such thing, however, and the courts are increasingly casting a skeptical eye on the administration’s pinched view of speech rights, especially when it comes to visitors and noncitizen migrants.

The disputes about the scope of speech are telling. They arise under both supposedly censorious Eurocrats and an American administration that tub-thumps loudly for speech. If everyone agrees that some limitations on speech are necessary, perhaps our civilizational allies in Europe are going about it in their own way, and how they do so may or may not be the appropriately ordered top concern of the American government. It does, however, play to an American base. 

The issues are real. However, the noise surrounding them drowns out a genuine and important shift. If the MAGA coalition was anything, it was the decisive majority of more-or-less normal Americans seeking a return to the kind of values they feel normal people, broadly, believe in, and that they feel progressive governance has abandoned. This has been branded by the spokesmen of progressivism as uneducated and dim: what, exactly, are the “normal” values? Who determines what’s “good”? Obviously there’s no ultimate authority, or real answer to these questions.  

Here, the natural-law tradition can be especially instructive. By the natural-law formulation, humans are designed to know the good, and thus the vague feeling that certain things are beyond the pale is telling us something. Our reason may be clouded, our will may be weak, our university education may be confusing us, but each human conscience is endowed with a sense of the true and right, and a longing for it. If there’s a MAGA future that could be pro-something, instead of merely anti-woke, it springs from this inchoate sense of a proper human virtue. 

Liberal secular morality and progressive governance have been characterized by the opposite, holding that truth is whatever the individual says it is; and that “the good” is what the people think is good for them, or perhaps what their betters think. That way led to the open border and the pediatric gender clinic, and a broad coalition of Americans has come out against it. 

It is astonishingly radical, actually, both in its metaphysical claims and its practical ones, that in 2026 the American government is even trying to deliver an authoritative stance on the good. To stand for any fixed truth — such as a defense of Western civilization, even if messily put together from discordant elements — is to oppose the ideology of the postwar order. That ideology elevated diversity as the highest good, and was allergic to suggesting that any populations or societies have any characteristics at all. Defense of a civilization requires certain claims: that we believe Western civilization is a good and meaningful category; that it has certain essential characteristics that are proper to it; that we aim to promote those characteristics and discourage others. 

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This isn’t diverse, but nor is it antithetical to the diverse society we currently have — because of Western Civilization’s very insistence that rights are universal, Samson says. The Catholic popes were among the first to champion the rights of indigenous peoples, on natural-law grounds, moral counsel that European conquerors honored only in the breach. Samson is thus clearly right when he says that “the tolerance and acceptance that this country has shown to immigrants is itself a product of the Western ethos…. There are non-Western people who live in America, but that’s distinct from the particular heritage that this country belongs to.” 

He references his own experience as the son of an immigrant from the Philippines, and his experiences in spending summers in the Philippines growing up, which were formative for his Christian faith. “If the prevailing international narrative was true, they would say, ‘Oh, well, the Spanish came and colonized your ancestors, and they were terrible to them.’ And of course, there are historic atrocities that you can’t ignore. But at the same time, I have the faith that I have, because of them. It was the Spanish who first came and taught [my ancestors] about the good and the true. I’m very grateful for that.” 

The devil, of course, is in the details. If there are actually correct values and goals that will promote human flourishing, the interpretation of what those values and goals are is a crucial art. An art that sits uneasily next to a president, Trump, who too often resembles the kind of petty, impulse-control-challenged figure the Greco-Roman sages of the natural law had in mind when they warned about the absence of virtue in a leader. Still, one cannot blame Samuel Samson for trying. One key question for the conservative movement, as it leaves the Trump era behind, is whether the intellectual depth and seriousness of purpose Samson exemplifies can be extracted from the wreckage.

Voters in favor of such changes have been supportive as politicians in red states give speeches against local universities, legislators circulate viral clips denouncing campus ideology, and college presidents suffer ritual humiliation when called to explain what, exactly, happens in an Office of Inclusive Excellence. These voters imagine their representatives are putting an end to biased hiring practices, shutting down alienating classroom polemics, and making campuses safe for conservative speech. 

The reality, however, is much more complex. The opponents of DEI have weaponized regulation and are creating a Pandora’s box of tools that can be used and reused by successive administrations — all to the detriment of higher education. 

A look at new state-level bills being enacted — the certification language, the reporting dates, the audit authority, the clauses decreeing that money may be withheld and not later restored — reveals much more than the substitution of one ideology for another. Instead, we are seeing the establishment of a new system of governance. It is much bigger than DEI and the current political moment. 

Ohio is the clearest place to witness the shift, because the state has already moved beyond messaging into the mechanics of enforcement. Gov. Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 1, the “Advance Ohio Higher Education Act,” into law on March 28, 2025. The statute bars public institutions from establishing or continuing DEI offices; prohibits DEI training and orientation except in narrow circumstances; forbids institutions from recreating the same functions under another label; restricts universities from stating official positions on “controversial belief or policy”; and requires a three-credit course in American civic literacy. The law took effect last June.

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One issue is the law’s vagueness, which masks matters of fundamental importance. What is a “controversial belief or policy,” and what is the curriculum of the new required course in “American Civic Liberty,” and who gets to decide? In the usual functioning of universities, faculty would, for better or for worse. But under Ohio’s law, politicians — with few if any qualifications — will be empowered to reject curriculum. 

Universities will have no metrics by which to judge their own compliance and will operate under constant surveillance. Any student could report any faculty member to the state at any time: an enlargement and statewide codification of a DEI measure in place at some universities, except now in the opposite ideological direction. It is nigh impossible for any teacher to uphold a requirement to stay within unknown bounds on any “controversial belief or policy” as judged by any student. The rule is bound to severely impact teaching.

Moreover, under existing arrangements, faculty have already been rigorously reviewed by their peers; their courses are also peer-reviewed; and universities receive extensive and serious peer-review through national and state accreditors, plus discipline-specific reviews. It isn’t a perfect system, but it is a system nonetheless, and could help address student concerns, if that is the desire. Instead, in order to correct one perceived problem, the state has instituted a new system that will destroy student-faculty relations and drain the coursework of meaningful content: essentially, each student will be dragooned as a potential informant on professors, who will have a strong incentive to steer clear of any controversial topic (Proust and homosexuality? Foucault’s diagnosis of power-knowledge? Aristotle on natural slavery?).

And this system will have teeth. Consider the Ohio bill now following behind Bill SB1. House Bill 698, introduced in February, would require each public institution to annually certify that it is complying with the statutory obligations created by SB 1. Beginning in fiscal year 2028, if an institution fails to submit that certification, the state university chancellor “shall withhold” the university’s share of a designated set-aside of funds that pay for classes. If a certification is found to be “recklessly false or fraudulent,” the chancellor may withhold the entire share. More striking still, the bill says withheld funds might not later be released even if the institution comes into compliance. Meaning, even if the errors are minor and corrected quickly, the instructional funds withheld might be lost forever. The state has built a lever and attached it to an essential revenue stream.

HB 698 is invasive in another way, too. The bill would require institutions to produce a public inventory of employees who, on Jan. 1, 2025, had DEI-related duties and were reassigned by Sept. 25, 2025. Universities would have to identify those employees by name, list their former and new titles, describe old and new duties, detail compensation changes, and provide a justification report explaining why the reassignment complied with the law. The president and board chair would have to certify that report. The bill aims to prevent universities from renaming, relocating, and redistributing functions, and it is designed to catch them doing so. This is understandable from the perspective of lawmakers but represents an unprecedented penetration of the state into granular aspects of university life — where it will have new abilities to impose political ideology. 

Such changes on local campuses are the first consequences of the new administrative order. At the University of Cincinnati, the implementation page simply states that “all four” identity centers have closed. Another university page says the central equity and inclusion office has also closed. At Ohio State, cultural and awareness observances — such as Black History Month, Women’s History Month, Pride Month, Juneteenth — may continue, the university says, but administrative support is permitted only under certain conditions, and funding can only be sourced from donations or gifts to the university. The university also says that it has paused communications that move beyond recognizing such occasions while it reviews the law’s restrictions on institutional statements.

This represents a transfer of authority inside the institution: the center of gravity is moving away from the administrator, the faculty committee, the dean’s meeting, and the campus debate, and toward general counsel, compliance staff, HR, and whichever office must eventually certify to the state that the university has obeyed. Lawyers become the curators of permissible language. Budget officials become interpreters of ideological risk. These laws do not simply ban. They reorganize decision rights. The change will also require the hiring of another layer of administrators to ensure institutional compliance, which will further constrain university budgets and siphon money away from student instruction.

The money matters because Ohio’s State Share of Instruction fund, which underwrites teaching, is not a decorative line in the budget — it is the core public subsidy for public higher education. SSI was funded at about $2.16 billion in fiscal year 2026 and $2.18 billion in fiscal year 2027. The Ohio Legislative Service Commission’s analysis of HB 698 says the state budget has already set aside $75 million of SSI funds (intended to support student instruction) for fiscal year 2027 to be distributed under the bill’s compliance framework (meaning the funds will go toward compliance mechanisms). One does not need to know the precise exposure of every campus to see the point. We can only expect the share of funds diverted toward compliance to grow. 

In Iowa, this logic has moved beyond public universities. There, House File 2488, passed by the state house on Feb. 24, 2026, but not yet law, would apply not just to state institutions but to private colleges, as well, if they participate in the Iowa Tuition Grant program — which is to say, almost all of them. The bill would prohibit participating private institutions from establishing, sustaining, supporting, or staffing DEI offices or doing DEI work, with some carve outs.

Similar to the design in other states, under the Iowa bill, any person may report a suspected violation on any college campus to the attorney general. The attorney general must notify the institution and the state department of education within 15 days. The institution then gets 30 days either to  prove it has fixed the matter or persuade the attorney general that no violation occurred. If it fails, it becomes ineligible for the Iowa Tuition Grant program beginning with the next academic year. 

Texas offers a preview of where such initiatives tend to end up. The Texas State Auditor’s Office issued the first required higher-education audit under that state’s DEI restrictions in February 2025. The auditor reviewed the Texas A&M University System’s 20 components and five community colleges. Most entities were found compliant, but the audit still flagged Texas A&M University-Central Texas over contract language and McLennan Community College over an employee training video. The findings themselves were small. The institutional meaning was not. Once the state creates auditable categories, someone eventually begins checking contracts, websites, trainings, handbooks, and organizational charts against them. To combat this, universities will need to hire their own internal policing and compliance staff.

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That is why the present moment can’t be understood simply as a dispute over whether DEI offices had become too large, too jargon-heavy, or too detached from the core educational mission — though they plainly had. They expanded carelessly. They confused student support with progressive catechism. They made themselves vulnerable through mandatory trainings whose claims outran their evidence and whose language alienated even sympathetic audiences. When anti-DEI clips go viral and red-state politicians grandstand, most audiences (though too few academics) can see exactly what the problem is. 

To admit all this, however, is not to concede the larger point. The danger, which is being hidden by the cultural unpopularity of DEI on the Right and the adoption of new, more pressing causes on the Left, is that state governments are building a reusable apparatus for directing universities through appropriations, attestations, complaint systems, public reporting, and audit authority.

Today, the target is DEI. It will not stay there. Once the mechanism exists, it can be turned toward rules governing anything. The state need not relitigate the culture war each time. It need only redefine the category, set the reporting date, and threaten the funding. For some states, this would require revision of the law; in others, the laws are vague enough that any administrative interpretation could set a yo-yo in motion. 

Universities still tell stories about themselves that belong to an older age. They imagine governance as a matter of argument: faculty debate, committee process, a report circulated for comment, a meeting running long in a room with bad carpeting and weak coffee. That world has not vanished, but it is no longer where power most decisively sits. Under this new dispensation, power lies with the office that certifies compliance, the official who can trigger an inquiry, the auditor who can define a violation, and the budget language that quietly waits for someone to miss a deadline.

The new university leash is not a slogan. It is not even, in the end, an idea. It is a system of control to be yanked by anyone who holds the leash. And it tugs whether anyone is persuaded or not. 

And not just any old bikini deepfakes, even though many AI platforms are capable of creating them. It’s easy to do: you just say to the AI “Put her in a bikini” and the politician, celebrity, or — sometimes — child is suddenly wearing only a bikini. Yes, it’s creepy. But also striking is the way Labour’s ire is laser-focused on Grok, the AI attached to X, formerly Twitter. It’s also striking how, despite pleas from campaigners for years on the platform’s abundance of obscene material, it’s only now that Labour is swinging into outraged action. So grievous is the danger posed by its bikini deepfakes in particular (including of Starmer), that the Government now plans to outlaw them, even as it’s  threatened to ban X from Britain altogether.

This is where the political expediency bit comes in. In Starmer’s shoes I too would be itching for an excuse to ban X. Under Musk’s ownership, the site has made Starmer’s political life a misery, more or less from the moment he entered Downing Street, from stirring the pot during the Southport riots to amplifying the grooming scandal to the point that Labour were forced to respond with the Casey review. And the response to the review, again largely convened on X, forced Starmer to promise the national inquiry his party is now doing its best to avoid delivering.

This is a far cry from pre-Musk Twitter, which was a liberal-dominated hub of respectable media-class opinion, one with a direct line for governments and intelligence services seeking speech-control influence. But since Musk bought the site in 2022, it’s morphed by degrees into something far more pungent and anarchic, where Right-wing voices predominate and many of the former progressive Twitterati have fled to the Bluesky echo-chamber or simply quit posting.

This has not been an improvement in every respect. I don’t miss the sanctimonious tone of old Twitter, but it was more playful. Even so, the rambunctious Right-wing X is politically significant, not least in being the sole large-scale digital exception to the general rule that major institutions are controlled by the Left. As such, the site plays a pivotal role in UK politics. Whether feeding the “posting to policy pipeline”, or drawing attention to ham-fisted efforts at propaganda or speech control, X convenes so large and vocally anti-Starmer a subset of the British Right that we can hardly blame Keith for wishing, like Henry II, that someone (in this case Ofcom) would rid him of this turbulent website.

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So is this just about Starmer’s ailing premiership? Yes and no. He’s at the helm of a regime that is, in its entirety, holed below the waterline by the subversive uncontrollability of digital public life. He can hardly be blamed for lashing out at a website whose denizens, and owner, so obviously loathe him. But the proposed ban is best understood as part of a wider war — as was the killing of Thomas à Becket.

Henry II had his Archbishop murdered in 1170 in the course of a dispute over the competing political and spiritual prerogatives of Crown and Church: a contest that obliged both parties to turn to the Pope in Rome for arbitration. And today Starmer finds himself at the mercy of not exactly a religious but certainly a cultural force, one whose extra-territorial leader also has an agenda that doesn’t always (or even very often) align with Starmer’s own. There is of course nothing very holy about Musk, or the trolls of X. But the contest over bikini deepfakes points toward a larger-scale struggle, with cultural, political, and economic dimensions and between overlapping Old and New World jurisdictions.

The field on which this is generally litigated is “free speech”, typically referred to as if it were an abstract moral value. But while there surely is a moral dimension to free speech, in an information age the power to free or control “speech”, and to determine what counts in that definition, is of immense political and economic consequence.

We are, in other words, once again litigating the extra-territorial reach of something intangible, much like Henry II. But in the intervening period Britain also gained her own territorial empire: and then lost it again, at the hands of our own former colony, in a way that also provides lessons for our situation now. In 1941, the British Empire, struggling against the Axis, was obliged to negotiate for aid from its secessionist progeny America. A key dispute within the negotiations was over “imperial preference”. This was a set of tariff arrangements enacted within the British Empire which gave preferential trading rights to polities that were part of the Empire. This so gravely disadvantaged American trade that its dissolution was a cornerstone of mid-century US foreign policy. Britain gave up on imperial preference and secured American aid.

I mention this not to re-litigate long-dead geopolitical quarrels, but to draw a parallel with the broader context of Starmer’s proposed ban of X. This modern argument doesn’t concern physical trade in goods, but the rules under which the digital kind are permitted to circulate. Many of these “goods” — including everything that happens on X — fall broadly under the heading of “speech”. In such a context, who gets to set the rules on “free speech” is obviously every bit as important as the 1941 battle over who gets to determine tariffs across British imperial territories.

As things stand, the digital “imperial preference” favors the polity in which the internet was first developed: the United States.  The question of geography is notoriously vexed when it comes to trade. Even determining who has tax and regulatory jurisdiction over (say) a pile of grain in a warehouse forms the topic of intense negotiations between trade experts. Intangible goods are still more complex, though: when a website can be served in multiple physical locations simultaneously, who gets to regulate it?

Extensive material and political interests rest on how this question is settled. And this is the real geopolitical backbeat to Starmer’s feud with Elon Musk: a backbeat that, in truth, encompasses not just Britain but also the EU to which Starmer clearly wishes Britain still belonged. It’s a feud currently playing out in a series of bitter skirmishes between the White House and the EU, as well as, in microcosm, between Musk and Starmer.

Recently, for example, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions against foreign individuals or institutions involved in censoring US digital properties: a clear shot across the bows of European politicians who believe they have a right to censor US websites and fine the companies  where these are served on EU territories. In the pandemonium that erupted following Rubio’s announcement, pro-EU supporters pointed out that no such challenges had been issued against Russia or China, despite these polities firewalling large portions of the American internet in its entirety.

But this is precisely the rub. Do the European states want to be as detached from the US as Russia and China, or not? There is no freedom of speech battle between these polities and the US, because neither Russia nor China tries to control what’s published on American platforms (at least, not openly). They just block them, and build their own platforms. By contrast, European states seem happy for America to supply its digital platforms, even as European politicians demand a say in how they are regulated. It’s as though 20th-century Canada was demanding, on the basis of its extensive wood and paper exports to Britain, a veto over everything published in London.

Until relatively recently, this relation of center and periphery was broadly mutually beneficial — not least in that it enabled American politicians to route round inconvenient constitutional clauses at home, in regulating the internet. Under Biden, the State Department encouraged and fostered European online speech controls, as a means of developing censorship tools both unconstitutional in the USA but nonetheless applicable domestically where desired, and aligned with an overall policy of digital speech control. I’m old enough to remember when something being illegal somewhere in Europe could result in its being deleted altogether from X even if the poster was in the USA. In effect, the Biden regime used Europe as a way of offshoring politically sensitive speech controls, somewhat like Guantanamo Bay offshored the torture of suspected jihadists.

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Now, though, priorities have changed — much to the bewilderment of Europe, which now has a well-developed censorship architecture but has discovered its American sponsor suddenly in a different mood. Even so, they have pressed on: two heavy-hitting US websites, X and Cloudflare, have already been threatened with fines under, respectively, the EU’s Digital Services Act and Italy’s “Piracy Shield”. The US-based forum 4chan has also been slapped with fines under Britain’s Digital Services Act. All have responded, essentially, “GFY”. Starmer’s threat to Musk on the deepfake image-making falls in the same category. It is an attempt to exert sovereignty in a space that’s both nominally open, but also in practice wholly dominated by American “imperial preference” — in the context of an American presidency taking a radical new direction.

Seen thus, the actual contest becomes clearer. Is Europe an American imperial subject, or a rival imperium? If it’s part of the empire, then obviously it doesn’t get to regulate its hegemon. If Europe is an imperial rival, it can hardly expect to demand its opponents supply services even as Europe dictates the terms. This is the real subject of the ongoing diplomatic wrestling-match over “free speech”, censorship, and regulatory frameworks such as the EU’s Digital Services Act and Britain’s Online Safety Act. If Britain, or any other European entity, really wants information sovereignty outside the American imperium, the only route there is the one now threatened by Starmer: banning American digital properties entirely from our territories, the way Russia and China do.

Does Starmer really want to go there? Does any EU state? This is perhaps uniquely difficult for Britain to answer. Geographically and economically speaking, Britain is closer to Europe, which accounts for around 41% of UK exports in 2024, compared to 18% for the US. But linguistically and culturally we’re closer to the USA. To take just one of countless examples, the BBC pays scant attention to EU politics, but Trump only has to raise an eyebrow and it’s front-page news.

In this context, can we really imagine an Atlantic firewall? I doubt it. Back in 1170, ridding himself of Thomas à Becket backfired badly on King Henry; I suspect that ridding himself of this turbulent X would prove similarly unpopular with the British media and political class. And yet our cultural, linguistic and digital enmeshment with an increasingly unpredictable US regime has introduced an acute new set of tensions. It is difficult to see how they can be resolved peacefully. But let us hope they can be. Having seen one bikini’d AI Starmer, I have no desire to see any more.

Recent criticisms of Europe by American politicians like JD Vance have reminded us that there is a profound gulf between American and European conceptions of free speech. The United States comes closer than any other country in the world to absolute free speech. The First Amendment to the US Constitution provides that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech”. No ifs, no buts. Since the early 20th century, this has been held to apply to state legislatures as well. The American courts were eventually persuaded to recognize exceptions for incitement to imminent violence, obscene and defamatory material, child pornography and fraud, but that is all. Even these exceptions have been very narrowly interpreted.

The European model has been very different. Freedom of expression is an important but not an absolute public interest in Europe. In principle, it may be overridden by a wide variety of other public interests if there is a sufficiently compelling case for doing so. Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects freedom of expression, but subject to a long list of potential exceptions: national security, territorial integrity or public safety, the prevention of disorder or crime, the protection of health or morals, the protection of the reputation or rights of others, the protection of confidences, or maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

In Britain, the list of exceptions recognized by the law grows longer all the time: speech that discloses secret intelligence, speech that prejudices current legal proceedings, speech that supports proscribed terrorist groups, hate speech directed at racial, religious or sexual minorities, “grossly offensive” messages sent through the post or over electronic networks, and so on. Most of these exceptions are concerned in one way or another with public order and social harmony. In Britain we have not usually specified opinions that it is illegal to hold in public, but other countries have. In Germany, Austria and Belgium it is a criminal offense to deny, trivialize or approve of the Holocaust. Spain, France and Switzerland go even further. It is an offense in those countries to question the existence or gravity of anything which is regarded as a crime against humanity. In many countries it is illegal to display the swastika. In Latvia and Lithuania, that extends to the hammer and sickle and other symbols of Soviet communism.

There is an inevitable tendency for people to want to exclude from freedom of expression whatever ideas they personally cannot abide. Milton’s Areopagitica, published in 1644, is one of the most eloquent pleas for freedom of expression in the English language, but he excluded Catholics and atheists, whose views he regarded as beyond the pale. So did John Locke, although he at least offered reasons for their exclusion. He thought that Catholics were intolerable because they were not interested in truth, and atheists because having no fear of God, they could not be relied upon to honor any social obligations. The authors of the famous early 18th-century tracts known as Cato’s Letters argued the case for free political speech but made an exception for what they called “factious scribblers” and “turbulent babblers”.

The problem, as George Orwell pointed out, is that free speech is worthless unless it extends to things that people do not want to hear. We all have different lists of things that we do not want to hear. Suggested candidates for legally enforced censorship include a variety of allegedly extreme or unacceptable positions such as gender-criticism, climate denial, antisemitism, blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammed or the Koran, totalitarianism, eugenics, satanism and many others. Many of these demands reflect the sensitivities of particular ethnic, social or religious groups who say that their position is special. Censorship is often the child of collective grievances. People who feel that the world has been unjust to them are likely to claim that their position is special too. If some opinions are to be banned as beyond the pale, then why should my list of unacceptable beliefs be privileged over yours? The truth is that if we believe in freedom of expression, we have to tolerate things that we regard as intolerable. Otherwise the whole concept is meaningless.

Since we have to draw a line, where do we draw it? The starting point, I suggest, is to ask why we instinctively believe in freedom of expression in the first place. I think that there are three main reasons.

The first is that constraints on our ability to communicate facts or opinions invade our autonomy as moral agents and thinking creatures. When the constraints are imposed by the state, they imply a relationship between the individual and the state which is morally repellent. They reduce us to the status of mere instruments of other people’s power. Whether the suppression of free speech comes from governments or pressure groups or public opinion, it ushers in a narrow-minded, intolerant and authoritarian world in which the fear of giving offense or challenging existing shibboleths eliminates some of the most creative and original products of the human spirit.

The second reason for believing in freedom of speech is that we live in a democracy whose entire political order depends on the free exchange of ideas. It depends on our ability to freely receive information, on an acceptance of diversity of opinion and on a large measure of tolerance of intellectual and emotional differences. Our collective life depends on the resolution of issues between citizens by marshaling objectively verifiable facts. It depends on ordered debate about their implications under common rules that exclude coercion, and on a culture in which the outcome of our processes of collective decision-making is accepted even by those who disagree with it.

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A third reason why we believe in freedom of expression is perhaps the most fundamental. It is the one which received its most eloquent expression from Karl Popper’s classic work, The Open Society and its Enemies. No one person or group, however respectable or expert, has exclusive access to wisdom or truth. This is not just because of the limits on the capacity of the human mind. It is also because truth and wisdom are dynamic concepts. They are informed by a stock of experience which is constantly increasing. All statements of fact or opinion are provisional. They reflect the current state of knowledge and experience. But knowledge and experience are not closed or immutable categories. They are inherently liable to change in response to fresh discoveries or insights. Knowledge advances by testing conflicting arguments, not by suppressing them. Understanding increases by exposure to uncomfortable truths. In a world of free expression, some of what people say will certainly be wrong, hurtful or even objectively harmful. But the principle which we would have to accept in order to justify censoring these statements is more damaging than the statements themselves. We cannot have truth without accommodating the possibility of error, or wisdom without accommodating the possibility of folly. In the end we have to accept the implications of human inquisitiveness, creativity and imagination. The alternative is to entrust significant parts of our intellectual world to external authorities whose capacity for objectivity, truthfulness and wisdom is no greater than our own.

Ever since the 17th century, our civilization has been based on the notion that truth is independent of human will. It may be only partly knowable, and more or less difficult to identify, but it exists somewhere out there whether we like it or not. We have built our intellectual world on the footing that we get closest to the truth by objective study, logical reasoning and open debate, by what Mill called the “collision of adverse opinions”. I am not suggesting that this is guaranteed to produce truth or the wisest possible outcomes, but experience suggests that in the long term it is more likely to do so than any system of intellectual controls.

These reasons for believing in freedom of expression suggest a number of conclusions that we should bear in mind when we come to think about exceptions.

In the first place, freedom of expression is concerned with the transmission of information or opinion. Not everything that is spoken or written deserves protection. If I write you a letter or an email consisting of nothing but foul-mouthed abuse, I may be committing an offense under the Malicious Communications Act 1988 or the Communications Act 2003. Low level communications of this kind are devoid of intellectual, cultural or political value. In a sense I may be regarded as having communicated my opinion of you, but that hardly counts as an infringement of my right of freedom of expression.

The second conclusion to be drawn from our reasons for believing in free speech is that we should not suppress the expression of facts or opinions simply because they give offense, however understandable that offense may be. If we are not free to say things that other people regard as objectionable, we have no freedom of speech at all. In a famous statement of principle, Lord Justice Sedley observed in the High Court in a case about a Christian fundamentalist street preacher that “free speech includes not only the inoffensive, but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative, provided it does not tend to promote violence. Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.”

Thirdly, it cannot be a good reason for suppressing some assertion or opinion that we think it is wrong or even that everybody thinks it is wrong. Few propositions are incontrovertibly false, in the sense that they are inherently incapable of being affirmed by hitherto unknown facts or fresh analysis. As a general rule, the best answer to misleading speech is counter-speech, i.e. reasoned refutation. Of course, counter-speech does not always work. The barrage of rubbish generated by the internet, generally mediated by algorithms which serve people up with material that confirms their existing prejudices, is a serious challenge. But counter-speech is more likely to work than suppression. Once upon a time, the authorized consensus was that the sun moved round the earth, because that view was supported by Biblical authority, then regarded as a source of incontrovertible truth. Galileo was condemned for denying it. The same point can be made about statements of opinion. Once upon a time the religious and social consensus justified slavery and the imprisonment of homosexuals, because this had been regarded as obvious for centuries. Once upon a time it was taken for granted in Britain that black people were inherently inferior. These views have almost entirely died out in advanced societies in the face of rational discourse.

In 2021 the Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific society, called for legislation to ban the dissemination by anti-vaxxers of “false information” about vaccines, by which they meant information rejected by the scientific consensus. The case for vaccination is not inherently irrefutable. But in the current state of our knowledge, the debate has been won hands down by supporters of vaccination. That has only been possible because there has been a debate. Suppressing public opposition to vaccination will simply drive it underground where it will be more difficult to refute. Holocaust denial is another example. It is an absurd position which has been discredited not by legislation but exposure to the evidence. The great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote some of the greatest judgments of the US Supreme Court in support of free speech, once observed that the guiding principle was that almost all certainty is an illusion. We might always be wrong, he said. All of us can all point to public statements which are untrue, mischievous or absurd, sometimes manifestly so. But manifestness is not a very useful criterion for censoring other peoples’ opinions. Nearly every received opinion which rational examination has discredited was once regarded as manifest by those who held it.

Finally, the concept of free speech assumes that adults are capable of distinguishing what is good from what is bad in the torrent of information to which we are all exposed. In a democratic society, it is necessary to proceed on that assumption, even though we know that it is not always true. In a society which treats every person as entitled to equal consideration and respect, we cannot distinguish between adults according to their degree of intelligence or discernment or their skill in ordering their lives. In a democracy, we have to assume that adults are capable of making discerning choices in their own interest, because the alternative is an authoritarian world in which their choices are taken away from them by the state.

All of this suggests that the threshold for banning the transmission of information or opinion should be exacting. Any exception must, I suggest, be based on some consistent principle, not just on people’s subjective likes and dislikes. The exception should also be consistent with the basic rationale for wanting freedom of expression in the first place. And it must be clearly defined, because if the boundaries of the exception are unclear, we will end up with a freedom that is at least partly discretionary. A freedom which depends on the discretion of the enforcers is no freedom at all.

I suggest that the only speech which we are justified in suppressing by law is speech which is coercive. By that I mean speech which deprives us of our choices because it is threatening, or directly incites violence or manipulates people in highly vulnerable categories, especially children.

The suppression or punishment of speech is a coercive act. The traditional principle of English law has been that it is only justified if the alternative is coercion of a different kind, the coercion which follows from a breakdown of public order. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England, the earliest systematic survey of the common law, published in the 1760s, Sir William Blackstone described a free press as “essential to the nature of a free state”. This was why the common law did not allow pre-publication censorship. Blackstone added that after publication, an author could be punished or mulcted in damages if his words were contrary to public order. This was because the state’s ability to maintain public order was also essential to the nature of a free state and to its role as the guardian of liberty. In Blackstone’s day, the courts were much more willing to take action against provocative speech, because the state had fewer means of maintaining public order. There was no general police force in Britain until the 1830s. In the first half of the 19th century, as Britain became a more orderly, better policed society, speech became less dangerous and the courts became more active in protecting it. However, direct incitement to violence is still the main exception sanctioned by English law to the principle of freedom of expression.

The most interesting analyses of this question come from the American case law. The Americans have a related doctrine known as the “fighting words” exception. Their case law denies that this amounts to censorship, because they distinguish between the content of the message and its consequences. Restrictions on free speech are unacceptable if they are directed to the content of the message. They have to be addressed exclusively to the circumstances in which the words were uttered and to their likely consequences. A rather similar line has been taken in some decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. A good example is the case of Faber v. Hungary, decided in 1992. Faber was a Right-wing activist who had been convicted in Hungary of standing at a site in Budapest where Jews had been massacred in the Second World War and holding up a banner with a fascist symbol. His conviction was held by the Strasbourg court to violate the Human Rights Convention because the mere act of holding up the banner was incapable of disturbing public order or inciting violence. The fact that it was offensive and liable to outrage those who saw it was not enough. That was an objection to the content of Faber’s statement, not to its likely consequences. I think that that is also the approach of English law, even though English judges have been less articulate in saying so. Calling for violence in a university debating society is objectionable but not illegal, whereas calling for violence in front of a howling mob in a city center is likely to be both.

In September of last year, Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months imprisonment for an inflammatory tweet. The case aroused much controversy. Her unsuccessful appeal against the sentence was supported by the Free Speech Union, and the sentence was roundly denounced in The Daily Telegraph and on GB News. This seemed to me to be strange. Her tweet said: “Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care.” If she had expressed this opinion at a meeting of the Women’s Institute, there would have been no problem. The actual circumstances were that the murder of three children in Southport had been attributed (in fact wrongly) to an asylum seeker, at a time when there was rising tension against immigrants in much of the Midlands. If a rabble-rouser stood on a soap-box in front of an angry mob and urged them to head for the nearest immigration hostel and burn it down, the vice of words like these would have been obvious. Doing it on social media is worse because the reach of the internet is so much greater. Its algorithms thrust words like Connolly’s under the noses of people who are already likely to agree. The internet is not a private conversation. It can whip up a violent mob in minutes. Connolly soon regretted her post and deleted it three and a half hours later, but in the short time that it was up, it was viewed 310,000 times and reposted 940 times. It was one of a number of wild statements on the internet following the Southport murders which provoked serious riots across England later that day and violent attacks on mosques and immigration hostels. Connolly was not a free speech martyr. Her conviction was in line with a perfectly rational principle reflecting a centuries-old limitation on free speech.

Incitement to violence is not the only restriction that our law places on free speech. Some of the other restrictions are principled exceptions which are perfectly consistent with the underlying principle of free speech. Others are unprincipled exceptions which should have no place in a rational system of law.

Let’s start with the legal restrictions which I suggest we should accept. The Online Safety Act, which was passed in 2023, is a complex and in some ways clumsily drafted piece of legislation, which hits many targets that were not intended. However, its principal purpose is to require providers of online content to have age verification checks so as to control access by children to manipulative or corrupting material such as pornography or material advocating suicide or self-harm. I have pointed out that the concept of freedom of expression involves treating adults as capable of discernment and of intelligently ordering their lives. The same assumptions cannot apply to children, who are by definition in a state of developing but incomplete maturity, and who do not have the full range of liberties available to adults. It is fair to regard the manipulation of children’s sensibilities as closely analogous to the coercion from which we seek to protect adults.

Next, there are laws which regulate the way in which our right of free speech is exercised, rather than the content of our speech. These too are, in principle, acceptable. For example, you cannot picket abortion clinics within 150 meters of their doors or buy advertising time for political causes on television. The law restricts the picketing of abortion clinics because it harasses women at an emotionally difficult time of their lives, but you can still protest against abortion in ways that do not amount to harassment: you can stand with your placards 160 meters away, demonstrate in Trafalgar Square, write articles in the press, publish podcasts on YouTube, distribute leaflets, and so on. The law forbids political advertising on television in order to provide some limit on the power of big money to buy influence over political debate in a democracy. However, you can still do party political broadcasts, put up posters on billboards, take advertising space in newspapers, or hold political rallies. These restrictions are not directed against the content of any spoken or written statement. There is no infringement of the right to freedom of expression simply because there are some places where you cannot speak. A notice saying “Silence” in a courtroom, church or library is not an infringement of free speech.

My final example is more controversial. It is about the laws relating to defamation and privacy. The law of libel and slander allows people to claim damages from those who have told lies about them. The law of privacy allows those whose privacy has been invaded without any justification in the public interest to claim damages from the intruder. There are legitimate concerns about the granting of injunctions, especially in privacy cases, but I see no reason why the law should not, after proper investigation, correct the financial consequences of lies and intrusions into our private lives by awarding compensation for the damage which these things can cause. I do not regard that as censorship. It simply adjusts as between private individuals the financial consequences of free speech.

If these are legitimate restrictions on freedom of speech, there are others which have been imposed over the last half-century and which ought to cause us real concern. They are designed to protect people not from coercion or manipulation but simply from being offended.

A good example, which is currently topical, is the provision of the Terrorism Act 2000, which forbids public expressions of support for proscribed terrorist organizations. The Act forbids any conduct which involves assisting or participating in the work of a proscribed terrorist organization, which is fair enough. However, it then goes on to forbid expressions of support even where they do not assist the work of the organization but merely amount to the peaceful expression of a favorable opinion about it. Unlike the restrictions which I have just been discussing, this is a direct attack on the content of certain statements. There are people who think that terrorism in the service of a good cause is fine. I think that this is foolish, but should not be criminal. Arresting hundreds of people in Parliament Square for holding up placards saying that they support Palestine Action is an unprincipled interference with freedom of expression.

The main restrictions of this kind come under the broad heading of hate crimes, which is probably the most intrusive and least justifiable interference with freedom of expression in Britain. Hate crimes are based on the Public Order Act of 1986. Their scope has been expanded by successive amendments since the original Act was passed. The position can be summarized as follows: it is an offense to use language which stirs up racial hatred, religious hatred or hatred based on sexual orientation. In the case of religious hatred and hatred based on sexual orientation, the language used has to be threatening. This probably means words which threaten imminent violence, which broadly accords with the law’s traditional approach to breaches of the peace. However, in the case of stirring up racial hatred, the offense is much wider. The language used need not be threatening. It is enough that it should be abusive or offensive. In the case of religious hatred, there is a broadly drawn exception which allows people to discuss or criticize, or express antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of any religious belief or practice. This may be described as a proviso for the benefit of Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, and the late Bertrand Russell, all of whom have had harsh things to say about religious beliefs. Yet there is no such exception in the case of race or sexual orientation. In 2024, 140,561 hate crimes were recorded by the 43 police forces in England and Wales. The breadth of the offense can be seen from the facts that the police have arrested Christian preachers for their street sermons, parents engaged in a dispute with their daughter’s school, and the Irish comedian Graham Linehan for tweeting that women confronted by trans men in women-only spaces should “make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls”.

In addition to hate crimes properly so-called, there is an anomalous category known as “non-crime hate incidents”. The police have a common law power to record incidents. Non-crime hate incidents are not criminal offenses, but are simply incidents which the police are administratively directed to record. They have real consequences and will usually entail intimidating visits and warnings from the police. They will show up on enhanced criminal record checks and may stop people getting jobs. The police defend the practice on the ground that such incidents may lead to real crimes if repeated. This seems rather far-fetched. The job of the police is to enforce the criminal law, not to regulate behavior which is perfectly lawful but may be loutish, offensive, politically incorrect or contrary to received opinion. Different police forces have recorded as non-crime hate incidents gender-critical tweets, tweets critical of the police, accidental damage done by schoolchildren to a copy of the Koran, and even speeches by ministers proposing restrictions on immigration. Harry Miller, who was visited by Humberside police at his workplace and questioned about his gender-critical tweets, took them to court. The conduct of the police, said the judge, offended against a “cardinal democratic principle”. “In this country,” he said, “we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.” Yet last year, more than 13,000 non-crime hate incidents were recorded by police forces in England and Wales.

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“Hatred”, “threatening” and “abusive” are vague terms which cry out for precise definition, but there is no definition of these words in the Public Order Act. “Offensive” is an even vaguer term, which is likewise undefined. On the face of it, the word extends to anything that causes offense. As for non-crime hate incidents, they have no statutory basis at all and therefore no definition either. The looseness of these concepts means that in reality action depends on the discretion of individual police officers. This is not a proper function for a statutory public service or a satisfactory basis for penalizing speech. A police state can fairly be defined as a state in which the police have discretion as to what constitutes an offense. The prosecuting authorities have tried to resolve this problem in a highly unsatisfactory way. The Crown Prosecution Service and the police have agreed to define a hate crime as anything which is perceived by the victim or anyone else to be motivated by hostility or prejudice. In other words, the definition which they use is subjective. If the complainant thinks it is a hate crime, then it is a hate crime. One would think that hatred implied a very high degree of animosity, but the Crown Prosecution Service has suggested that it can include ill-will, ill-feeling, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment, and dislike. Yet all of these, humanity being what it is, are hazards which most of us must expect to live with. Remarkably, until 2021 the College of Policing, which sets standards for the police, after explaining that a hate crime depended on the perception of the victim, added the following observation:

“The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers and staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of hostility is not required for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incident.”

Carried to its logical conclusion, this approach gives racial minorities a right of veto; an entitlement to silence opinions to which they object.

In 2021, the guidance was changed in response to criticism by the Court of Appeal in Miller’s case. The Court of Appeal did not object to the subjective character of the definition, but it held that the guidance was unlawful because it was far too wide. It interfered with Miller’s right of freedom of expression and was likely to have a chilling effect on the discussion of controversial issues like gender. However, the changes to the guidance were minimal. The guidance now says that at the point of receiving the complaint, no justification or evidence is required, leaving open the possibility of seeking such evidence later. The effect is that the investigation of a hate-crime is still dependent on the personal sensitivities of the complainant and the discretion of the police.

All of this originated with the Macpherson Report on the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which was published in 1999. Macpherson made two recommendations which are relevant for present purposes. First, he recommended that the police should systematically record “racist incidents”, a category which he defined as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”. That is the origin of the subjective definitions currently used by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service. Secondly, he recommended that racist incidents should include both crimes and non-crimes. That is the origin of the category of non-crime hate incidents. Experience has shown the Macpherson recommendations have proved to be extremely damaging. Speaking in the House of Lords last November, Lord Hogan-Howe, a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, observed that the recording of hate crime was a well-intended change which had gone wrong. “The definition of a crime is objective and the definition of hate crime is subjective,” he said, “during the time this has been in place, online crime and online hate crime have grown massively, and the application of the hate crime definition has been inconsistent.” Recently, Britain’s largest police force, the Metropolitan Police, announced that it would stop dealing with non-crime hate incidents. The current commissioner, it was announced, “has been clear he doesn’t believe officers should be policing toxic culture war debates, with current laws and rules on inciting violence online leaving them in an impossible position”. So far the Met’s example has not been followed by other police forces.

The most famous test for determining what can and what cannot properly be suppressed is the “harm principle” proposed by John Stuart Mill, the great Victorian apostle of free speech, in his 1859 treatise On Liberty. Mill taught that the only purpose for which power might properly be exercised against individuals against their will was to prevent harm to others. Hate crime and non-crime hate incidents are symptoms of a modern tendency to redefine harm so that it extends to the discomfort caused by having to endure rudeness, contradiction or dissent. When interest groups object to someone’s opinion of them, they commonly call for a subjective approach to its impact. Harm is whatever the relevant target group perceives as harm. It depends on their “lived experience”, as the phrase goes. This way of looking at the harm done by free speech is particularly common when the offended group is a racial, religious or sexual minority. The argument is that words may undermine the dignity of the groups against whom they are directed. Words wound, it is said, especially when they relate to another person’s identity or status. Words are therefore viewed as a form of violence comparable to physical assault. But there are obvious problems with this approach. One is that concepts such as undermining human dignity are too uncertain and subjective to serve as part of the definition of a criminal offense. Another is that there is an important difference between violence and words. Violence is coercive. Words, even if offensive, are not coercive except in those cases where they are calculated to provoke violence.

Today, racial, religious or sexual minorities are said to need protection from hurtful words. The desire to accommodate groups who feel themselves oppressed is understandable. It assists social inclusion. Racial, religious and sexual differences are highly sensitive matters, but they are also major issues in our society, as well as in other countries of Western Europe and North America. They need to be openly discussed without fear of criminal liability. Discussion certainly cannot be suppressed without inviting serious suppressed anger which will ultimately be destabilizing and very bad for community relations. Historically, minorities have been the main victims of censorship and other forms of intellectual and social intolerance and the chief beneficiaries of freedom of speech. As I have pointed out, people once believed in the persecution of sexual minorities, the inferiority racial minorities and the exclusion of religious minorities. These notions were supported by the social consensus of the age, but died out in the face of rational discourse. In general, rational counter-argument is a better way of addressing hate speech than the attempt to suppress it through criminal law.

The suppression or punishment of speech tends to start from the best of motives. Its progress is gradual and frequently unperceived. But the ultimate result is objectionable. Recent legislation and police practice has, I fear, moved away from the distinction between coercion and liberty, which represented the only rational basis for curtailing freedom of expression. The result has been to reduce large parts of the law in this area to incoherence.

Once you start proscribing speech on the sole ground that it offends or distresses people, you open the door to the censorship of any words that people do not like. Without a coherent principle governing the permissible limits of free speech, there is effectively no free speech on some issues, except for those who confine themselves to the inoffensive and the anodyne. I think that that would be a retreat into an unpleasant world.

***

This essay is adapted from the Shrieval Lecture, given at Hereford Town Hall on 12 November 2025

It’s fair to say that Kirk was not over-mourned in the liberal enclave of Bluesky. Elsewhere, though, he was very rapidly attaining a kind of MAGA sainthood — aided by the fact that his killer appeared to be motivated by animosity to Kirk’s anti-trans views. Anyone demurring from the public performance of mourning risked becoming a target of Right-wing rage. Within hours, Felker-Martin received a call from the comics publisher DC, canceling the series Felker-Martin had been working on and terminating their relationship.

That made Felker-Martin one of the many Americans to have been fired or disciplined for being insufficiently respectful towards Kirk. High-profile examples include late-night host Jimmy Kimmel (whose show was temporarily pulled) and the columnist Karen Attiah (who was sacked by The Washington Post). More concerning are the rank-and-file Americans, from hospital workers to restaurant managers, who either lost their jobs or faced formal sanctions: over 145 by The New York Times’ count in late September, and presumably more since then.

In the words of historian Timothy Snyder, from his 2017 book On Tyranny, by canceling Felker-Martin, DC was “obeying in advance”: intuiting what the powerful wanted, and delivering it. Other writers were quick to identify this as a sinister tendency. “It’s an absolute shame that DC fired Gretchen Felker-Martin for exercising free speech,” wrote the feminist author Roxane Gay on Bluesky. “Every writer here should be decrying this because we have to stand up for each other! This is ridiculous.”

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People losing their livelihoods for real or perceived political transgressions, however, is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on for over a decade — it’s just that, until very recently, the vast majority of the victims were identified with Right-wing politics, and so long as that was true, it didn’t strike those of Gay’s persuasion as an issue. In one egregious 2020 case, a worker for the San Diego Gas & Electric company was fired for making a “white supremacist gesture”: he had made the “okay” sign, unaware that it had recently been co-opted by the alt-Right. In another instance, a senior figure in the American Civil Liberties Union — which literally has one job: upholding the First Amendment — favored banning Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Harm, which describes the social contagion of trans identification among teenage girls.

But asked whether cancel culture existed in a 2021 interview, Gay replied robustly: “No, it does not. Cancel culture is this boogeyman that people have come up with to explain away bad behavior… I like to think of it as consequence culture, where when you make a mistake — and we all do, by the way — there should be consequences.” (It would be snide, but not inaccurate, to point out that Felker-Martin’s sacking is also an instance of consequence culture.) Another cancel culture unbeliever was Karen Attiah, who tweeted in 2022 that “‘Cancel culture’ anxiety is not about free speech. It’s about status anxiety.” Concerns about free speech, in other words, were really just concerns about who got to speak — a failure of the once-powerful to accept their new place in the hierarchy. The possibility that the hierarchy might change again and leave the Left on the losing side never apparently occurred.

The intellectual collapse of the liberal Left allowed the Right to monopolize the cause of free speech, even if that position was rarely taken in good faith. One of Donald Trump’s first executive orders in this presidency was titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship”; at the same time, federal websites were being cleansed of oldspeak terms such as “antiracist”, “trauma” and “hate speech”. This government-directed linguistic purge is more disturbing by far than the “soft” repression of Left-wing cancel culture, but it violates the same principle.

While leftist fury held the ascendance, “civility” was treated as a dirty word. “Tone policing” was a grievous sin. The space between politics and violence was intentionally narrowed. Anyone who held the correct beliefs could engage in the most vicious forms of speech with no consequences whatsoever. Like, for example, Felker-Martin. For as long as he has enjoyed a public profile, he has been vivid and explicit about exactly who he thought should be killed and how. But so long as those enemies were Terfs and so anathema to the US mainstream, Felker-Martin faced zero reputational cost for doing so.

In a statement to Wired magazine, DC’s editor in chief tried to present the firing as non-partisan, asserting that “the tone of Gretchen’s posts, not her personal views, was of concern for DC”. If that’s the case, I have to wonder whether DC had any awareness of Felker-Martin’s social media presence or literary output prior to Kirk’s death. Because, compared to much of Felker-Martin’s lurid and sexually inflected writing, “thoughts and prayers you Nazi bitch” is extremely mild stuff. Take this 2019 tweet about the journalist Jesse Singal (a regular target of Felker-Martin’s), the tone of which apparently left DC unperturbed:

“Cis people, fix your hearts* or die.

*Bind Jesse Singal with strong rope and bring him to the quarry at the edge of town. Give him to us alive and unspoiled. Leave, and no matter the sounds you hear, do not look back.”

The motivation for this bizarre bondage scenario is that Singal has reported consistently and fairly on the failures of child gender medicine. That, according to Felker-Martin, amounts to “politely trying to incite genocide”, and this in turn justifies whatever sadistic fantasies Felker-Martin may have. It’s a rationale that invokes a pet idea of the Left’s called “stochastic terrorism”, which maintains that dehumanizing language is a form of violence in itself. Like “cancel culture”, though, “stochastic terrorism” was politicized beyond usefulness: instances in which the Left itself could be dehumanizing never figured in the analysis.

Usually, I would try to argue for a separation between an artist’s social media and their art. But in Felker-Martin’s case, it’s hard to make that distinction because his fiction is very much in the same genre of inventing justifications for violence, and then imagining that violence in pornographic detail. Manhunt is the story of two trans women surviving in the post-apocalyptic remains of society after a zombifying virus has ravaged anyone with sufficiently high testosterone: the protagonists are engaged in a constant hunt for DIY HRT in order to avoid succumbing themselves.

But while the rabid men are dangerous, the true antagonists are the members of a Terf militia, who are dedicated to rounding up and executing any surviving trans women. And it’s when describing the Terfs’ deaths that Felker-Martin is most obviously excited. Imminent violence against women goes hand-in-hand with arousal in Manhunt. When the two protagonists first encounter the militia and are preparing for a confrontation, Felker-Martin writes of one: “Her cock was hard, tenting the front of her stupid cargo shorts.”

In the moral schema of Manhunt, women deserve punishment for holding disobliging beliefs about trans women, even when those beliefs are an accurate reflection of what the trans women understand about themselves. The Terf militia leader inveighs against “Men who take sexual pleasure in stealing our bodies. In wearing our skin,” and this is presented as one of the many misdeeds for which she will ultimately pay with her humiliating death. But given one of the trans woman protagonists elsewhere recalls a teenage crush on a girl with “a body she’d wanted more to hollow out and crawl inside than fuck”, is the militia leader actually wrong?

In one especially unpleasant scene, Felker-Martin imagines the militia leader executing a defector from her ranks by disemboweling her and extracting her uterus, holding it up for the watching crowd with the words: “No life without a womb.” The purpose of this scene is to demonstrate the endless depravity of what, in the book, are referred to contemptuously as “menopausal white ladies” or “sneering middle-class white women”. It vindicates the trans characters’ decision to “kill them all and piss on their corpses”.

The ultimate “sneering middle-class white lady”, from Felker-Martin’s perspective, is J.K. Rowling, and Manhunt acquired a burst of notoriety from one specific scene in which Rowling’s death is narrated. Within the world of the book, Rowling attempted to ride out the infection “at her castle in Scotland with a bunch of her rich girlfriends”. The “girl-power retreat”, however, rapidly goes south: one of the friends has PCOS (meaning she has higher than usual testosterone), which leads to her contracting the virus and starting a rampage that leads to the castle burning, killing all inside, Rowling included.

In response to outrage at this, Felker-Martin presented himself as a victim of misrepresentation. This is dishonest. The narrative takes pleasure in imagining Rowling’s death — the character who tells the story is “grinning evilly” — and the entire scenario is constructed as a Dante-esque punishment. Within Manhunt, Rowling is destroyed by her privilege, and by her apparently deluded belief in binary human sex. It is sadistic and disturbing, and almost none of the reviews noted this. Manhunt instead received supportive notices from NPR (“brilliantly imagined”), New York Magazine (“full of… messy, beautiful humanity”) and The New Yorker (“tender”).

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The fact that Felker-Martin is obnoxious, misogynistic and crass doesn’t mean he deserved to lose his job over a bad tweet. But, realistically, he only had that job because this is the kind of person and the kind of art — obnoxious, misogynist and crass — that the liberal culture of the last five years chose to celebrate. Manhunt is not a good novel: it lurches from scene to scene with little explanation of how you got there, and the characters are so loosely drawn that they blur into each other. This is not even James Herbert, and yet it was lauded by critics as though it were George Eliot. Felker-Martin could only have achieved cultural prominence in a milieu that prized rightthink above artistic quality.

Liking Manhunt was a test of allegiance to the cause. The more violence you could stomach, the more you were overcoming your unconscious transphobia; and (for female readers) the more you could find pleasure in the degradation of women, the more you proved that you weren’t a part of the despicable “cisterhood” who apparently deserved this degradation. His pattern of sexualized harassment against individuals such as Singal was ignored because, as a trans woman, Felker-Martin could claim the perverse privilege of the most oppressed.

Not content with fictionally destroying female writers, Felker-Martin also sought to trash their reputations. He was especially savage about Sandra Newman’s novel The Men, which like Manhunt was published in 2022, and described a world in which every person with a Y chromosome — trans women included — had mysteriously disappeared. This “repellent premise”, according to Felker-Martin, was “fundamentally transmisogynistic” (even though it is not very different from Felker-Martin’s own book, albeit with fewer scenes of misogynistic butchery). That charge fed into a broader denunciation of Newman’s novel. The Men was bombed with one-star ratings on Goodreads even before it was out; an author who defended Newman’s novel was punished by having her own book removed from consideration for an LGBT literary prize.

I wonder whether this is what Roxane Gay would class as “consequence culture”. There was no call for solidarity with Newman like the one Gay would later make for Felker-Martin: no declaration that “every writer” should “stand up for each other”. Newman was deemed on the wrong side of history, and so she was allowed to sink. The recent rediscovery of free speech is difficult to swallow from people who have spent the last 10 years or so either airily downplaying the threat from their own, or actively making it worse.

Felker-Martin did not agree with Kirk about very much, but they did share an essentially martial vision of the world. Kirk saw himself as a soldier for God, while for Felker-Martin, every disagreement is a war: “I have fuck-all time for a consensus.” This belief, that the only worthy way of life involves bloodletting, has been incubated on both sides of the American divide. Now, under Trump, the Right has the opportunity to crush its enemies, and it is doing so with relish, using techniques that the Left has refined. If this is how the Left rediscovers free speech as a universal principle, it’s been an expensive lesson, but a necessary one.

But a healthy culture needs other values too: it needs moral and aesthetic judgments that do not split along party lines. It needs to be able to say who is, and is not, a good person. It needs to be able to say what is, and is not, good art. Felker-Martin is the free-speech martyr that the Left of the last decade deserves: unpleasant, unsympathetic and almost impossible to defend.

In February, in response to Vice-President Vance’s criticism of the British State’s suppression of free speech, Sir Keir managed to get his bit out: “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time […] I’m very proud of our history there.” Is he very though?

Is it pride he feels when he looks at the history of the Paul Chambers case, for instance, when the CPS, under his leadership as Director of Public Prosecutions, pursued a young man through the Magistrates, Crown, and High Courts, for a harmless piece of flippancy, an obvious joke about blowing up an airport, which none of the relevant authorities took seriously? If there’s any truth to the Guardian’s report of his personal intervention to continue fighting Chambers’s appeal “to save face” (and it is inconceivable he wasn’t aware of the matter) then he must have had in mind a different pride, and a different history.

But his answer flew well enough, and the discussion moved on. A few months later, in Scotland, the question was again raised in front of the US President. Dusting his cuff and pulling a grin as if in dad-like apology for an overused joke, he parried with, “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time here, so we’re very proud about that and we’ll be protecting it,” before being interrupted. Indoors later that day, he again stuck to the script — “Free speech in this country has been [sic] for a very long time, and we’re very very proud of it, we will protect it forever.”

The fourth outing of the very-very-long-time-very-very-proud defense came at Chequers the other week. “It’s one of the founding values of the United Kingdom, and we protect it jealously and fiercely, and always will, and we will bear down on any limits on free speech,” he began. And to conclude, “We have had free speech in this country for a very long time and we will always protect it.” But sandwiched between these two pieces of now familiar pabulum was something with a new flavor: “I draw a limit between free speech and the speech of those that want to peddle paedophilia and suicide social media to children.” The Paedo Pivot. They should teach it at Bar school.

Over the two months since Trump’s Scottish visit, something in the order of 2,000 people were arrested in the UK for online communications offenses, including, most publicly, Graham Linehan. In an attempt to deflect the backlash from the comedian’s detention, the PM said the police should “focus on the most serious issues”, while the Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley put out a statement asserting that it’s not the police’s fault as they have no choice but to investigate reported hate crimes, and the law needs to be changed.

Clearly, then, there is defensive anxiety among the new Establishment about restrictions on Free Speech in the UK. But whose fault is it, and what can be done?

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My own experience of the senior ranks of the police, which comes mainly from defending officers in their disciplinary tribunals, often for speech transgressions of one kind or another, is that the Force has been more thoroughly captured by extreme progressive zealotry than any comparable institution. For evidence, peruse almost any of the College of Policing’s recent output.

The Hate Crime Operational Guidance is, as you might imagine, representative. Turgid and internally inconsistent, it contains countless encouragements to go in hard on the likes of Linehan: “Positive action should be taken,” “Hate crimes should be treated as priority incidents,” “There are occasions where an immediate response by a police officer may not be appropriate or possible… Where such delays occur, a supervisor should consider the reasons given and set out a clear plan for how and when the incident will be responded to.” At the same time, a light dusting of uninformative references to “proportionality” provides plausible deniability.

But the only important message — that officers have wide discretion and must use their common sense — is buried among little nudges as to how that discretion should be exercised: “Where the evidence justifies it, taking positive action is preferable, but the decision to arrest is always a matter for officers, and should be based on the evidence available at the time.” Taking all this stuff together, the thrust of the guidance is clear: if a member of a protected group alleges hate crime, and you don’t get stuck in immediately, you’ll have to answer for it.

So Commissioner Rowley is right to say the Guidance could usefully be amended, but he’s wrong to imply that officers have no choice but to investigate. When an allegation contains no crime, as in the recent Linehan arrest, or when it does but the crime is trivial, the police need make no arrest. Indeed, generally they must make no arrest, because for an arrest to be lawful it has to be “necessary” — a law the police routinely ignore. Most victims of unnecessary arrests don’t have the money to sue. Linehan, funded by the Free Speech Union, is an exception.

But the UK’s status as global number-one free-speech laughing stock does not rest solely, or even mainly, on the volume of arrests, but rather on the substantial sentences of imprisonment that can follow these arrests — of which my former client Lucy Connolly’s is perhaps the best-known example. Although I write this with her knowledge and consent, my role as her advocate is over. How, then, did she end up spending over a year in prison, for posting and then deleting after less than four hours, “Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care. While you’re at it, take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.”

The simplest answer, as her less forgiving critics would have it, is that she pleaded guilty to Stirring Up Racial Hatred, and accepted the Crown’s case that she was guilty of both the more serious version of the offense — s.19(1)(b) intention to stir up — and the highest categorization on the sentencing guidelines — intention to incite serious violence. That gave a starting point of three years’ imprisonment before the reduction for a guilty plea. And then the Court of Appeal rejected her claim not to have properly understood what she put her signature to when accepting an intention to incite serious violence. So what, really, is the problem?

Well, even if she had understood that she was signing up to be sentenced for an intention to incite serious violence (and I have no wish, and no need, to relitigate that here), her agreement would have been made in the same spirit as her admitted agreement to be sentenced on the basis of an intention to stir up racial hatred: namely, that she didn’t think she would win if she argued it in front of a judge, and she didn’t want to risk losing any of her guilty plea discount by trying.

To be clear, she said in the police interview that she “didn’t intend to cause hate or racial issues”, and despite waiving privilege in the Court of Appeal, there was no evidence of her ever having said to anyone that she had in fact had any criminal intention. Rather, her decision to accept the Crown’s allegation of intent was really a predictive judgment call, a guess at the inferences a judge would draw— and one about which both she, and the lawyer who was advising her at the time, may well have been right.

So, on one view, the problem isn’t so much the action of this particular court in this particular case — which was, after all, presented with an apparent acceptance to be sentenced on the Crown’s case with no argument about intention. But rather it is the broader political climate in which a defendant in Mrs Connolly’s position can make an accurate judgment, on accurate legal advice, that a judge will probably decide that her tweet demonstrated, to the criminal standard of “sure”, an intention to incite serious violence. For my own part, I just can’t see it.

Certainly, there were elements of the proceedings which, in my opinion, might have been different, and might then have made some difference. The Crown could have split the allegation into two counts to at least give her the option of putting to a jury, rather than a judge, the issue of whether she even intended to stir up racial hatred (let alone incite serious violence). And the decision to refuse her bail on 22 August 2024, two weeks after the riots had stopped, was, in my view, unjustifiable. Nevertheless, she might still have made the same decisions regarding her plea, and might still have been right to do so.

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The trouble is, to the Progressive mind the success of multiculturalism isn’t just good, it’s the highest good, and its failure the worst ill. All decent people, therefore, will carefully avoid saying or doing anything that even might push things in the wrong direction. And so anyone who does take that risk is not a decent person, and can only really have been intending the bad outcome: if you don’t want the worst imaginable thing to happen, you don’t take the slightest chance of bringing it about. It’s only a short distance away from “silence is violence”: evil must be fought, not ignored, and certainly not diced with. This, in any event, seems to me the most likely chain of reasoning, unconscious or otherwise, of those that believe Lucy Connolly deserved her 31-month sentence.

But it’s not generally fair, nor conducive to the aim of restoring free speech in the UK, to simply blame the judges. Of course the judiciary is more Left-wing than the national average. Even Tony Blair thought so. But it’s the same in all professions. They’re Gen-X-ers and young boomers who attended top universities in the late 20th century. It would be astonishing if it were otherwise. But on the criminal side at least (I make no comment about immigration tribunals), they tend not to be activists. Most of their work has no political valence to it, and the culture in their corridors, so far as I’m familiar with it, is to try very hard to be boringly fair. They don’t always succeed, but politics basically isn’t their game.

It would be nice if the judiciary were more politically representative of the people they serve, if only for optics’ sake. But if your free speech laws cannot withstand a wave of Left-wingers on the bench, then those laws aren’t up to much.

So if the law isn’t currently up to it, how should it be changed? First, section 127 Communications Act 2003, which criminalizes “grossly offensive” messages sent privately even where the recipient is unbothered, delighted or amused, must be repealed: we should be free to send electronically anything we are permitted to say in person. This outdated offense, with its absurd privileging of “a public electronic communications network”, has no place in modern society.

Secondly, Stirring Up Racial Hatred needs a refresh. As another former client Jamie Michael discovered to his detriment, all that’s required — at least for an arrest and prosecution, although not in his case a conviction — is a spirited objection to illegal immigration with a couple of borderline-insulting words thrown in. The 1976 expansion of the offense, to include words that are merely “likely” to stir up racial hatred, now has too great a chilling effect. After all, there arguably is a good chance that some racist somewhere might see your punchy anti-immigration post and feel inspired to a shade more hatred than they were feeling already. And that is now enough for the police to put your door in.

Whereas common sense and proportionality were once inherent features of the system at every level – before the communality of the rules of political engagement, including the conventions around free speech, had been fractured — now they might be absent until — as in Jamie’s case — they are effortfully injected by legal argument in the Crown Court about the jurisprudence on the right to freedom of expression. Safer, then, to just keep your mouth shut on the most significant political issue of our age.

The curious fact that both sides in the culture war offer the same answer about where “the line” should be drawn — speech that incites real-world violence — shows that it is no answer at all. Causation is a quicksilver concept, which lawyers, like philosophers, struggle to delineate. Are you morally responsible, and should you be held criminally liable, for a bad outcome if you can foresee that your words could make that outcome more likely?

If the outcome is bad enough — like terrorism — the answer is sometimes yes. That is why, in those rare cases, we criminalize the mere expression of support. The modern State, though, now seems to be taking a de facto similar attitude to expressions of political opinion that have the potential to influence others in a way that threatens the wellbeing of its sacred cows. But that is not terrorism, and should not be illegal.

Obviously, the less racial hatred there is, the better. The law can, and does, seek to reduce it. But to try to silence millions of citizens who want to share their views on immigration, despite in some cases lacking the verbal dexterity required to avoid rude words and other tripwires, is a terrible own goal.

Starmer reminded us, in his conference speech this week, of the mid-century roots of his socialist convictions: his father’s frustration that the nation did not respect him because he worked with his hands. But the frustrations of the modern working class, certainly on immigration, seem to be of less concern – acknowledged, now and then, but always with a disapproving caveat: “This party is proud of our flags, yet if they are painted alongside graffiti telling a Chinese takeaway owner to ‘go home’…”

Suppressed views, like suppressed emotions, tend to erupt with great force. If disputes over our nation’s future are to be conducted peacefully through debate and not violently on the streets, speech must be free. And if Keir Starmer wants that to last a very, very long time, as he claims, he must act now, and make us all very, very proud.

We also need reflection that condemns violence without slipping into mythmaking. Because alongside the horror of what happened, there is also the reality of who Kirk was and what he stood for.

Kirk’s Christian convictions were, I believe, sincerely held, as was his commitment to free speech. He would, no doubt, hate the idea of people being fired from their job for reacting bluntly (or even cruelly) to his death. But history is already being rewritten in the rush to memorialize him. To claim that many of his positions on race, gender, and religion were not on the furthest edge of the conservative spectrum is either pure denial, or evidence of how ideas once thought relics of the past have steadily crept back into the mainstream.

So, what did Kirk actually believe? When we look at his positions across a range of issues, the picture is clear enough — and it’s far from moderate. He insisted the “Great Replacement” — a far-Right conspiracy theory — was real. He dismissed the Civil Rights Movement as “a huge mistake”. He expressed suspicion of black professionals, painted Muslims as a civilizational threat, and repeated antisemitic tropes about Jewish influence. On gun violence, he argued mass shootings were a necessary price for the Second Amendment — scant comfort to families who have lost children in classrooms. On abortion, he said he would force his 10-year-old daughter to carry a pregnancy to term even if she was raped. That these views are widely held in the US makes them no less hard-line.

His supporters might mount spirited defenses of Kirk’s views on race or culture or guns, in an attempt to portray him more favorably. For others in the hard-Right ecosystem, his refusal to condemn homosexuals in the most extreme terms may have marked him ‘’moderate’’ by contrast. It’s when we turn to his positions on constitutional questions that ludicrous claims Kirk was simply a center-right provocateur truly collapse.

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Hosting a Trump rally in Georgia in October 2024, Kirk told the 10,000-strong crowd, “This is a Christian state. I’d like to see it that way.” Kirk’s embrace of Christian nationalism shows his politics were far from middle-of-the-road. Once willing to affirm the constitutional safeguard of church–state separation, he later dismissed it as a “myth” and argued that America should be governed by Christian values. He endorsed theocratic ideas like the “Seven Mountains Mandate” — a doctrine holding that Christians must seize control of the seven key spheres of society (government, education, media, arts, business, family, religion) to establish dominion. Kirk understood that the rise of Trumpism presented a unique opportunity to challenge secular, pluralist governance, and in 2021 established Turning Point Faith — a branch of his organization designed to mobilize churches and pastors, explicitly fusing evangelical activism with Right-wing politics.

In a free country, Kirk had the right to think, say and do all of this — but make no mistake: this was not center-right conservatism but the language and strategy of the Christian hard-Right. Some will insist he was not “far-Right,” reserving that label for Klan robes and open fascists. But narrowing of the term is just as dangerous as overusing it and ignores how far-Right politics have softened their aesthetic and slipped into the mainstream. The reluctance to embrace the label reflects not moderation, but Kirk’s talent for laundering radical views as common sense — most of it on campus, where his charisma and quick wit turned sparring into theatre.

He could pivot from combative to compassionate, sharp-edged to endearing, blurring the line between persuasion and performance. One example came in an exchange with a non-binary student. Kirk advised them to be very careful about medication and urged them to aspire to be comfortable with the body they were born with. Even if some would regard this as transphobic, the tone of the encounter was nonetheless marked by a degree of empathy — complicating the portrait of him as a purely hateful figure. On YouTube, however, what endured were the highlight-reel victories — clips of nervous students being “owned”, often edited for maximum impact — giving him an aura of intellectual dominance. His debating style was less open-ended than it seemed: more like rehearsed routines, polished through repetition, not unlike ‘’crowd work’’ in comedy. A student might think they had mounted a devastating challenge, only to discover Kirk had answered the same question dozens of times before.

Kirk was reminiscent of a bullish Christopher Hitchens during the heyday of the New Atheist movement, when he toured the Bible Belt turning priests and rabbis into cannon fodder for the entertainment of the crowd. Hitchens fans will bristle at the comparison — and rightly, because Hitchens’s intellect and rhetorical ferocity would likely have torn Kirk apart — but the performance element was strikingly similar. And like Hitchens, Kirk thrived on YouTube, cultivating a cult-like following that congratulated itself on intellectual seriousness while rarely subjecting its hero’s arguments to genuine scrutiny. On the rare occasions when Kirk faced seasoned opponents, such as his bruising exchange with a Cambridge Union feminist, the mask slipped: the charm gave way to petulance, and the performance faltered.

Kirk’s campus appearances should be seen for what they often were: set-pieces, not robust, open-ended exchanges of ideas. To present him now as the lone arbiter of free exchange in this context is also misleading and does a disservice to many of his opponents.

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A convenient narrative has taken hold: that the very campuses where Kirk made his name as a debater are now hotbeds of censorship and proof of democratic decay. Sadly, this narrative is not entirely baseless. Yet while some students tried and failed to block his appearances, just as many chose to engage him. His fame rested in part on their willingness to argue back, even when the playing field was heavily tilted in his favor.

A central plank of the conservative strategy is to caricature the Left as irredeemably “woke” and incapable of reasoned debate. Kirk understood that nowhere was this easier to stage than on campus, where students brimmed with confidence but often lacked experience or composure. By turning their faltering challenges into “lib-owning” theater, he not only polished his own reputation but reinforced a broader narrative of progressive fragility — a tactic that displayed his undeniable political intelligence.

For many disaffected young people, conservatives like Kirk and Jordan Peterson before him provided catharsis: the thrill of watching “snowflakes” get their comeuppance. What began as entertainment soon became an entry point into conservatism, which, compared to the rigid, doctrinaire tone of online activism, felt warmer and more welcoming. While the Right isn’t quite the easy-going broad-church of ideas it likes to claim, a solidarity can develop between hardline conservatives and disaffected liberals, who find common cause in their contempt for the “Left’’. In this context, genuine concern about free speech becomes the hard-Right’s primary youth recruitment tool.

Kirk’s talent was to veil extreme Right-wing views many Americans would find abhorrent, behind that moderate aesthetic: the suit, the charm, the affable style. Conservatives in his mold rose not through the force of their arguments alone, but by capitalizing on a Left that had grown intellectually complacent and morally self-satisfied — a strategic opening Kirk was quick to seize.

But the project was clear — to normalize ideas that, only a decade earlier, would have been recognized as hard-Right, reactionary, and deeply consequential for women and minorities if written into law.

Where Tyler Robinson, the young man accused of killing Kirk, fits into this story remains murky. But whatever his political beliefs, America’s ideological obsession with firearms — an obsession Kirk shared — clearly played a decisive role in this tragedy. Photographs have already surfaced of Robinson as a child, posing with an array of high-powered weapons. Culturally, he had been exposed to mass shootings countless times before he ever became politically engaged. He knew the grim fame that comes with such spectacles — a uniquely American notoriety.

Armed only with extreme beliefs, Robinson would likely have been just another troubled young man mouthing off into the void of the internet. It’s dishonest and cowardly of many on the Right to cast Kirk as a martyr to intellectual fearlessness while, at the same time, minimizing or dismissing this point.

Progressives should welcome honest conversation about the role Leftist ideologies may have played in this horrifying event. It remains to be seen whether this latest outburst of political violence in the US will prompt conservatives to reexamine their love affair with firearms. I somehow doubt it will. But we will find out whether the commitment to so-called free speech amounts to anything more than free speech for those they agree with — given how many US conservatives, Trump included, are now waging a very Christian brand of cancel culture in the wake of this tragedy.

Kirk once remarked that “you can tell a lot about a person by how they react when someone dies”. Now, in the wake of his own assassination, we face the same test: whether to respond with denial, mythmaking, or glee — or to condemn the violence plainly while refusing to launder the politics he championed.

Now, with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Republicans have a new pretext for blatantly violating the First Amendment. Attorney General Pam Bondi has promised to “come after those who engage in hate speech,” distinguishing between “free speech” and “hate speech.” As she said in a recent interview: “There’s no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society. … We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” Vice President JD Vance is no better: “Call them out, and hell, call their employer,” he said as he guest-hosted an episode of Kirk’s podcast. “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.” Sen.Ted Cruz, who at least insisted that the First Amendment safeguards hate speech, told a Politico panel that he endorsed “naming and shaming” as a means of supporting a “functioning and vibrant democracy.”

It is almost amusing to hear Republicans talk this way after spending the last decade decrying the illiberal, woke Left. Now, instead of defending their own professed values, they have lustily adopted every last woke pathology. Those progressive pathologies were all too real. “Naming and shaming” is indeed what many liberal activists advocated for in the 2010s, waging Twitter-fueled cancellation attempts against anyone who violated their orthodoxies. In the wake of Trump’s first presidential victory, the Left, along with organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, took what they considered to be reasonable measures for desperate times: abandoning discourse among friends, standards in journalism, and defenses of free speech. Just ask anyone who wanted, in 2020, to say that the police should not be defunded or Covid vaccine mandates for employment were an infringement on labor rights and personal liberty. 

The Left’s forms of censorship were more subtle than Trump’s heavy-handed approach, but they existed at a nexus of government, corporate, and institutional power, and came to define the movement in the public eye. Tech platforms, in collaboration with the government, forcefully suppressed information, whether it was the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop or discussion of the Wuhan lab-leak theory. Twitter and Facebook shadow-banned offending accounts, and many institutions, not least colleges, unduly muzzled students and faculty who vented dissident views. As the Left veered into illiberalism, the Right became, for a period, the champion of speech rights.

But those days are long over — and that could be good for the Left. 

The MAGA regime is plainly disdainful of free speech. It is abusing the powers of the federal government because it has yet to fully control the private institutions where liberals still hold significant sway. There is absolutely no difference between the Left’s dedication to cancel culture and Cruz’s call for “naming and shaming.” Or, for that matter, Vance effectively demanding that anyone who says something he doesn’t like about his slain friend get fired from their job. Or the X account Libs of TikTok boasting of making calls to dozens of ordinary people’s employers to get them fired for anti-Kirk messages.

Most ominous is Bondi, who appears ready to wield the full machinery of the Justice Department against the American Left because there are political views in the country she finds distasteful. There are no legal grounds for arresting or even harassing an individual who espouses so-called hate speech. Indeed, the Constitution protects hate speech, as the Supreme Court has affirmed. Bondi knows this. What she is hoping to do, though, is to intimidate the Left and break it on the cultural terrain. Success is doubtful, but she has the power to disrupt the lives of many activists, politicians, and intellectuals, the way the 20th-century FBI and CIA menaced, surveilled, and infiltrated the Left.

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The last time conservatives were so openly hostile to speech rights, George W. Bush was president, but that administration, at the minimum, had the excuse of the worst terrorist attack in American history. The 9/11 attack was the pretext for setting up a mass surveillance state, spying on American citizens, and intimidating opponents of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars into silence. It was vile, but it had some logic to it.  

Kirk is another matter entirely. His assassination is a tragedy and should not have happened. Yet it does not represent a grave new threat to national security or the American people more broadly. Thousands of civilians were not killed in cold blood. Conservatives can insist it’s the American Left that killed Kirk — the radicals. There may be a radical and radicalizing online discourse that destabilizes such people, and Tyler Robinson seems to have succumbed to the Left-wing variety. But there’s no formal organization or movement behind Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old alleged shooter. He is, in the tradition of American assassins, an alienated, angry, and very young gunman. This is true of most assassins and mass shooters; they have confused and disordered inner lives. Post-hoc justifications are crafted to elucidate what is, ultimately, a form of deep mental illness, and one that occurs on both sides. It is true that the Left has been guilty of blaming mass shootings on an infectious Right-wing ideology but, in almost every instance, the violence had no clear cause that could neatly fit a political binary. Now conservatives are guilty of the same fallacy. 

A good question is what Kirk, a man who defended free discourse, would ask for now. Would he want his death to be used as a pretext for shutting down debate? We’ll never know. One of the great failings of Kirk — yes, it’s acceptable to criticize the recently deceased — was that he was usually willing to jettison certain principles in the service of Trump and MAGA. He did this repeatedly, from dropping his pursuit of the Epstein files once Trump wanted the matter dropped, to flip-flopping from isolationist to supportive of Trump’s bombing of Iran. 

With the Right wing apparently finished with free speech, it will be up to the Left to defend and champion it anew. This is possible, still. At the very minimum, the many activists, pundits, and politicians who dismissed the First Amendment’s value in the last decade are discovering, again, why it’s so vital. We can only hope they’ve learned their lesson and are ready to embrace principle over political expediency — only that will bring back the votes.

What might this look like? In the 20th century and into the Aughts, there was rarely any conflict between progressive values and free speech. Leftists understood that an unstinting defense of the First Amendment was vital, and to support the speech rights of so-called enemies was necessary if a climate of free discourse was to survive. The American Civil Liberties Union defended the right of the Ku Klux Klan to hold a march, and drew a clear distinction between that and an endorsement of the organization’s racist ideology. In the 2020s, Democratic politicians and Left-leaning organizations like the ACLU must become speech champions again. Americans believe in the First Amendment, and they don’t want their rights trampled on. Can liberals and progressives earnestly safeguard these rights once more? It’s not impossible. MAGA, certainly, has handed them an opportunity. 

I know Hatef very well, and not just because it became the longest-running weekly in my native Guilan province. It was run by my mother — and my father, until he died suddenly in March, at the age of 57. And so, in the most literal sense, I grew up with Iranian journalism, and all its triumphs and challenges. I saw censorship and financial hardships, outdated labor regulations and corruption.

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Local firms were often reluctant to put ads in the magazine, while provincial authorities ran a covert sabotage operation against the magazine. It was just too disobedient to be given any extra lifeline. Whenever Hatef ran a story revealing institutional malfeasance, legal repercussions inevitably followed. In June 2001, for instance, the Guilan University of Medical Sciences filed an official complaint after it reported that the number of HIV patients in the city of Astara had reached alarming levels.

It’s hard to get published here. Publicly distributed literature requires a license from the Ministry of Culture. Once that’s granted, a committee for “supervising the press” actively monitors what the newspaper, magazine or website publishes. This ensures they can be disciplined appropriately when needed, and that nothing that “disturbs the public opinion” makes it to print. Those red lines are defined and readjusted rapidly: editors and reporters are supposed to have the presence of mind to know what can go out, and what should be bowdlerized.

These days, for instance, when the morality police harass women in public, newspapers are expected to either ignore them or else rehash the official talking points if something unpleasant happens: underlying health conditions; suicide; drugs. Nor can the country’s costly nuclear program be criticized. All a journalist should write is that this is an entirely peaceful scheme meant exclusively for electricity production.

And for those who go too far? The supervisory committee has been responsible for shutting down hundreds of newspapers and websites. There’s no comprehensive inventory of the publications that have been shut down, though history offers something of a guide. Right after the revolution, in August 1979, over 20 newspapers were banned following an order by Tehran’s revolutionary court. That included Yoldash, printed in Azeri, which was closed for running a caricature of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In April 2000, when Mohammad Khatami was president, a hardline judge called Saeed Mortazavi announced the closure of 18 newspapers overnight. To justify his spree, Mortazavi cited legal passages stating that “criminals” and “clinically insane” individuals weren’t entitled to possess instruments (read: newspapers) that could cause “accidents”.

Mortazavi didn’t stop there. By February 2004, he had personally overseen the closure or license revocation of some 90 publications. His rampage against the reformist press came on the heels of remarks by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, whose incendiary broadsides against newspapers as the bulwark of “the enemy” at home were construed by the judiciary as a declaration of war against the nonconformist press. Mortazavi, the so-called “hangman of the press”, was himself imprisoned, in 2018, for his role in the torture and killing of four political prisoners arrested during the 2009 Green Movement. But he was released before his two-year term ended.

In a press freedom factsheet released in September 2001, the Committee to Protect Journalists estimated that “at least” 52 newspapers had been banned by the Islamic Republic since 1979. And while print reporters can plausibly get something out, their colleagues in multimedia journalism have even less space. The tentacles of state media are so far-reaching that the idea of being a television or radio reporter presupposes that you’re an employee of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), the entity supervised by the Supreme Leader and with an absolute monopoly on multimedia broadcasting rights. Private broadcasters don’t exist.

The punishment for any infraction, meanwhile, can be worse than unemployment: the Islamic Republic is notorious as one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists. In 2022, it imprisoned at least 62 reporters. At the same time, journalism education is uncharted territory, and the most distinguished journalists are self-taught, often with degrees in other fields.

Against these odds, though, a sliver of independent, pro-reform newspapers remain. And dailies such as Shargh, Ham-Mihan or Sazandegi have been a thorn in the side of the theocracy. Military commanders, and even the ayatollah himself, launch occasional tirades about newspapers being “counterrevolutionary” outlets betraying their country.

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Independent journalists have broken some big stories. Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi rattled the conscience of a nation with their courageous reporting on the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Iranian morality police in September 2022. They spent 17 months in prison for their work of journalism before being “pardoned” earlier this year. Years earlier, Banafsheh Samgiss, another prominent journalist, was imprisoned after reviewing a book about the role of women in Iranian music.

More to the point, the fact that this sort of reporting is sometimes taken seriously, and generates universal interest, suggests that Iranians indeed appreciate solid independent journalism. Just as important, the striking sensitivity of the Islamic Republic leaders to a free press suggests that they understand critical voices can cut through indoctrination. If people are made aware of what it’s like to live in a democracy, there’s a chance they’ll revolt for change.

Not that we should exaggerate. Many Iranians remain skeptical of domestic reporting regardless of its provenance, even stories emanating from non-governmental media. No less important, state censorship has been so forceful that many Iranians now look for their news abroad: according to one recent poll, a quarter of respondents don’t have any trust in domestic journalism.

Indeed, an increasing number of Iranians rely on diaspora media. That includes Telegram channels run by exiled dissidents; Persian broadcasters in Western capitals; and social media stars who speak the same language as their cynical followers, both literally and figuratively. Crushed by bad governance, jaded Iranians are looking for reports that don’t wrap words in journalistic euphemisms. Rather, they want journalists who have both the ability and inclination to call a corrupt politician a “bastard”.

So if the free press has never been stronger, might the media ultimately foment a more fundamental transition: including revolution in Iran? Let’s face it, over the long sweep of history, journalists have rarely precipitated radical political change absent other ingredients. But in the face of rising international isolation and domestic asphyxiation, even as the specter of a full-fledged war looms large, one fact about Iran has hardly ever been contested. A dynamic if ailing civil society, including a press that raises a voice of dissent whenever possible, prevents the country from becoming the North Korea of the Middle East. I’m sure my father would be proud.

“The… so-called investigation into the University I represent was flawed and politically motivated,” a furious Professor Sasha Roseneil wrote for Politics Home, shortly after the findings of academic freedom director Arif Ahmed were leaked to the Financial Times. Her experience of the investigation had been “Kafkaesque”, she said, and the “implications for the higher education sector could be dire”.

As it happens, I have some experience of Kafkaesque investigations at Sussex myself, so I can sympathize with Roseneil’s frustration. Under prolonged official scrutiny at various points for what I felt sure were fairly innocuous statements about sex and gender, I too felt a bit like Josef K at times. But the OFS’s investigation did not concern such stressful moments for me directly, nor did it deal with the equally surreal period of campus protests and harassment — posters and banners saying “Fire Stock”, manifestos in buildings telling people to “get angry” — before my resignation in 2021. Focusing instead on regulatory matters, its main conclusions relate to the university’s former “Trans and Non-Binary Policy”. As far as I am concerned, the findings are very welcome; I hope the sector finally pays proper attention.

In 2018, when this policy document was first published, something like it was mandatory for any organization that wished to climb Stonewall’s then sought-after workplace rankings. The more radical you were prepared to be in eliminating traces of biological sex from your organization, the better your chances of getting a virtual gong. Among other things, such policies were supposed to cover what bathrooms and changing facilities trans-identified people were entitled to use (typically, almost any of them); and what words would be tolerated about trans-identified people in classrooms (typically, a heavily restricted set). Many such policies were adapted from inherited templates, presumably originating with Stonewall, with the same clauses reappearing on university websites time and again. In my view, Sussex’s particular version set the tone for nearly everything that would then happen to me over the next few years, emboldening those at the university who were already against me, and enfeebling the morale of the rest.

The most egregious bit of the Sussex policy, in my eyes, was a clause which required that “any materials within relevant courses and modules will positively represent trans people and trans lives”. This seemed to me more like an instruction from a client to an advertising agency than a serious pedagogical commitment. Certainly, nothing like it existed for any other protected group, either at the time or since. This clause made it practically impossible to discuss with students what I saw as the severe detriments of defining “woman” in terms of inner feelings of gender identity, not biological sex: cases such as the trans-identified male prisoner Karen White, sexually assaulting female fellow prisoners in 2018, while “her penis was erect and sticking out of her trousers”, as was reported in a court trial shortly afterwards.

I tried to raise the matter with superiors but to no avail. Once, in a fraught meeting with a member of the senior management team, I was asked with some anxiety if my focus on male sexual assault statistics in relation to single-sex facilities implied I actually wanted to represent trans people negatively. Staggered at the stupidly Manichean terms being offered, I protested it did not, but did not feel believed. Over time, my teaching about sex and gender in feminist philosophy grew increasingly cautious, and most of my criticism of the sudden sanctification of gender identity took place elsewhere.

Still, in other ways I tried hard to raise the alarm to colleagues about the effects of trans policies on free expression, long before large fines on offending institutions were ever in the offing. I published letters in national newspapers, and gathered anonymous testimonies from colleagues across the country about how, in practice, academic freedom on sex and gender was being chilled. For a while, I was possibly the UK’s leading expert/biggest pub bore on the subject, collating a huge list of the most ludicrous clauses in university trans policies, circulating them to journalists, and writing about them in the press myself.

There was UCL’s policy, for instance, still online as I write this, which effectively turns lecturers into deferential intellectual lackeys, insisting that “If a trans person informs a staff member that a word or phrasing is inappropriate or offensive, then that staff member should take their word for it, and adjust their phraseology accordingly”. Or how about the University of Leeds’ version, also still up, which amalgamates two of the clauses found in breach at Sussex: “The University will strive to ensure that its curriculum does not rely on or reinforce stereotypical assumptions about trans people and that it contains material that positively represents trans people and trans lives.”

Academics who supported the introduction of these policies liked to pretend they only outlawed the truly “bad” sort of speech — you know, where bigoted, transphobic things were really being said — and not innocently meant or harmless statements. But how anyone was supposed to know the difference remained unclear; and especially not where Stonewall had taken the HR reins and was decreeing that “transphobia” now included “denying” someone’s gender identity “or refusing to accept it”. I have written or spoken variations upon that last sentence literally hundreds of times in the last five years, and so have lots of other people. I can’t tell you how bored I am of making such remedial points, obvious to anyone not educated into this level of stupidity. Yet many of these dim-witted, claustrophobic policies are still in place in universities across the land, right now.

Sussex, on the other hand, changed its policy to something more sensible a while ago, shortly after I left. The original one was published under then Vice Chancellor, Adam Tickell. Despite occasionally showing some awareness of problems caused by the old text’s wording, he seemed powerless to deal with them. Eventually, Tickell left to lead Birmingham University in 2021, just as I resigned. For this reason, I have been surprised by Roseneil’s combative response to the OFS judgement. I would have thought there was an opportunity here to regretfully concede past mistakes on someone else’s watch, then move on.

But in any case, I am afraid it is wishful thinking on her part to say of my time at Sussex that “the University has never wavered from its position… that her academic freedom and freedom of speech should be protected”; nor that “it has consistently and publicly defended her right to pursue her academic work and express her lawful beliefs”. Prior to her arrival, in 2022, in my recollection there was indeed some wavering, not to mention rather patchy public defending. It would seem to me risky and expensive to hash out this evident difference of opinion in the glare of a high court legal challenge, but then again, what do I know: I’m just a former lecturer now, thank God.

Aside from her complaints about process, Roseneil also argues that the OFS’s ruling now makes it “virtually impossible for universities to prevent abuse, harassment or bullying, to protect groups subject to harmful propaganda, or to determine that stereotyped assumptions should not be relied upon in the university curriculum”. Leaving aside the daft idea that “stereotyped assumptions” can never be true — just think of the stereotypes about academics, for a start — I also think this complaint isn’t right. All university managers need to do is stop defining concepts such as “abuse”, “harassment”, or indeed “harmful propaganda” absurdly loosely, in order to pander to rapidly expanding notions of student victimhood and the crazed demands of moronic campaigners. This is not cold fusion or Fermat’s Last Theorem.

In any case, while I’ll never back down on saying sex matters more than gender identity, I’m mostly out of the gender wars now. I certainly did my time in the trenches. And I also gladly renounce the title “Professor”; I’m a former professor at most. In truth, no academic title means much to me anymore, such is my disgust for my former profession. Really, I’m a civilian now, with nobody looking over my shoulder. “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight”, is another Sun Tzu aphorism. And I really hope my former employer gets the hint.

The United States needs a health secretary who will, at the minimum, cast a skeptical eye on the pharmaceutical industry, which turns enormous profits and helps ensure American health care will always be commodified. Before the pandemic, most Democrats had little problem railing against Big Pharma. They were the villains, deservedly so, of the opioid epidemic, and it was not an exaggeration to say several of the pharmaceutical behemoths, most notably Purdue Pharma, had blood on their hands.

When Covid arrived, however, the politics shifted. Republicans resisted the vaccines once President Joe Biden was in office, even though Operation Warp Speed had been a Team Trump accomplishment. Democrats defended the Covid vaccines and their manufacturers — Pfizer and Moderna, in particular — at all costs, even though the jabs did cause injuries in relatively rare instances and couldn’t stop the spread of the novel coronavirus as originally promised.

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By Freddie Sayers

Naturally, RFK Jr. was a Covid-vaccine skeptic. Hence he became, in the 2020s, a public enemy for many liberals.

Yet he should be listened to when it comes to one of his most cherished causes: banning pharmaceutical advertising from television. In a sane world, this would be a bipartisan cause. Few countries on Earth allow pharmaceutical companies to relentlessly market their drugs to unsuspecting consumers. Non-Americans are always shocked by what is permitted on the airwaves. Turn on the television, especially the news, for any length of time, and you will be barraged by ads for every type of malady under the Sun. Since the Nineties, drug companies have spent tens of billions on these ads.

Drug advertisements began appearing with regularity in newspapers and magazines in the Eighties, but they were mostly kept off TV by a requirement that ads naming a specific illness include the long list of side effects. In the late Nineties, the Food and Drug Administration relaxed its rules, permitting advertisers to briefly summarize the drug’s risks. The TV floodgates were thrown wide open. These days, the most aggressive campaigns are for newer medications that haven’t yet gone generic; competing brands duke it out in a packed field of similar drugs to reach patients with widespread conditions like arthritis and diabetes.

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The average American drug ad is easily parodied but plainly effective. Typically, some older adults are shown in a cheery setting with friends and family. The color palette is bright. A narrator with a warm voice speaks about health challenges that might arise. The older adults are never shown to be in pain or distress; they might be taking a jog, playing with their dog, or firing up the grill. They’re bright-eyed, maybe laughing. Towards the end of the ad, the narrator will briefly summarize the drug’s side effects. Anyone with a morbid sense of humor can enjoy the contrast, just a bit: the scene remains focused on life’s joys as the narrator informs you the drug might cause rashes, bleeding, blackouts, or suicidal thoughts (in “rare cases”, rest assured).

But we know the big business of Big Pharma is no laughing matter. The drug companies are prepared to furiously fight any sort of ban that Kennedy might attempt. They will call up their expensive lobbyists on retainer in Washington to bend rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats to their will. They will probably get to Trump, who doesn’t feel passionately about the issue.

The courts have snagged reforms in the past. Efforts to minimally restrict drug ads have repeatedly been defeated, often on First Amendment grounds. The first Trump administration tried to require that commercials mention the drug’s price, but a judge blocked the policy, saying that it lacked authority from Congress.

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Will Congress act? In theory, if Trump prioritized the ban, lawmakers could push it forward. The current Republican Party will obey Trump’s commands. The narrow majority the GOP holds in the House could be bolstered by a slew of progressive and populist Democrats who might view a fight with Big Pharma as a winning issue. Several centrist Democrats in swing districts, including Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington state, campaigned on a platform that was critical of pharmaceutical companies.

There’s a coalition to be built if the Trump administration takes the issue seriously. If a critical mass of Senate Republicans back legislation, it’s not hard to imagine the most Left-wing members of the Democratic conference, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, supporting a ban on TV ads. Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut who may run for president and has swerved in a more populist direction, could be a convert, too.

But that’s the rub: Trump has never demonstrated that he is all that interested in the granular work of getting policy priorities through Congress. In the first term, he was content to let Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan hash out a corporate tax cut and attempt — unsuccessfully — to repeal ObamaCare.

For now, Congress is focused on classic GOP priorities like tax cuts for the wealthy and gutting Medicaid, the health-care program that covers more than 70 million Americans. In addition to being cruel to the poor, a budget reconciliation package with tax and health-care cuts is likely to prove inflationary, especially when paired with tariffs. Beyond the tariffs, there’s no grander project here. The populism Trump promised isn’t being delivered — DOGE, and its wanton budget cuts, certainly aren’t it.

What conservatives don’t quite understand is that the truest owning of the libs will come through triangulation. Trump can begin to subdue Democrats by pursuing policies like a ban on TV pharmaceutical ads, forcing the Left to stand with him for something popular or oppose him and appear extremely out of touch. Trump doesn’t seem to have that kind of savvy. He’s fine to let his party scheme over Medicaid cuts.

That will not end well for the GOP. Democrats know how to campaign on health care, and taking it away from working-class people will make the 2026 midterms rather easy for the party out of power. Those political ads write themselves. They’ll be sandwiched between the 30-second spots for heart disease pills that may cause internal bleeding and murderous thoughts. In rare cases.

The American Right increasingly answers in the negative. In doing so, conservatives are staging their own version of the critical-theory doctrine deployed by progressives until recently to restrict speech.

The triumph of the Free Speech Movement appeared to accord students full rights to participate in the era’s public debate, which fit in with the broader dismantling of the in loco parentis paradigm, under which university administrators acted as parental authorities for students. Where the in loco parentis regime had consigned college students to a status of quasi-adulthood, the Berkeley protesters’ demands successfully redefined the campus as a space in which the full exercise of citizenship could occur; not coincidentally, the voting age was also lowered to 18 in many states during this period.

In more recent years, the campus Left became widely associated with an anti-free-speech stance, while the Right has often laid claim to the ideals of the 1964 Berkeley students. Hence in 2017, it was the Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopolous who attempted to hold a “free-speech week” on the Berkeley campus, after an earlier talk he attempted to give there was shut down amid violent opposition from progressive activists.

It might seem, therefore, that Trump’s crackdown has returned us to the pre-1964 status quo, with progressives once again defending speech rights on campus and conservatives trying to limit them. But this isn’t the full story. In reality, the approach taken by the Trump administration has far more in common with the progressive speech regime than its enthusiasts would have you think.

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The Left’s turn against free-speech maximalism is often traced to a text that appeared soon after the Berkeley protesters’ apparent triumph, under the byline of one of the protesters’ heroes, the philosopher and New Left guru Herbert Marcuse. I refer to the essay “Repressive Tolerance”, in which Marcuse expanded on the central argument of his hugely influential 1964 book, One-Dimensional Man: that the ostensible freedoms of advanced industrial society masked its fundamental unfreedom.

Revisiting the foundational 18th– and 19th-century struggles for freedom of speech, Marcuse argued that their aim was not simply to establish a neutral public sphere. Rather, “the tolerance which enlarged the range and content of freedom was always partisan — intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo”. In other words, advocacy for unlimited freedom of speech was a tactic of opposition to dominant forces — a tactic that, according to Marcuse, had become obsolete. This is because unlike the ancien régime, the “repressive status quo” of advanced industrial society in fact benefits from a regime of “pure tolerance”.

This was because, as Marcuse’s Frankfurt School colleagues Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had first argued decades earlier, the 20th-century culture industry had become a regime of propagandistic mass deception that manufactured consent for what they called the “totally administered society”. Accordingly, arguments for free expression and other liberal rights now amounted, as Marcuse put it, to accepting “the toleration of the systematic moronisation of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda”.

In contrast to authoritarian societies, “totalitarian democracy” bestows formal freedoms on its subjects, but these freedoms are negated by the overwhelming force of technological mass communication that tip the scales in favor of dominant social forces. By this account, demands for free speech like those made in Berkeley might ultimately serve to reinforce this broader unfreedom.

Marcuse’s paradoxical response to this impasse was to replace the value of “pure tolerance” of all views implicit in free-speech protections with what he called “liberating tolerance”, which, as he stated explicitly, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left”. He characterized this proposal as “utopian”, since “no authority, no government exists which would translate [it] into practice”.

However, there was a way in which the approach he proposed was eventually put into practice. By gaining power and leverage within consensus-making institutions, especially universities and the media, the Left managed to tip the scales of tolerance against the Right, somewhat as Marcuse had counseled. The shift from an ostensibly neutral public sphere to one in which certain views coded as reactionary were subject to aggressive “intolerance” seemed to follow his prescriptions. Hence, Marcuse’s text has sometimes been read as a sort of ur-manifesto of cancel culture; the Left’s centrist and conservative critics have tended to fight back by reasserting “pure tolerance”.

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In the wake of the October 7 Hamas terror attack against southern Israel, however, conservatives dramatically shifted their criticisms of the progressive campus speech regime. From the Nineties battles over political correctness to the early 2020s wars over wokeness, their main concern was with universities’ censoriousness towards conservative-coded views. But their new focus is on the same institutions’ permissiveness towards extreme speech by Leftists — most notoriously, celebration of terrorist violence against Israeli civilians.

In other words, the criticism directed at universities shifted away from the “intolerant towards the Right” side of Marcuse’s equation, and toward the “tolerant towards the Left” side. Meanwhile, the Left correspondingly pivoted from demanding “intolerance towards the Right” — keeping Milo off-campus — to “tolerance towards the Left” — letting pro-Palestinian protesters protest, even if their speech may offend some.

However, this reversal of positions was possible in part because it’s not only the Right/Left polarity that came to determine the range of permissible speech on campus in the post-Sixties era. Indeed, the unofficial campus speech regime didn’t so much legitimize itself in Right/Left terms as in terms of victimhood and oppression. A programmatic statement of this rationale can be found in the pioneering critical race theorist Mari Matsuda’s article “Public Response to Racist Speech”, published in 1989. In Matsuda’s account, it is speech by members of or on behalf of “historically dominant groups” and against “subordinated communities” that should be subject to “intolerance”, while speech going in the opposite direction, even if hateful or violent, should be subject to “tolerance”.

Matsuda offered, in effect, an update on Marcuse’s “liberating tolerance”, processed through the classifications of civil-rights law. Instead of “the Left” being granted extra leeway, as Marcuse had demanded, it was members of oppressed groups who were to enjoy what Matsuda calls the “victim’s privilege”. In practice, this meant that when any speech generated controversy, the task was to identify oppressor and oppressed, then ensure that the latter is granted “the tolerance of hateful speech that comes from an experience of oppression”, whereas the former is subject to maximum intolerance.

This is how the attempts to shut down controversial speakers at the height of last decade’s Great Awokening were justified. For instance, in 2017, New York University provost Ulrich Baer argued in The New York Times that efforts to prevent figures like Yiannopolous and Charles Murray from speaking on campus “should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship”. Intolerance toward oppressors, that is, equals tolerance toward the oppressed.

Matsuda defined universities as a “special case” because college students are “at a vulnerable stage of psychological development”. Accordingly, “tolerance of racist speech in this setting is more harmful than generalized tolerance in the community-at-large”. Gesturing back at Berkeley and other Sixties protest, Matsuda reaffirmed support for the protesters’ speech rights, but not on grounds of “pure tolerance”. Rather, she appealed to the “power imbalance” between students and “university administrators, multinational corporations, the US military, and established governments”. In other words, insofar as students can be construed as victims, their speech must be protected — but once they can be construed as victimizers, they can no longer lay claim to that privilege.

The broader implication of the original Free Speech Movement’s demand was, again, that intramural speech be protected by the First Amendment in the same manner as extramural speech. The effect of this demand — like the other factors that eroded in loco parentis — was to merge the university with the broader space of rights-granted citizenship. But a further implication of this move, not necessarily evident to the student protesters when they made their demands, was to weaken the specificity of the university’s function within society: to form young adults.

It was perhaps an inevitable reaction to this drift and evacuation of institutional purpose that new forms of paternalism reemerged to substitute for in loco parentis, not least the differentiated speech regime outlined by Matsuda. This helped define a new moral, values-imparting mission for universities, which over decades became ever more explicitly oriented around social justice.

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Conservative and centrist critics of campus politics have documented the divisive and intellectually stultifying effects of this regime. Now that the Trump administration is attempting to force top-down change on the system, many who opposed it are celebrating.

Yet it should be clear from the administration’s single-minded focus on reining in pro-Palestinian protest — justified on the grounds of protecting Jewish students from harassment — that what it is offering is not at all a fundamental change from the status quo ante. On the contrary, Matsuda’s basic idea that speech must be regulated on the basis of whether it causes harm to a “subordinated community” remains fully in force; it is simply that a different minority group is now asserted to be in need of special protection. In other words, Trump is merely adjusting the dials of the prior campus speech regime, applying greater tolerance here and greater intolerance there.

The real problem with this shift isn’t the apparent inconsistency with conservative opposition to cancel culture, but that the administration is leaving the deeper assumptions of the prior system for regulating speech intact. Universities need to be reformed, and reimagined, on a much more fundamental level. The post-in loco parentis integration of campuses into the broader realm of citizenship has failed to facilitate the responsible exercise of the citizenship. Rather, it has only succeeded at evacuating institutional purpose in favor of an incoherent mix of anything-goes consumerism and tendentious moralism.

Trump’s heavy-handed actions will succeed in suppressing some of the campus radicalism to which conservatives object. But they will leave intact the divisive and infantilizing speech regime.

The letter arrived a few days after Department of Homeland Security agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, and revoked his green card. Now, they are trying to deport him over his political speech. The same week, DHS searched two student dorm rooms and arrested another international student who was involved in the campus protests against the Gaza war for overstaying her visa. Going forward, the State Department will be deploying artificial intelligence to scan the social media posts of tens of thousands of international students to search for pro-Palestinian sympathies.

The dragnet isn’t limited to the foreign-born. Under pressure from the White House, Columbia University is looking into an American student for writing an op-ed calling for divestment from Israel. On Friday, the Department of Justice announced an investigation into the Columbia protests to determine whether they violated federal terrorism laws; 59 other universities are also under investigation.

These are the actions of a President who claims to be restoring free speech to America after four years of online censorship orchestrated by the Biden administration. “This is the most significant threat to free speech in modern United States history,” civil rights attorney Jenin Younes, who sued the Biden administration for censorship in the Supreme Court case of Missouri v. Biden, tells me. “There is almost no precedent for deporting people in the United States merely for voicing dissent from the government’s foreign policy.”

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For years, conservative politicians and “heterodox” writers (myself included) have complained incessantly about the threats to free speech posed by the social justice-oriented Left. About a decade ago, an authoritarian, schoolmarmish ideology took hold within Left-wing academic and activist circles. It then percolated into elite American institutions, including the media, the government, the nonprofit sector, and the human resources departments of major American corporations.

This ideology equated speech with violence. The thinking was that because spoken and written expressions of disfavor toward “marginalized communities” can lead to real-world discrimination and even physical attacks, such speech should be suppressed. Mobs of activists “de-platformed” speakers at public venues; universities enacted speech codes, created safe spaces and instituted trigger warnings; employers forced workers into training sessions on what to say and how to think.

Over time, this ideology began to shape government policy too. During the Covid pandemic, the federal government pressured social media platforms to suppress posts that questioned vaccine efficacy and criticized lockdowns. Joe Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” by not censoring the expression of views that the government disagreed with.

The Right baulked at this culture of censorship, as did some on the Left. The annihilation of “woke” ideology became the animating cause of the Republican Party, and may have won Trump the 2024 election. But all the while, a conservative strain of the exact same ideology was gestating on the Right, until October 7 unleashed it.

When the Gaza war erupted and militant student protests mushroomed on campuses all over the country, Republicans suddenly began to talk exactly like the social justice activists they so despised. In precisely the same way that Left-wing ideologues condemned every opinion that failed to conform to social justice dogma as “racism”, “misogyny”, or “transphobia”, the Right vilified not only the excesses of the pro-Palestinian movement, which were considerable, but declared just about any expression of opposition to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza as “antisemitism”. The very expression of those views, they insisted, put Jewish students in physical danger. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis banned Students for Justice in Palestine from the state’s public university campuses. Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill that promised to make campuses into “safe spaces” for Jewish students. House Speaker Mike Johnson stood alongside students from elite private universities who claimed to be victimised by the political beliefs of their classmates.

For 18 months, the pro-Palestinian narrative has been systematically demonized. And now, to Republicans and many Democrats, pro-Palestinian activism has become synonymous with antisemitism, promoting terrorism, and endorsing Hamas. This narrative is taking on the force of law. In an NPR interview last week, deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Troy Edgar described Mahmoud Khalil’s participation in pro-Palestinian protests as ipso facto support for Hamas. He called Khalil’s advocacy “antisemitism activity” and compared it to terrorism.

This isn’t mere political rhetoric; it’s the legal basis for the administration’s case against Khalil. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has openly declared that he was arrested for being “a supporter of Hamas” and for “ril[ing] up all kinds of anti-Jewish student, antisemitic activities”.

Even if he had explicitly declared an allegiance to Hamas and a hatred of Jews, his views would still be protected by the Constitution. But no evidence has emerged that he holds either of these beliefs. Khalil has explicitly disavowed antisemitism in his movement, telling CNN that “the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other”.

Yet in the Right’s imagination, there is no distinction between supporting Palestinians and supporting Hamas. Just as, on the Left, concern for preserving women-only spaces can only indicate deep-seated transphobia, on the Right, criticizing Israel can only suggest a genocidal hatred of Jews. As such, to the movement’s critics, pro-Palestinian speech must be criminalized and suppressed, even at the cost of America’s commitment to free speech.

Trump’s stifling of free speech won’t end with Khalil. “The administration has indicated that its next strategy will be to go after US citizens for ostensibly engaging in terrorist activities,” Younes says. “Given that pro-Palestine activism is defined as terrorism, this is an absolutely horrifying prospect.”

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Nor are Trump’s brazen attacks on free expression limited to pro-Palestinian speech. In its mission to expunge “woke ideology” from the federal government and those entities funded by it, Trump and Elon Musk have directed the National Science Foundation to do keyword searches of disfavored terms (such as “women” or “diverse”) in its grant database to determine where to make cuts. Other agencies have scrubbed references to such terms from their websites, as have their contractors in the private nonprofit world. Trump’s de-wokification campaign has begun tracing the outlines of China’s censorship apparatus.

The will to silence the political opposition is neither a specifically Republican nor Democratic predilection. Rather, it’s the irresistible impulse of whoever happens to be in charge. Those with the power to censor their ideological opponents will tend to do so; this was true of Biden’s administration and it’s just as true of Trump’s. But as with everything Trump does, it’s dialed up to 11.

If the courts don’t stop him, Republicans should prepare for a future in which they reap what they sow, just as the Democrats are doing now. The Right won’t be in power forever. When their ideological adversaries next return to the White House, the full force of the state could be turned against anyone who dissents from liberal orthodoxies, eclipsing what transpired even at the height of The Great Awokening. The scale of that suppression will make Biden’s Covid censorship subtle by comparison.

In their race to restrict each other’s right to free expression, both parties have contributed to this catastrophe. We’ll be fortunate if American democracy survives it.

While a literal cull of the experts might be a step too far, most of us will have grown weary of those who seem to believe that the “argument from authority” fallacy is a persuasive way to settle a debate. We are experiencing what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas described as a “legitimation crisis”, by which the public has lost trust in figures of authority. Journalists, academics and those in positions of political power have continually deceived the public in service of woke ideology. As their era gradually comes to an end, we will be left with the fallout. And as we move into the next phase of the culture war, one of our principal challenges will be the repairing this damage.

Anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed that those who complain of “misinformation” (unintentional misrepresentation) and “disinformation” (intentional deception) are typically those who have been most responsible for it. Just last week we had the BBC apologizing for airing a supposedly impartial documentary about Gaza fronted by the son of a Hamas official. One interviewee was heard praising the deceased terrorist leader Yahya Sinwar for his “jihad against the Jews”, while the BBC’s subtitles mistranslated her phrase as “fighting and resisting Israeli forces”.

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Then there is the mainstream media’s continual attempts at historical revisionism. Last month, we heard CBS’s Margaret Brennan claiming that the Holocaust was caused not by rabid and genocidal antisemitism, but by the weaponization of free speech. Around the same time, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was trying to eliminate gay men and women from their own history by insisting that the Stonewall uprising in June 1969 was “a riot by trans people”. The Guardian made the similarly fraudulent claim that the riots were “led by trans women of color” and that a black trans woman called Marsha P. Johnson “threw the first brick”. By his own admission, Johnson was a drag queen who did not identify as female and was not even present when the riots began. This isn’t journalism; it’s propaganda.

This kind of truth-twisting is an inevitable feature of human discourse, which is why a reliable press is an essential feature of a functioning democracy. Yet just last week BBC News was observing the “preferred pronouns” of a rapist of children as young as three years old. In September 2023, Joan Smith wrote a piece for UnHerd about how editors at the Financial Times had instructed her to insert a deliberate untruth into a review to promote the tenets of genderism. The reason for this became clear last March, when whistleblowers at the Financial Times exposed the extent to which the publication is ideologically captured, leaking its “Diversity and Inclusion Toolkit” to writer James Esses. There are few mainstream publications operating today that do not prioritize fealty to this dying ideology over accurate reporting.

The problem of academia is even more pronounced. In the most comprehensive recent survey of academics, the University and Colleges Union found that 56% of its members believed that freedom of speech in higher education was in decline and that “self-censorship is very common”, and 19.1% of respondents in European Union countries admitted to censoring themselves at work, as compared to 35.5% of teaching staff in the United Kingdom. The report outlined how “many staff have had their academic freedom abrogated and thereby been subjected to cruel and degrading treatment by their peers, on account of their academic views” and that the practice of self-censorship was the major factor in preventing “the incidence of bullying, psychology pressure and other unconscionable behavior from being even higher”.

The conclusion was harrowing: “self-censorship at this level appears to make a mockery of any pretense by universities of being paragons of free speech and that of being advocates of unhindered discourse in the pursuit of knowledge and academic freedom.” In his new book Bad Education, Matt Goodwin calls this the “secret code of silence” in academia — which he compares to the Mafia concept of omertá — by which “no matter how glaringly obvious the crisis becomes, no matter how visibly these once great institutions are failing our young people, you just never, ever tell people on the outside”.

The humanities are not immune either. Recently, I had my own brush with the entrenched ideological thinking of art historians. I had written a piece for the Washington Post about Leonardo da Vinci’s lost masterpiece The Battle of Anghiari, a painting which might possibly still exist behind a fresco in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. For years, experts have been claiming that Leonardo never painted it in the first place, and yet I was able to quote numerous historical accounts from 16th-century writers who claimed to have seen it. Rather than address the evidence, the experts who responded simply restated their flawed hypothesis, as though asserting something multiple times will magically make it true.

A letter to the Washington Post from Francesca Fiorani, professor of art history at the University of Virginia, exemplifies the problem. She telepathically asserts that my argument is based on “obsession”, as though one article in a two-decade writing career qualifies as monomania. Fiorani either could not, or would not, deign to address any aspects of the evidence I presented. I would have welcomed arguments against the authenticity of these sources, but none were forthcoming. She should have heeded Aldous Huxley’s observation that “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored”.

While we might assume that academics would be more objective, there are good reasons why the opposite is often the case. Those working in higher education are particularly susceptible to groupthink. Their work is based on the notion of superior knowledge, and so egos are easily bruised when they are proven wrong.

Moreover, the cleverest among us are also those who are able to rationalize and justify the most improbable of theories. Consider the claim by the Scientific American that the “inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports”. So the reason why men run faster than women has nothing to do with muscle mass, heart size, lung capacity or longer strides, but is attributable to sexist stereotyping. Even a child could explain the flaw in this reasoning.

And while the suggestion that the Covid pandemic was the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is now widely accepted as credible, it was not so long ago that it was dismissed by leading experts as a “racist conspiracy theory”. When molecular biologist Alica Chan and writer Matt Ridley published a defense of this theory in their book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times claimed that the authors were placing “a conspiracy theory between hardcovers to masquerade as sober scientific inquiry”. Hiltzik’s certainty was premature. In December 2024, the United States government’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its final report confirming that the lab-leak theory was most likely true.

According to many members of the political class, censorship is the solution to the problem of a public that will not accept these fabricated narratives. Seemingly without irony, the unelected president of the European Commission — Ursula von der Leyen — has announced her intention to create a “European Democracy Shield” to protect EU citizens from online “disinformation”. Apparently, voters are too fickle to listen to arguments and make judgments for themselves; all it takes is a few social media posts from Russian bots and they’ll be marching, automaton-like, into the voting booths to do the bidding of malevolent foreign powers. Such is the esteem in which these EU bureaucrats hold the people they supposedly represent.

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Worse still, von der Leyen has compared free speech to a virus. Speaking last year at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit, she had this to say: “As technology evolves we need to build up societal immunity around information manipulation. Because research has shown that pre-bunking is much more successful than debunking. Pre-bunking is basically the opposite of debunking.” She then added: “In short, prevention is preferable to cure. Perhaps if you think of information manipulation as a virus. Instead of treating an infection, once it has taken hold, that is debunking. It is much better to vaccinate so that the body is inoculated. Pre-bunking is the same approach.”

As a new synonym for “censorship”, “pre-bunking” is up there with “pre-crime”, “thoughtcrime” and “public safety” in the dystopian lexicon. The unanswerable retort to this was written by the Roman poet Juvenal almost 2000 years ago: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (“who watches the watchmen?”). The authority of the censor presupposes a kind of omniscience. As John Milton put it in his Areopagitica: “How shall the licencers themselves be confided in, unless we can confer upon them, or they assume to themselves above all others in the land, the grace of infallibility and uncorruptedness?”

I for one do not trust von der Leyen or any of her ilk to arbitrate on the difference between reality and fiction. I no longer trust academics, the mainstream media or politicians to prioritize facts over convenient falsehoods. As we move into the post-woke era, we are going to have to find a way to rebuild the reputations of our captured institutions. I do not claim to know how this legitimation crisis can be rectified, but it will only be possible once those in authority overcome their contempt for the public and rekindle their respect for the primacy of truth.

The answer is that they have all been shortlisted for Islamophobe of the Year awards by the Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), a British campaign and advocacy group with close links to the Iranian government.

It all sounds like a bit of a joke. The “Commission” used to promote the Awards in a semi-comedic style: as an irreverent swipe at those who have shown hatred to Muslims in public life. But there was always a bad smell about all this: having a laugh, about hatred. The apparently light-hearted format enabled fierce denunciations of others for the same reasons that are getting people killed. In 2015, the IHRC gave another of its Islamophobia Awards to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo — just two months after jihadis slaughtered 12 people at the magazine’s offices in Paris.

The origins of this unsavoriness are no secret. In his 2023 review of the Prevent anti-extremism program, William Shawcross described the organization as “an Islamist group ideologically aligned with the Iranian regime”, with a history of “extremist links and terrorist sympathies”. Until recently, the IHRC’s director was Saied Reza Ameli, also secretary of Iran’s Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution.

Nevertheless, thanks to its campaigning on Islamophobia, the IHRC has had a notable influence on British public life. And Islamophobia is now a pressing concern of the British state and Labour government.

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How can we best understand this concept of Islamophobia? One of its problems is how it seems to mean whatever the likes of the IHRC dislike at any given moment. The literal meaning, though, is implicit in the word: Islam-phobia. It suggests an irrational fear of Islam, prompting questions of whether fear of Islam is itself irrational (a view that would match Islamic doctrine) or whether versions of that fear can be rational.

From the Islamist scene in Britain, a group called Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND) has placed itself at the forefront of efforts to identify and combat Islamophobia. It provided significant support for a landmark report in 2018 by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims, co-chaired by current Health Secretary West Streeting MP.

MEND stated that Islamophobia was:

“…a prejudice, aversion, hostility, or hatred towards Muslims and encompasses any distinction, exclusion, restriction, discrimination, or preference against Muslims that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.”

This, you might say, is a maximalist position. In a cutting response to the APPG report for Policy Exchange in 2019, Trevor Phillips, John Jenkins and Martyn Frampton noted that “the comprehensiveness of the behavior that MEND seeks to place beyond the pale is striking”. A whole smorgasbord of other potential definitions can be found in the APPG publication. Some of these definitions came from academics. One came from the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), a grouping of Muslim governments from around the world. The OIC described Islamophobia in 2007 as “the worst form of terrorism”. In a follow-up report, it said:

“Islamophobia signifies the contemporary proliferation of discrimination against Muslims and distortion of Islam and is partly due to the ignorance and lack of understanding of Islam in the West. It would be an unfortunate error of judgment in believing that Islam is linked to terror; that it is intolerant of other religious beliefs, that its values and practices are not democratic; that it favors repression of freedom of expression and undermining human rights.”

The APPG report makes similarly bold claims, the core one being that “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.” The behaviors it deemed Islamophobic include those which are already illegal, such as threats of violence, and discrimination at work. But the report also claims that Islamophobia encompasses Muslim students failing to win places at top-level universities, and the schools inspectorate Ofsted questioning whether young girls should be wearing the hijab. And if you think these definitions are overly expansive, then you might already be an Islamophobe. Another example of Islamophobia, the report says, is “accusing Muslims… of exaggerating Islamophobia.”

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Why Islamism became woke

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Islamophobia is a total wrong, it appears: blasphemous but also irrational and immoral; rooted in Western racism and ignorance. And from it arises the error of thinking there is any link between Islam and young Muslim men yelling “Allahu-Akbar” (“God is Great”) as they plunge knives into passers-by on European streets. As the OIC points out, this would be unfortunate. Not wrong, inaccurate or unfactual, but unfortunate and an error of judgment.

These claims are worth unpacking, not least for how they demonstrate the characteristic Islamist fusing of a so-called “mediaeval” religion with the techniques and styles of Western secular modernity, particularly progressive social science.

From the Islamic perspective, Islam cannot be associated with bad things because it represents submission to a perfect God. All problems associated with Islam and Muslims therefore must originate outside Islam. For the more ideological sociologists and historians meanwhile, bad things in society necessarily have their root cause in Western culture, capitalism, Whiteness, colonialism, Englishness and the rest.

These two perspectives come together in what we might call Islamist sociology, which treats Islam as a force of progress in the world. Progressive ideology is particularly amenable to Islamists, for it conveys the ideas that believers are on the right side of history. History is on their side. The world is moving in their direction. If you do not accept their version of truth, you will eventually lose.

The West’s ignorance of this perspective matches the Islamic notion of “jahiliyya”, which describes the age of ignorance before the Prophet Mohammed received the word of God. Applied to Western countries, it supposes that we are in a pre-Islamic state of ignorance. Mainstream Left-wing history and social science see things in a similar way. In this view, Muslims and other immigrants serve as a motor of change, bringing us to a higher historical state.

In this way, the notion of Islamophobia helps to bring together Islamic and Western intellectual traditions. It converts Islamic law — or merely the desire of Islamists to punish those who displease them — into secular rationalist and moral language, helping to mobilize both Muslims and non-Muslims in support. In effect, it works as a form of linguistic laundering: converting religious authority into a general, all-consuming rationality and morality. This makes it an effective tool. Critics of Islamophobia often speak of how it gets “weaponized”. This assessment is accurate, for the concept is consistently used as a prop to punish, but also to deter and bring others onboard via the appearance of strength. At the very least it is a form of social technology, working to advance the group’s aims, to build the size and strength of the group, and to weaken its opponents.

In this regard, the lack of an agreed definition can be a strength. The nebulousness of “Islamophobia” grants maximum flexibility to those who deploy this weapon. It is a weapon that can be used freely to denounce anyone who displeases Islamists and their allies. It can be invoked against the authorities, to intimidate and win concessions. And it can be used against fellow Muslims, as a more ecumenical version of takfir. (Takfir is excommunication from Islam, or society, potentially meriting death).

If we are not to be Islamophobic, it seems we must defer to Islamists, to their interests and their interpretation of their religion as perfect. We must bow to Islamists’ authority to decide the boundary between right and wrong in relation to Islam. This fits into the Islamic distinction between the “dar-al-harb” (the House of War) and the “dar-al-Islam” (the House of Islam): assigning all bad things in the world outside Islam, to a state of war. Through this framing, Islamists can bypass inconvenient issues like the “grooming’”(or “rape”) gangs and Islamic terrorist attacks. The culprits are not the individuals involved, but external forces: lax morals in Western society, colonialism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine and discrimination against Muslims in the West.

This distinction between the House of War and the House of Islam helps explain another of the Islamists’ tendencies: that of inveigling themselves with the authorities one minute and denouncing them in the strongest terms the next. There is a tension here. Islamists see the West as a place which, while not of Islam at the moment, at least has or might have arrangements with its representatives. At the same time, the House of War is implacably hostile to Muslims and must be fought against. The APPG report points towards the latter in describing Britain as an “Islamophobic environment”: it is another way of describing a House of War.

In this framing, like the closely related idea of systemic racism, everything is touched by Islamophobia and so everything will have to be changed to defeat it. From the track record of advocates, their maximalist approach and their intolerance of differing views, they will likely never be satisfied.

Nevertheless, the British state is trying to satisfy them. Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, recently set up a group “to deliver a definition of Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia within six months”. Explaining the creation of this group, the government said that “incidents of anti-Muslim hatred reached the highest number on record in 2024.” The group’s chair, the former Conservative minister Dominic Grieve KC, said the group’s task was to balance the pressing need to impose a definition on behalf of British Muslims “with the unwavering requirement to maintain freedom of thought and expression under law for all.”

Eventually the Government will have to decide: between censorship and freedom. If a definition is indeed agreed and, as activists demand, operationalized, the effects will be significant. Media reporting will become even more fraught with risk, leading to a more aggressive culture of self-censorship. Academic work likewise: further undermining the culture of truth-seeking in universities. To resist the demands of Muslim activists in the workplace will become perilous for both bosses and employees, clearing the way for Islamic practices to be embedded in daily routines while others are blocked for being discriminatory. At Michaela School, for example, the activists have been temporarily set back, but will eventually win.

It seems that Western traditions of free speech and inquiry, already straining under repeated attacks, will no longer apply in relation to Islam and Muslims in British public and institutional life. And so gradually, seemingly inexorably, Britain will continue its weary progress into becoming an Islamic state in all but name. Islamophobia is a crucial tool in the battle to make that happen: a startlingly effective social weapon.

Debanking is when a bank closes an account in order to censor or punish the customer for political or religious views. The banks, in these cases, are typically responding to ideological pressure or to perceived reputational risk. As you might imagine, anger over debanking rapidly merged with concerns shared by crypto companies, which have also contended with access issues to traditional banking. One CEO shared a letter in which the bank Chase said it was closing his company’s account.

The complaints about debanking were echoed and amplified by Donald Trump. His wife, Melania, claims that she herself was debanked. More broadly, the MAGA movement has ample experience of being booted off social media platforms. The matter of tech debanking, therefore, has been rolled into existing MAGA complaints. By this account, the US government has restricted freedom of expression via several coercive means.

In keeping with this view, Trump’s allies have called for a dismantling of financial watchdogs such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). “Delete CFPB”, wrote Musk, echoing Andreessen, who blamed debanking woes on the agency. Examine the policy upheavals of the past two months, though, and you will note that such measures will not have the intended effect.

Far from protecting freedom of speech, the new administration has made it easier for financial platforms to kick users off for political expression. Among the red tape it has slashed were some CFPB rules that were designed to protect, of all things, free speech. This should all work out well for Andreessen, who is one of Silicon Valley’s biggest investors in crypto — the sector that, more than almost any other, yearns for looser regulation.

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Just as the casual observer loses sight of the magician’s card, many observers missed Andreessen’s sleight of hand. His remarks on the Rogan show convinced those enraged about censorship to support a niche campaign to unwind protections against crypto fraud.

In this way, Andreessen conflated two unrelated issues for his own financial benefit. In a worrying global trend, a wide array of people — Canadian truckers, Brexit supporters and Palestinian activists — have been removed from financial platforms without due process. Unrelatedly, regulators concerned with keeping crypto startups in compliance with banking rules have taken steps to crack down. Some executives involved in the crypto trade have said they have had difficulty using traditional bank accounts simply because they were flagged by the system. The truckers were debanked; the crypto executives were not.

Consider the viewpoint of regulators. On several occasions in recent years, crypto brokerages and emerging cryptocurrencies have imploded overnight and left ordinary customers with nothing. Regulators have also repeatedly accused crypto startups — including those backed by Andreessen — of a variety of alleged financial crimes. These offenses have included the undermining of rules on money laundering, and the violation of sanctions on terrorist groups. It’s not entirely surprising that those entrusted with safeguarding the financial system view these schemes with extreme suspicion.

As free speech has become a battleground for everyday Americans — waged on college campuses, over political correctness in the workplace, and on social media platforms — a simultaneous legal revolution has taken shape. Corporate actors seeking to eviscerate rules and restrictions on business conduct have attempted to conflate commercial action with free expression. In other words, the business elite is piggybacking off the free speech debate for its own ends.

“The business elite is piggybacking off the free speech debate for its own ends.”

This piggybacking has been taking place for decades. Lawyers have poked and prodded, attempting to find new legal maneuvers to classify business behavior as protected speech. In this vein, Southwest and Spirit Airlines have repeatedly litigated to block a regulation that required airlines to display the full price of tickets. Another example comes via the private rating agencies that were responsible for falsely certifying the safety of risky mortgage-backed securities in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis. In court, the agencies argued that they were simply expressing First Amendment-protected speech, and were thus exempt from fraud lawsuits.

These efforts largely failed in court, but other, similar arguments have begun to prevail increasingly often. In the Supreme Court ruling Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc., Justice Anthony Kennedy struck down laws against health care firms mining and selling patient data to pharmaceutical companies. The patient data laws, Kennedy wrote, violated commercial speech laws and “burdened a form of protected expression.” In similar fashion, Kennedy and his Supreme Court colleagues cited the First Amendment when ruling in 2018 that the imposition of union fees on non-union public sector employees was unconstitutional. The imposition of fees, they said, amounted to coerced financial speech.

Most famously, Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Citizens United, the 2010 decision that allowed unlimited corporate and independent spending in elections. The court ruling ushered in our current era of engorged Super PACs and dark money spending, all in the name of the First Amendment. The rules that had governed the financing of political campaigns, Kennedy wrote, had unduly restricted “corporate political speech”.

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The flood of challenges continues. The First Amendment is being used to attack corporate regulations, ethics laws and consumer safety rules. Corporate attorneys are attempting to overturn the few existing laws restricting robo-calls and automated texts; interest groups funded by Google and Facebook have claimed that antitrust enforcement would increase censorship and stifle free speech; and state bans on lobbyist gifts to legislators are continually under threat. Lawyers have argued that such gifts are not bribery, but an example of free expression.

The new administration might find that this legal trend threatens some of its most consumer-friendly reforms. Processed food industry lobbyists have threatened to use First Amendment lawsuits to strike down the Food and Drug Administration’s new updated guidelines on what foods can be labeled as “healthy” — a cause that has been championed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s new health secretary. Trump has also promised to minimize pharmaceutical advertisements on television, but this endeavor, too, is likely to face challenge in the courts on the grounds of freedom of expression.

All of this is taking place without society having made much progress on what we should consider genuine freedom of expression. Banks are still free to arbitrarily remove customers, college students continue to face coercion over free speech, and social media platforms retain near-untrammeled power to censor their users.

Corporations, then, have taken an expansive view of the First Amendment in order to remove constraints on their power. But ordinary Americans have been left on the sidelines, as vulnerable as they ever were to government and corporate censorship.

The symbolism of a burning book is, therefore, the repudiation of the very notion of freedom. And yet this same freedom means that we must be able to burn books if we so desire. The Nazis, of course, were destroying the property of others, an authoritarian act designed to eliminate whole branches of thought. This is not to be conflated with an individual who chooses to vandalize his or her own property. The trans activists who burn J.K. Rowling’s books and post the footage online are making fools of themselves, but they are also exercising their right to do so in a free society.

This is a distinction worth bearing in mind when we consider the murder of anti-Islam campaigner Salwan Momika, an Iraqi man who had been awaiting a verdict in Sweden for the crime of “agitation against an ethnic or national group”. Momika had publicly burned a number of copies of the Quran during the summer of 2023. He was shot dead during or just before a live stream on TikTok at his home in Södertälje on Wednesday. The details are as of yet unclear, but there are suggestions that the assassination may have involved a foreign power.

Momika had been granted temporary residence in Sweden in 2018, although his frustration with his adopted country’s lackluster commitment to freedom of speech led him to seek asylum in Norway in March 2024. After just a few weeks, the Norwegian authorities had him deported back to Sweden. According to Momika, the prosecutor in his trial had been seeking his extradition back to Iraq because of his criticisms of Islam. Back in August, he had posted the following on X: “Sweden and Norway have identified me as a threat to their security. Yes, I am a threat to the Islamization project of the West, which is being pursued by your Leftist communist government that is deceiving the citizens and making the country Islamic. So I have come to awaken the people and thwart the Islamization project of the West, and I will not be afraid of you.”

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Why I'm leaving the UK

By Andrew Doyle

In cases of this kind, it has become depressingly inevitable that commentators will seek to blame the victim. After the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in 1988, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for the author’s murder. Instead of taking a united stance against a foreign regime threatening the life of a British citizen, pundits and politicians engaged in endless debates about whether Rushdie had brought this on himself. Crime novelist John Le Carré stated that “there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity”, and that “there is no absolute standard of free speech in any society”. It should go without saying that powerful theocrats do not require protection from the hurtful words of novelists.

Last month was the 10th anniversary of the massacre at the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Initially, world leaders were united in their condemnation of terrorists who had butchered cartoonists for drawing satirical caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. Thousands gathered at vigils and held placards bearing the words “Je Suis Charlie”. PEN America — an organization devoted to the principle of free expression — created a “courage award” for Charlie Hebdo. That was until dozens of members of PEN, including writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and Junot Díaz, signed an open letter in protest. Charlie Hebdo, they claimed, had mocked a “section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled and victimized”. This was, of course, to misidentify the target. The cartoonists weren’t “punching down” at the Muslim minority, but rather “punching up” at the authoritarianism of institutionalized religion.

We never seem to learn that appeasement of religious extremists only makes them stronger. Our collective failure to take a firm stance for artistic liberty in the Rushdie affair has made it more difficult to uphold the principle today. That Momika was on trial in the first place suggests that Sweden’s commitment to freedom of expression has been subordinated to the creed of multiculturalism. According to the BBC, following Momika’s campaigns in 2023 the Swedish government had “pledged to explore legal means of abolishing protests that involve burning texts in certain circumstances”. Yet Momika’s copies of the Quran were his own property, and he was free to dispose of them as he wished. We might take the view that his method of protest is insensitive or provocative, but in a free society such behavior is a matter of individual conscience.

The victim-blamers have been predictably vocal. Within hours of the news of Momika’s murder, television personality Bushra Shaikh posted the following on X: “Some of you may disagree but the public desecration of any holy book should be viewed as a hate crime and the offender should face consequences”. She later clarified that by “face consequences” she was not supporting murder, but rather the principle that the “government decides on the punishment”. And yet Shaikh’s logic defeats itself. Her post has been widely interpreted as hate-filled and authoritarian. Does this mean that, if the government were to designate the public advocacy of blasphemy laws a “hate crime”, she would be content to be prosecuted?

Those who endorse authoritarianism, in other words, are laying a trap for themselves. If we look to the state to punish our detractors, where does that leave us when the values of those in power no longer align with our own? Momika has been blamed for the riots and the international diplomatic rows that ensued following his campaigns, but the peaceful protester is not responsible for those who break the law in response. Last summer, the Guardian published a piece that presented his Quran-burning as evidence of a “racism crisis”. One of the Swedish Muslim interviewees was quoted as saying: “I understand you are allowed to think and feel what you want, this is a free country, but there must be boundaries. It’s such a pity that it has happened so many times and Sweden doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes.”

Those of us who still believe in liberal values will balk at the suggestion — and the implied threat — in claiming that we are mistaken to support freedom of expression. Moreover, there is nothing racist about burning a copy of the Quran. Islam is a belief-system, not a race. The criminalization of “Islamophobia” makes about as much sense as prosecuting citizens for “Marxistophobia” or “Freemarketcapitalismophobia”. Had Momika burned a copy of The Communist Manifesto, would there be calls to modify the law to see him incarcerated?

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Why Europe fears free speech

By Wolfgang Munchau

Increasingly, Western societies are pandering to religious zealots who are willing to resort to violence to achieve their aims. Members of the ruling class are undeniably afraid. During Prime Minister’s Questions in November 2024, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, Tahir Ali, asked Keir Starmer whether he would establish “measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”. Starmer replied: “I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.” A better response would have been: “Blasphemy laws are incompatible with the values of a free country.”

It is undeniably the case that Islamic theocracies are intolerant to dissent, but we have only ourselves to blame if we capitulate to pressure from foreign powers to undermine our commitment to secularism. Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan, for instance, blamed the radicalization of Islamic terrorists on the French president Emmanuel Macron’s tolerance for the right of citizens to blaspheme against Islam. In October 2020, he tweeted: “President Macron has chosen to deliberately provoke Muslims, incl his own citizens, through encouraging the display of blasphemous cartoons targeting Islam & our Prophet PBUH.” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey even cited Momika’s Quran-burning in an attempt to scupper Sweden’s bid to join Nato in 2023.

But blasphemy only makes sense to the faithful. Stéphane Charbonnier (known as “Charb”), the cartoonist and editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo who was among the victims of the 2015 atrocity, addressed this point in an “open letter” completed just two days before his death. “God is only sacred to those who believe in him,” he wrote. “If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists… In France, a religion is nothing more than a collection of texts, traditions, and customs that it is perfectly legitimate to criticize. Sticking a clown nose on Marx is no more offensive or scandalous than popping the same schnoz on Muhammad.”=

This is the spirit of secularism — the French tradition of laïcité — that other countries in the western world should emulate. The problem is not the complaints from those who seek the implementation of sharia in democratic nations, but those in power who fail to reject such demands unequivocally. The murder of Salwan Momika should be a wake-up call for the West. Continued appeasement will only guarantee further bloodshed. For all the short-term risks of defending free speech, our long-term security depends upon it.

If anything, things have got worse. Take Romania, which recently canceled its presidential election when Călin Georgescu, leader of a nationalist Right coalition, won the first round. Thierry Breton, former French European Commissioner, revealed the EU’s mindset during a damning recent TV interview. “We did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary,” he said. In other words, if you can’t beat the far-Right, ban them.

I disagree with almost everything Breton has ever said, but I am grateful to him for stating his case with such revealing clarity. During his time as industry commissioner in Brussels, from 2019 until last summer, when Emmanuel Macron replaced him with a more compliant figure, he was the driving force behind a series of laws designed to keep Europe in the digital dark ages. The most extreme of which is the Digital Services Act (DSA) which compels “very large online platforms”, such as X and Meta, to check facts and filter out fake news.

But, thanks to Breton, the truth is out there. Europe’s ultimate aim isn’t to save public discourse, it is to suffocate far-Right parties by depriving them of the oxygen of information. The DSA isn’t even the last word in the EU’s anti-digital jihad. One of Ursula von der Leyen’s big ideas last year during the European election was the so-called “democracy shield” — effectively launching even more legislation to prevent outside interference in EU affairs. This notion conjures up images of laser beams and light-saber fights. And in some respects it’s not far from the truth: a frightened bloc needs a shield to protect itself from the encroaching enemy.

Mark Zuckerberg is certainly on the attack. Last week he announced that he is abandoning fact-checking on his platforms — effectively defying the DSA. And he is betting on Donald Trump to protect him from the legal consequences. Given that J.D. Vance, the Vice President-elect, has already threatened to end US support for NATO if Europe tries to censor Elon Musk’s X, surely the same will apply to Facebook. And the EU is far too dependent on the US to be able to mount an effective campaign against any of America’s social media platforms once Trump is president. The DSA, hastily drawn up during the pandemic, not only misjudges the nature of the social media, it misjudges political power. It exposes Europe’s essential weakness before America.

This isn’t just a geopolitical battle, though. It is also a European one. The attempted clampdown reveals that there is something the bloc fears more than free speech: populism. MEPs found it hard enough to stomach Nigel Farage’s brutal outbursts when he was a member of the European Parliament. Now they have Musk breathing down their neck, endorsing candidates from the AfD, a party that sits on the far-Right in the European Parliament’s benches and which supports German withdrawal from the EU.

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The German media had a collective breakdown when Musk tweeted an endorsement for the AfD, interviewed Alice Weidel, the party’s co-leader, on X, and then endorsed her in an article for Die Welt. The op-ed editor of the German daily resigned in protest. And an article in another newspaper hysterically described Musk’s intervention as unconstitutional. That journalists would advocate censorship seems shocking, until one understands the role of journalism in continental European society. It operates firmly inside a narrow centrist political consensus, which spans all the parties from the center-left to the center-right. Naturally, the AfD does not get much airtime in the German media.

But while marginalized by traditional media, the AfD thrives on TikTok, where it has large following. So what irks the German media, and politicians from other parties, is that the censorship cartel is no longer functioning as well as it once did. In the US and in the UK, the once mighty legacy media have already lost their power. Hillary Clinton expressed the frustration perhaps most clearly when she said that social media companies must fact check, or else “we lose total control”. But Europe still lives in a twilight zone where the traditional media still basks in the dwindling sunset of power, trying to ignore social media rising on the other horizon. Like all the modern political battles in Europe, this is about protecting vested interests.

The Romanian case demonstrates how these restrictions on freedom of speech are the first salvos in a greater war of repression. The presidential elections there were canceled on the grounds that a Russian-infested TikTok had misinformed voters. I am sure that the Russians were active. But it is shocking to think that an election was canceled because someone lied on TikTok.

Let’s be clear, there was no suggestion of any vote rigging. Georgescu won the first round of the election fair and square. But as with the laughable misperception in Brussels after the Brexit vote, the presumption behind the EU’s support for the nullification of the result, was that voters were too stupid to make up their own mind. The rerun is to take place on 4 May, followed by a run-off between the most successful candidate two weeks later. Georgescu is still the most likely candidate to win according to opinion polls, but the Romanian political establishment is still determined to find ways to disbar him, the most promising of which is the hope that he may have received undeclared funds.

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How the AfD won over Germany

By Lily Lynch

There are similar patterns elsewhere. Marine Le Pen faces potential disqualification from the 2027 presidential elections following accusations of irregularities regarding her assistants in the European Parliament. More recently, Brussels was spooked by the victory in Austria of the Freedom Party, which managed to obtain 28.8% of the vote in the September general election. It surpassed a threshold at which point it became politically impossible for the other parties to form coalitions. Herbert Kickl, the FPÖ’s leader, is now likely to become Austria’s next chancellor. Meanwhile, in Germany, a group of 113 MPs has ganged up to ban the AfD. Their story is that the far-Right wants to destroy democracy. While the party is not yet polling high enough to frustrate yet another centrist coalition in Berlin after next month’s elections, Germany may only be a few percentage points away from an Austrian-style impasse.

Surely, though, the sensible approach to the rise of the AfD, the FPÖ and other parties of the Right is not to censor them, but to address the underlying problem that has made them so strong: persistent economic uncertainty, loss of purchasing power, and dysfunctional policies on migration. Failing that, why not co-opt parties of the far-Right as junior coalition partners as they did in Sweden and Finland? If Weidel were suddenly thrust into the job of economics minister, we would see whether she could defend her record in government. But the centrist parties in Germany and France do neither. They have erected political firewalls against the far-Right. And they are doubling down with the same old policies.

It’s an approach that will inevitably backfire. A banned Le Pen would be far more dangerous for the centrist establishment, and possibly even more extreme when she eventually gets to power. Likewise the AfD would surely be radicalized after a ban.

Until then, the EU’s blunt weapons of choice — the legal bans, political firewalls, and censorship — will inflict more self-harm than good. In the pecking order of democratic rights, freedom of speech has a relatively low priority in Europe. Like the creatures in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, I am struggling to spot the difference between the extremists of the Right, and those who are trying to fight them.

Originally initiated by the previous Conservative government and championed by the centre-left Labor Party, the legislation promised to be a watershed moment in Australian media regulation. It proposed stringent controls on information sharing, with a curious twist: some, including legacy media and academics, would be exempt from the most restrictive provisions, while the hoi polloi would face intense scrutiny and potential censorship.

What makes this defeat truly remarkable is the broad coalition that emerged to block the bill. In the senate, an uncanny alliance formed — conservative opposition, the Greens, and Left-wing independent senators all united in rejecting the proposed legislation. This cross-political alignment suggests a growing recognition of the dangers inherent in state-controlled information management.

Progressive media outlets such as The Guardian, which would have been sheltered from the bill’s most severe provisions, were full-throated in their support for the legislation, dismissing opposition as a “scare campaign”. But the fractures within progressive circles proved to be the most intriguing development.

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The bill’s trajectory exposes a deeper narrative about how contemporary progressive culture has inadvertently become a vehicle for speech control. While I believe the core global actors pushing speech control are centrist, contemporary Left-wing culture has provided an excellent Trojan horse, via its collectivist concerns about public health, identity politics, online bullying and environmental issues. These fears have been systematically leveraged to advance increasingly restrictive information management strategies. Despite our reputation as living among snakes, spiders and emus, Australians have long been a coddled and fragile bunch, tucked into cul-de-sac suburbs, afraid of both the sun and our own shadows. Our Covid response was so remarked upon for this reason. A brutalist contrast between self-image and stark reality.

Harnessing contemporary progressive culture to advance speech controls was effective not only in disarming the field of digital free-expression NGOs, but in many cases those same organisations provided platoons of digital mercenaries to scour the internet and weed out disinformation. Having spent nearly two decades working in digital free expression advocacy, I witnessed first-hand how government and philanthropic funding diverted organic digital free speech movements. towards policing what they define as “disinformation”.

Working on the Twitter Files with Matt Taibbi, I helped map the intricate networks behind this phenomenon. First Draft, a US/UK outfit, emerged as a key player. It coined the term “malinformation” and played a critical role in attempting to suppress the now-verified Hunter Biden laptop story, two months before the New York Post broke the story. It was all carried out under the guise of “anti-disinformation” work.

First Draft also assisted in developing the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation which the proposed legislation was based on and sought to strengthen by providing a “regulatory backstop” and was the only NGO involved in the Trusted News Initiative, a Covid-era legacy media consortium that was integral to pandemic narrative management. Its work illustrates that these are not organic responses to the challenges of a cacophonous internet — but a politicised strategy to shape the public debate.

Through the Australian Twitter files I revealed that, under the existing voluntary code, our security agencies were already flagging remarkably innocuous content to social media platforms. Jokes, political criticism, and accounts with minimal followings were targeted. They even attempted to censor respected academics such as former Harvard professor Martin Kulldorff for questioning lockdown efficacy and promoting the Great Barrington Declaration. Full-scale legislation would only make things worse.

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And the bill’s provisions were breathtakingly broad. Companies could face fines of up to 5% of global revenue, and the bar was lowered to the point where content only needed to be “reasonably verifiable as false or misleading” to count as misinformation. “False” according to whom? Well, this would be the domain of faultless fact-checkers, their cheeks flushed with truthiness and here to rescue you from your misinformed self.

Among the justifications for the bill were the Southport Riots in Britain (triggered apparently by misinformation) and a recent stabbing in Sydney, where the perpetrator was misidentified most significantly by mainstream news, which, in a fabulous irony, is exempt from the bill. The cherry on the cake was the expansive definition of “harm” — encompassing potential damage to the environment, economy, and public health.

But, whisper it, the bill’s resounding defeat could signal that something profound is afoot. Could free speech values be experiencing an Australian revival? Though the Covid pandemic period saw unprecedented restrictions on public discourse, a growing number of people — including those traditionally supportive of such measures — are now loudly speaking out. Nick Coatsworth, a Deputy Chief Medical Officer during Covid and previously supportive of vaccine mandates, has emerged as a powerful critic. Coatsworth has seemingly been to Damascus and back, stating: “Misinformation causes harm. The weaponisation of misinformation as a term to shut down debate causes even greater harm. This bill does the latter.”

Similarly, legal experts, including the Human Rights Commissioner and constitutional law professors, provided crucial intellectual ammunition against the bill. The freedom movement that emerged from Covid managed to move the conventional Right into a more populist free-speech position and those moderate “expert” voices on the centre and centre-left gave permission to progressives to voice their concerns with less fear of being dogpiled.

That said, the failure also owes much to the incompetency of the current Labor government, who littered the bill with hypocrisies and excess largesse making it easier to shoot down. It should also be noted that the Greens’ rejection was a mixed bag – in part wanting legacy media to be included in government policing efforts, and in part a broader critique of Big Tech power.

But while celebrating this victory, realism is essential. Australia remains a fertile ground for technocratic control mechanisms with its penchant for technocracy and over-trust in government. Other restrictive legislation continues to advance, including proposed bans on social media for under-16s that would have serious impacts on adult users and expanding eSafety regulations.

Winning the free speech war requires building a broad, cross-political consensus. The defeat of this misinformation bill suggests such a thing might be emerging. The Left’s partial rejection of speech control narratives is especially significant, potentially creating a “permissions cascade” for other fearful progressive voices.

But the rejection of Australia’s counter-disinformation bill is more than a legislative outcome. It represents a potential inflection point in how democratic societies negotiate the challenging terrain of information control. The emerging alliance defending free expression suggests that the impulse to protect open dialogue might be more resilient than the forces seeking to constrain it.

After slavishly obeying perhaps the most absurd covid diktats of anywhere in the world, today Australia offers a sprig of hope. In a new political atmosphere, reasoned debate, cross-political collaboration, and a commitment to free expression can still prevail against increasingly sophisticated attempts to shut it down.

I learnt this lesson the hard way. Early on during my time at Oxford, after an alcohol-fuelled encounter during Freshers Week, I descended gingerly into the quad the next morning. On a noticeboard at the college entrance where people would usually read official missives about exams or prizes, some third year had stuck up a bit of A4 gloatingly informing fellow students, tutors, and passing tourists of my liaison. Beneath such a weirdly personal prank, darker emotions were presumably lurking, but 19-year-old me was incapable of analysis, conscious only of burning shame.

I remembered this feeling reading about the death of the 20-year-old Oxford student Alexander Rogers, who killed himself within a week of being shamed by university friends. According to the coroner, he too had become the subject of rumours after a post-pub tryst. While no formal allegation was registered, the woman involved told mutuals afterwards that it had left her feeling “uncomfortable”. An ex-boyfriend of hers was then involved in a physical confrontation with Rogers, while others told him he had “messed up” and they would be distancing themselves accordingly. Shortly afterwards, the third-year material sciences student wrote a goodbye note describing an “unintentional but unforgiveable” act.

It’s usually an oversimplification to assume a suicide is caused by a single precipitating event. Still, the coroner in this case at least seemed to think that the social punishment exacted immediately beforehand played a substantial role. He cited an independent review commissioned by Corpus Christi — the college attended by Rogers — describing a “normalised” culture in which “students could rush to judgment without knowledge of all the facts, could shun those accused, and a ‘pile-on’ might occur where a group would form a negative view about another individual”.  According to the report, “this culture was not limited to Oxford University — it is an issue for the higher education sector as a whole.”

When I was an undergraduate, it was the Nineties, and the balance of social power was still mostly in males’ favour, especially if they came from public schools. The kings of the castle were the “rugger buggers”: braying beer monsters who would get their kit off in the bar or race naked around the quad at a moment’s notice — only apparently to impress each other — and who tended to treat members of the opposite sex like confusing and slightly distasteful alien species. There was lots of open mockery and cruel nicknames for certain collectively designated stooges. Those who didn’t positively join in tended to watch with the flat indifference of late youth, strategically incurious about whatever the victims must be feeling inside.

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And then there was the Junior Common Room (JCR) meeting every Sunday, to which most Freshers in my day would dutifully troop. A venerable college tradition had it that each week a comic speech would be given by a second year — almost always male — roasting flamboyant college characters old and new in the crudest of terms, and detailing any intrigue that had taken place over the past seven days. There were only a handful of women in my intake, and female vocal tics, surnames, fashion choices, and doomed attempts to find boyfriends were the butt of many jokes. I would laugh as hard as anyone there and ignore the mortified faces beside me, glad that this time it wasn’t me.

These days, a brief perusal of online resources for undergraduates suggests things have changed quite a bit. Guilt at the relative privilege of most Oxbridge students has apparently been supercharged by powerful ideological forces that were rippling across the country anyway, and now every college seems to resemble a rest home for the nervously exhausted in some kind of expiation.

At my old college, for instance, there are weekly “Welfare Teas”, “peer supporters” and “college parents”. There’s a BAME officer, an LGBTQ+ Officer, a “Womxn’s Officer”, and two “Class Officers… for anyone who identifies with class issues”. There’s also a JCR “gender expression fund… for anything to do with your gender expression, from binders, packets and the like to haircuts, clothes and makeup”. One assumes it doesn’t stretch to manly sporting attire for archaic souls whose gender identity is rugger bugger.

Meanwhile, the college’s “Flag Flying Policy” reveals a confused jumble of ancient and modern colours and causes: the Union Flag for the sovereign’s birthday and Remembrance Sunday; the college flag for Eights Week; the Progress Flag for Pride Month, and the Trans Flag for Trans Awareness Week. One can only imagine the impassioned internal battles to get the Palestinian flag up.

This would all look quite innocent — and indeed, endearingly solicitous and idealistic from some angles — if you didn’t suspect that more traditional human emotions also have to find an outlet. This week, the papers have shared first-hand accounts from Oxbridge students, bearing witness to painful struggle sessions and acts of shunning for those suspected of harbouring morally injurious attitudes. And this fits with what others have told me: a Cambridge student I met in 2023 who said her entire college year group had turned on her after she was discovered to have written a mildly gender-critical blog post; an Oxford student who told me she had defended me against accusations of “transphobia”, and was excommunicated by her peer group as a result.

It’s tempting to rail against the fanaticism of aspiring young witchfinders, and the cowardice of those who fall in silently behind them, especially when the consequences are as grave as in Alexander Rogers’ case. But just as I now look back on the sometimes parodically boorish student behaviour of the Nineties as exacerbated by the wider “lad” culture, glorified at the time in magazines and on telly, so, too, it seems clear that the whispering and pointing now rife among students would not be so popular had influential adults not sanctioned it. In many ways, here too young people are just doing what they think they are supposed to, by diligently copying other people.

In particular, the current intake has lived through the group hysteria surrounding #MeToo at a formative age, a movement which started with good intentions but ended up as a trivial revenge project for unsatisfactory sexual encounters. Even as I write, there are women lost in their own projections, confidently opining online that Alexander Rogers must have done something illegal, despite no detailed knowledge about the case. This gamete-divided Manichaeism reigned uncontested in the progressive media for years. In 2020, for instance, a Guardian commentator was telling us with arresting confidence that “[f]or women… ‘bad sex’ almost always involves considerable pain and/or violence”. Any resulting damage to the psyches of boys and girls listening in was treated as negligibly important collateral.

Then, in the run up to university, present-day students will have participated in endless classroom discussions about things such as “toxic masculinity” and “white privilege”. Ironically, this seems to have been especially likely to be the case if they went to places like Eton. And now that they are finally on the home stretch in higher education, they are bound to encounter at least a few lecturers or tutors who delight in rooting out politically suspect language from young mouths and minds, and who approach every topic, no matter how abstract, with an eye to playing hunt-the-victim. That is still the case in every university I know.

Over the years, in other words, they will have learnt that — without having done anything deliberate to earn it — many of them carry a deep moral taint that requires constant vigilance in order to suppress it, and frequent acts of atonement. While public sympathy is rightly with Alexander and his family, please do spare a thought for the young friends of his who believed they were doing the right thing in confronting him. We raised them that way. And now they have to live with the consequences.

For confidential support, the Samaritans can be contacted by calling 116 123 or going to samaritans.org

It’s all too easy to miss the early warnings of an impending disaster. Today’s culture wars are often interpreted as the symptoms of an ephemeral fad. Most can feel the tremors — restrictions on free speech, public shaming of those with unfashionable views, regressive identity politics masquerading as “progress” — but there is a widespread sense that if we ignore the problems, they will simply disappear. But what if these rumblings presage something far worse to come? What if, like the people of Pompeii, we are at risk of civilisational collapse but are misinterpreting the signs?

Further tremors have reverberated recently with renewed attacks on the First Amendment to the US Constitution, perhaps the final bastion of free speech in the West. Speaking at the World Economic Forum earlier this month, former Secretary of State John Kerry argued that when it comes to “disinformation”, the “First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence”.

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The First Amendment codifies a “negative liberty”, not a licence for certain behaviour but rather a protection from government interference. It reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It can function as a kind of barrier to the worst excesses of the illiberal Left, even at a time when their party of choice occupies the White House.

Such challenges to the First Amendment began around 10 years ago with the emergence of the Critical Social Justice (or “woke”) movement, which sought to promote equity according to group identity through authoritarian means. In March 2018, an article appeared on the website of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) which noted that by this point it was “common” for Leftist activists “to call for lower legal protections for speech”. The writer concluded that such calls were misguided, describing the First Amendment as “our most powerful tool to keep the government from regulating the conversations that spark change in the world”.

But other activists took a different view from the ACLU. In 2018, two of the founders of Critical Race Theory, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, republished their 1997 book Must We Defend Nazis?: Hate Speech, Pornography, and the New First Amendment. This version of the book was modified according to the shift in activists’ demands, and the subtitle was now Why the First Amendment Should Not Protect Hate Speech and White Supremacy. In that same year, activist and legal scholar Justin Hansford argued in the Yale Law Journal Forum that, when it comes to race, the “marketplace of ideas” does not apply. “When ideas on race that would disrupt the racial hierarchy of white over Black emerge,” wrote Hansford, “the First Amendment is disproportionately applied to trample that dissent”.

The “woke” movement had always taken a pro-censorship stance, but by 2018 the First Amendment was clearly identified as the key obstacle to their aims. This was developed further in The Cult of the Constitution (2019), in which legal scholar Mary Anne Franks took aim at “First Amendment fundamentalism”. An entire chapter was devoted to what Franks calls “the cult of free speech”, a chilling phrase that recalls Labour MP Nadia Whittome’s belief that “we must not fetishise ‘debate’ as though debate is itself an innocuous, neutral act”. Authoritarians frequently resort to this kind of sophistry rather than admit outright that they find the concept of free speech inherently rebarbative.

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In October 2019, former editor of Time magazine Richard Stengel continued this disturbing trend with an article for the Washington Post entitled “Why America needs a hate speech law”. Stengel rehashed the typical concerns about “false narratives” and “lies”, as though any kind of speech regulator could possibly be immune from deceptive or misleading behaviour. He also repeated the “direct effects theory” which posits that people act on cue from social media posts, even though more than six decades of research into media impact on public behaviour has seen such notions fully discredited. The First Amendment, Stengel argued, “should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another. In an age when everyone has a megaphone, that seems like a design flaw”.

A snobbish mistrust of the masses lies at the heart of the opposition to the First Amendment, a feature that we can trace to the Frankfurt School and the French postmodernists of the Sixties, two groups that have substantially influenced the philosophy behind Critical Social Justice. According to this view, popular culture has created a society of unthinking clones. What Herbert Marcuse described as the “one-dimensional man” is irredeemably blind to his own subjugation and reacts mechanically according to decrees from above. According to this perspective, “hate speech” has the power to rile up one group against another, even though the evidence for this claim is scant.

Those of us familiar with the concept of the “long march through the institutions” will be aware that these theories take time to percolate and to infect the mainstream. John Kerry’s recent remarks would suggest that First Amendment scepticism has finally made the leap from academic activism into the political sphere. Whether it gains traction in its new home should trouble us all.

The signs are not promising. This week, Hillary Clinton weighed into the debate during an interview with CNN. “We should be, in my view, repealing something called Section 230,” she argued, referring to the section of the Communications Decency Act introduced in 1996 that protects online platforms from liability for comments posted by users. Without these protections, big tech would have little choice but to implement draconian censorship measures. The consequences for free speech, in the de facto public square of our digital age, would be catastrophic.

Clinton stopped short of a call for a ban on “hate speech”, but how long before other mainstream politicians are echoing Kerry’s assessment of the First Amendment as a “major block”? There was a telling moment in the recent vice-presidential debate, in which Tim Walz interjected to claim that “hate speech” is excluded from First Amendment protections. The remark was so fleeting that it was not even included in the official CBS News transcript, but it was perhaps the most significant moment of the evening. If the Democrats are triumphant in the election, Americans will be governed by an administration that does not believe the First Amendment is fit for purpose.

History teaches us that legal proscriptions against offensive viewpoints do not have a mitigating effect; bad ideas that are driven underground tend to fester and multiply. We also know that laws against offensive speech soon become expanded to incorporate any viewpoints that are not approved by those in power. In 1644, John Milton published his Areopagitica, a counterblast to the Licensing Order of June 1643 which decreed that all printed texts be passed before a censor in advance of publication. In this essential defence of liberty, he pointed out that censors do not “stay in matters heretical” but inevitably broaden their remit to “any subject that is not to their palate”.

Once a state has been empowered to set the limits of speech, to introduce legislation against vague and indefinable concepts such as “hate” or “offence”, the groundwork for future tyranny is firmly established. One thinks of Juvenal’s famous question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (who will watch the watchmen?). Kerry, Clinton, Walz et al seem to believe that those in authority can be trusted to distinguish between fact and fiction, but this was roundly disproved during the Covid pandemic when the lab-leak theories, now widely accepted as credible, were censored as “disinformation”.

Any attempt to carve out exceptions to the First Amendment for “hate speech” will inevitably empower the state to curb freedom of expression at will. The hopelessly subjective notion of “hate” means that this will be tantamount to a censor’s charter, a means by which political opposition can be stifled with the backing of the Constitution. As more and more political figures are willing to openly question the validity of the First Amendment, the threat to free speech in the West is now palpable. The tremors are becoming more frequent, and we ignore them at our peril.

The festival, founded in 2013, will also be showcasing Mohammad Sabaaneh, whose work is alleged to contain antisemitic tropes. UnHerd has learned that one former LICAF board member, Peter Kessler, resigned from his position in July over Sabaaneh’s involvement, as well as over what he considered to be the board’s decision not to challenge the artist’s previous work.

Earlier this year, LICAF invited Sabaaneh to co-curate an exhibition on Palestinian comic-book art, alongside the writer and comic book expert George Khoury. But during online discussions with festival director Julie Tait in June, Kessler expressed concern about Sabaaneh. Citing images in which the Palestinian artist depicted Israel as an octopus in control of the global financial system, and as a locust with an oversized nose, as well as one showing a Jewish concentration camp internee in 1945 transforming into an Israeli settler, he claimed that “in putting [Sabaaneh’s] work on display, and in allowing him to speak, I’m concerned that we are giving a platform for a racist”.

Kessler added that the images in question were designed “to stir up racial hatred in the viewers” and recommended seeking advice from the British Council, which is both co-organising and contributing £15,000 towards the event. In an email response at the start of July, Tait denied that Sabaaneh was a racist and argued that “his ‘job’ is to question, to challenge […] a wide range of ‘targets’ to convey a message”. Tait added that the Palestinian artist is “a brave man, a humane man and his only ‘crime’ is his relentless pursuit of what he sees as justice for Palestinian people”. In the same message, she stressed LICAF’s “duty to uphold freedom of speech”.

Later that month, on 11 July, six members of the LICAF board, including Tait and Kessler, convened to discuss the festival’s response to Sabaaneh’s appearance. In a presentation delivered during the meeting, Kessler argued that “Sabaaneh should attend LICAF and speak at his session, but with the conditions that he is questioned about his antisemitic material and that he doesn’t use the festival as an opportunity to attack what he sees as Israeli propaganda”. Kessler added that “there is severe danger to LICAF’s reputation both in cancelling [Sabaaneh] and in allowing him to continue as planned”.

After this proposal was rejected, Kessler resigned from the LICAF board and wrote to the British Council explaining what had happened, attaching some of Sabaaneh’s more contentious cartoons. He stated that he felt inviting the artist “without addressing this more controversial aspect of his work would be tantamount to ignoring hate speech”. The next day, Paul Thompson, chair of the British Council, replied, agreeing that the images — which do not feature in the LICAF exhibition — contain “some extremely distasteful tropes”.

Scott McDonald, the Council’s chief executive, then informed Kessler that senior staff were now investigating the dispute. Kessler claims that during a later phone call, McDonald revealed how Council members had undergone trial antisemitism training sessions — but that he was unsure how successful those sessions had been. McDonald also reportedly said that the cartoons shared were antisemitic.

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In his last communication with Kessler on 19 August, seen by UnHerd, McDonald concluded that the Council “will continue to provide input to the LICAF team to support them in ensuring the safeguarding of all speakers and audience members, and providing a respectful safe space for dialogue”. In a statement, the British Council told UnHerd that “we have supported this year’s Lakes International Comic Art Festival (LICAF) by helping to fund an exhibition of work by twelve Palestinian comic artists. We are aware of concerns that have been raised regarding a selection of political cartoons previously produced by one of the curators. These cartoons do not form part of the exhibition at LICAF, which aims to highlight the unique creativity of Palestinian comic art.”

For the past decade, LICAF has been funded by Arts Council England (ACE), receiving an annual grant of £240,000. On the same day that Kessler first contacted the British Council, 19 July, he also emailed ACE to draw attention to what he viewed as a “grave failure of governance, breach of policies, and misuse of public funds”. He accused the remaining members of the LICAF board of “breach[ing] basic principles of good governance by preventing full and free discussion of a highly sensitive issue relating to race discrimination”.

ACE chief executive Darren Henley responded by saying that his organisation would investigate the claims. UnHerd was told this week by an ACE spokesperson that “Arts Council England is not a regulator, but we have comprehensive processes in place if concerns are raised with us about an organisation we fund, and we can look into whether they are in breach of their funding agreement with us”. They added: “While we cannot share details of confidential concerns that are flagged to us, we have robust processes in place to make sure organisations address them.”

Then, on 16 September, an ACE official contacted Kessler to say that the investigation was complete and that he had written to LICAF with “conclusions and recommendations”. In an email seen by UnHerd, the representative stated that “we did find minor breaches of the terms and conditions of their current funding agreement with us, relating to the organisation’s policy about handling complaints, and we are now satisfied with the actions proposed by LICAF to address these issues [sic].” The message made no direct mention of Sabaaneh, his work, or racial discrimination more widely. 

Kessler responded that he was “flummoxed”, and that ACE had “investigated something that I hadn’t actually complained about”. In a further email to Henley and the organisation’s chair, Nicholas Serota, he concluded that ACE’s handling of his complaint was “not just woefully insufficient. It borders on complicity.”

Sabaaneh is currently scheduled to appear at two LICAF events, one alongside Khoury and another in which he is set to discuss freedom of speech in comics with Russian graphic artist Victoria Lomasko. During an interview with the New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium in May, Sabaaneh said he wanted to use his involvement with LICAF to “dismantle the Israeli propaganda, dismantle Israeli discourse when they describe the Palestinian people as human animals”. Speaking to the Washington Post at the end of last year, he claimed that “my main mission is to rehumanise the Palestinians”; earlier this year, he argued online that “antisemitism has become a tool of anti-free speech and censorship. Israel uses it against anyone who criticizes it.”

The artist — whose work has been exhibited in Britain, America, and across Europe — was previously imprisoned in Israel. Arrested by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank in February 2013, Sabaaneh was kept in solitary confinement for two weeks and jailed for a further five months. The reason given for his internment was that his artwork appeared in a book about Palestinian political prisoners written by his brother Thamer, who has been accused by an Israeli military court of being a Hamas member. 

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Sabaaneh was also targeted in 2015 by the Palestinian Authority for allegedly depicting the Prophet Muhammad, a charge he denies. Earlier that year, he had marched in Paris in support of the right of artists to mock and criticise Islam, following the Charlie Hebdo shooting in the city. He has previously said that Hamas “hates” him. 

Sabaaneh did not respond to a request for comment, though a LICAF board member informed UnHerd that the artist was aware of the disagreement over his appearance and Kessler’s ensuing resignation. They also made clear that Sabaaneh will defend himself against charges of racism “coherently and persuasively at the festival”.

This week, Tait told UnHerd that the current LICAF board is “fully supportive of [Sabaaneh’s] attendance”. She also stated that LICAF had been in contact with the British Council about “safeguarding all groups at the festival”. Kessler, for his part, told UnHerd that “when you see racism, it is your responsibility — especially as a publicly funded organisation that inspires others — to call it out”. 

According to its equality policy, “LICAF aims to create a safe and welcoming atmosphere for everyone. We will ensure that all people are treated with dignity and respect and will challenge all forms of discrimination.” Yet speaking to UnHerd, Kessler attacked the festival’s attitudes towards discrimination: “It is not right to conceal [racism], forgive it, or deny its existence. But this is what LICAF is now doing.” 

Where Kessler believes that LICAF is promoting an antisemite, the festival board maintains that Sabaaneh is categorically not a racist and stresses the importance of upholding artistic freedom of speech. For all of the British Council’s reassurances about “providing a respectful safe space for dialogue”, next weekend’s events risk being overshadowed by the dispute.

But should this development be welcomed?

Back in the Sixties, an overly romanticised moment of revolutionary fervour when some intellectuals even garnered rock-star appeal (at least in French cafes), there was an open assault on language and its connection to how we understand the world. Spearheaded by great thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, what was seen as the important marker of any shared civilisation — the language which sets us apart from more barbarous animals, as Aristotle mused — was no longer taken as given. The sentences people used were not simply learned, but the outcome of a fractious historical battle that would often normalise systems of oppression, subjugation and hidden forms of violence. In short, what was and was not said could both be boiled down to one single word: power.

As the politicisation of language has continued apace, addressing its inherent power has become a dominant preoccupation for all manner of social commentators. In short, if a claim’s legitimacy is really about the power to impose verifiable truths, everything that passes as truthful is ultimately a matter of perspective. It is no coincidence that the oft-cited phrase “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” has become part of standard political fare

The problem with perspective, however, is that no two people ever experience the same event in an identical way. Moreover, even within “post-modernist” circles, there was some warning against a slide into a purely subjective abyss where the truthfulness of language risked losing all meaning. This was particularly acute when it came to the most emotive of all words: “violence”. Hannah Arendt, for instance, was at pains to argue that words needed to mean very specific things; so when we spoke of violence, we really meant physical violence and the very denial of one’s humanity. Likewise Frantz Fanon held that to speak of violence means speaking of some kind of “intention”.

Intention, however, is no less fraught. As terrorism experts have appreciated for quite some time, motivation is very difficult to prove. Should a person have training manuals for al-Qaeda, enough peroxide to blow up a shopping mall and just so happen to be communicating their hatred for the West, accusations of intention can draw upon laws of probability, as has been the case. But such cases are a rarity. So, as the widening security net during the War on Terror showed, once language becomes securitised and bad deeds linked to claims of extremism marked with intent, the trawler tends to reach wider and pull in those whose words could easily be read as simply ill-considered.

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Underwriting the securitisation of language tends to be a neat correlationism, which draws a clear line between what is said and what will be enacted. But for intention to work, should somebody say they want to burn down the house, it has to be assumed that they are indeed intending at some point in their lives to have that house burnt to the ground. Fantasy thus becomes the pre-emptive proof of a reality that should not be left to chance. Regarding the recent case of Julie Sweeney, then, her call to blow up a mosque was no doubt revealing of her rather unsavoury character, which would no doubt warrant a custodial sentence under pre-existing legislation. Yet whether we should call her a would-be mass killer is more open to debate.

It would be foolish to deny that speech can occasionally incite violence and words can undoubtedly be wounding. This needs to be accounted for and persons brought to task for harmful things they have said. But if we are dealing with perception — and recognise that perception matters both in the articulation of truth and whether our words will be believed — we also need to contend with what the comedian Chris Rock brilliantly called “selective outrage”. Whether we agree with what’s said or not, there is a perception in society today that the angry words of some are always presented as threatening and divisive, whereas others would be presented as the most reasoned, just and legitimate of all positions. This was pretty much the argument presented by the radical thinkers of the Sixties, but has mostly now been turned on its head.

Which brings us back to power. It’s worth stressing here that there has never been such a thing as a golden age of free speech. Just as culture has always been a battlefield (sorry to disappoint, but there’s nothing new about the culture wars), so language has always been policed. Our task, then, is to ask who is doing the policing, and in whose name does it serve. Alongside this, we need to be mindful of the climate in which the words are spoken. Or as a comedian might say: timing is everything.

In the post-9/11 environment and the mass acceleration of what Manuel Castells called “the information and communications revolutions”, three developments have made today’s climate notably fraught. Firstly, the fragmentation of societies into multiple identity-based groups enabled by social media has transformed the spoken-word landscape in ways that would have been inconceivable a few decades ago. Partly inspired by the Sixties’ notion that speech and thoughts should be freed from the moral entrapments of the suffocating nation state, many welcomed the internet as a means for democratising language. Yet, as we have found, there is nothing preferable to having everybody say whatever they want, whenever they choose to do so, to whomsoever may be listening. Indeed, if the famous post-colonial scholar Gayatri Chakravotri Spivak could rightly ask “Can the subaltern speak?” just before the dawn of the digital age, it is dubious whether that assertion holds today. Billons now speak of everything, to nobody in particular, all of the time.

Secondly, the culture of the internet has fuelled a marked shift in political contestation, which has notably resulted in a social culture that’s moved from victim-blaming to victim-claiming. The battle lines in politics today are all about who is the greatest victim of history. Trump even played to this when he told Americans for the first time “you are no longer great”, but assured them he could remedy that. Much of this sense of victimisation has absolutely depended upon a broadening of our understanding of violence, which has come to mean so much more than physical force. While this is to be welcomed — ask victims of domestic abuse about the violence of psychological terror — it has raised its problems of its own. After all, if everyone is a victim, who do we prioritise? Do white people, for example, have any right to use the language of victims of history?

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And thirdly for Castells, most challenging of all has been the many ways in which most people now simultaneously occupy two worlds and seem utterly incapable of reconciling them both. As we walk down physical streets with devices in our hands that already place them elsewhere, or politely order decaffeinated coffee while verbally assassinating somebody on social media, it seems we are caught in a schizophrenic bind.

The result, as so many of us know well, is the hyper-arousal of the human condition. Here we have a peculiar situation in which people can say whatever comes into their minds without any filter or hesitation, and what is received leads to an equation in which emotion is linked to some unequivocal truth. I am not suggesting emotions are irrelevant. But just because something is said or felt in the heat of a moment, doesn’t necessarily make it a universal truth.

And this has important repercussions for our understanding of violence. For today, just as we’re told that whatever we say can be understood by others as violence, so too are we told that “silence is violence”. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

Yet while the ability to silence voices remains a hallmark of totalitarian projects, I am suspicious that such a claim holds. Our problem, by contrast, is that we don’t know when to be silent, so that something meaningful may be said amid the digital circus. Even more disturbingly, if everything said or indeed everything unsaid now amounts to a potential act of violence, forming any judgements — political or moral — will surely become impossible. And who could live with such a burden?

To the presumed horror of the English tourist board, Elon Musk has joined in, taking a break from trying to set off nuclear bombs on Mars by putting a metaphorical one under the discourse here instead. According to him, the UK is now beset by “two-tier justice” and “civil war is inevitable”. Over the past fortnight, he has sent out a stream of posts and memes, deriding various attempts by Starmer and his Director of Public Prosecutions to strike fear into the hearts of would-be miscreants, by telling them of the grave consequences they face for carrying out riots or inciting them online.

And it is the latter that has got Musk especially worked up. Communications offences in UK law have long included sending “grossly offensive” and “indecent” messages, as well as obscene and threatening ones. Last year’s Online Safety Act also criminalised knowingly false messages intended to cause “non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience” without “reasonable excuse”. Meanwhile, the Criminal Justice Act generally requires that racial or religious hostility be treated as aggravating factors in criminal conviction, resulting in heavier sentences than otherwise. Pleading guilty also means the decision can be faster than when guilt has to be established at a trial.

Accordingly, there have been some swift and draconian-looking judicial decisions over the past few days for Musk to highlight for his avid followers, contrasting them with apparently lenient criminal cases involving immigrants to the UK. “It’s 2030 in the UK, & you’re being executed for posting a meme…” goes one typically restrained post. Retweets have included memes merging the British police with the SS, and one jokily showing Starmer as a Nazi — a bit unfair when you remember it was the Conservatives who brought in the Online Safety Act in the first place.

Another meme, comparing a photo of an extremely blonde woman surrounded by black men in their underwear with another of a white policeman in the midst of Muslim community leaders, went out with the words: “Found this pic of the British justice system.” Immediately underneath, he wrote: “This meme could get you 3 years in prison in the UK (actually)”. One assumes Musk is partly worried about his business model: also according to the Online Safety Act, Ofcom now has the power to fine him 10% of a year’s worth of “qualifying worldwide revenue” for what users get up to on X.

Soberly raised, there are various angles one could use to attack the moral legitimacy of giving someone three months in prison, say, for the use of two emojis on Facebook — a brown face next to a gun — or for writing “blow the mosque up with the adults in it” in an online community group. You could question the use of aggravating factors in sentencing about speech. You could argue that illegality should depend on establishing a causal link between a particular post and an instance of violent unrest, rather than just positing a vague counterfactual. Many racist posts on social media during times of rioting are caused by the riots rather than the other way round, yet the system doesn’t reflect this.

Alternatively, you could argue that the fast-paced, vaguely dispersed, algorithm-triggered and impulsive nature of most social media messaging means it often doesn’t meet the bar for traditional notions of intentional harm or threat. Hitting two emojis and pressing “send” into the universe looks importantly different in this respect, say, to writing a letter, addressing it to someone, and putting a stamp on it. But Musk doesn’t seem interested in discussing such complicated matters, preferring instead to flex what his former spouse Talulah Riley calls his “naughty Twitter fingers” instead.

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Britain's Right is just as weird

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It’s not that the vision of the UK being projected around the world at the moment has no truth behind it. As Carl Jung said of projections generally: “It frequently happens that the object offers a hook to the projection, and even lures it out.” The UK unambiguously has two-tier policing, at least in one sense: it has aggravated offences and non-aggravated ones. We also have a judicial system focused on maintaining public order and so likely to engage in example-setting, and politicians across the board who agree that visibly harsh sentences have a generally deterrent effect.

After a decade of institutionally adopted white guilt in many quarters, it is indeed possible that sometimes the judiciary punishes white offenders disproportionately relative to other ethnicities for the very same crimes — though cherry-picking individual decisions to compare them, as Musk and others are doing, is a terrible way to establish this as true. What does seem clear is that elements of the establishment are markedly more at ease castigating white working-class people than non-white ethnic groups, including where speech inciting racial and religious violence is concerned.

For instance, pro-Palestinian marches last year, though mainly peaceful and engaged in legitimate political protest, included instances of nakedly antisemitic speech that provoked few outraged op-eds on the Left about harms to British Jews. But then again, some subsequently overbearing criminal prosecutions prompted few objections from the normally free-speech-loving Right either, with many of them exaggeratedly describing the protests in their entirety as “hate marches”. People often say they want neutrality, but it’s tempting to conclude they just want a system that doesn’t enable their political enemies to succeed — and that’s not the same thing.

And the same apparently applies to Musk too. He didn’t seem such a big fan of free speech when his employee Martin Tripp spoke to a journalist about environmentally and financially damaging waste-management practices at the Tesla plant in 2018. Back then, Musk accused Tripp of “sabotage” and personally instructed others to hack his phone and emails, while a Tesla spokesman falsely claimed that Tripp was intending to come to the factory to commit a mass shooting.

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Equally, although the billionaire has this week complained on X about British judges sending citizens to prison for fighting the police, in his conversation with Donald Trump on Monday, he decried various cases in the US where insufficiently substantial sentences had been handed down for attacking cops. He also seemed to understand the principle of general deterrence, at least by broad analogy: for in the same conversation, he said: “It’s worth emphasising to listeners the immense importance of whether the United States President is intimidating or not intimidating, and how much that matters to global security… because there’s some real tough characters out there.”

But while Musk is busy conjuring exaggerated phantasms of Britain, what fantasies are we projecting upon him? Progressives who once lauded him as an ecological revolutionary, marshalling tech to save humanity, now see him as a pantomime villain who must be stopped at all costs. This week, for instance, former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf called him “one of the most dangerous men on the planet” responsible for “the most wicked evil possible” in amplifying “far-Right white supremacist ideology”. As usual, this sort of hyperbolic overstatement produces defensive overcompensation from the Right, with some conjuring up a noble warrior saving liberal values and the West, one shitpost at a time. No mention tends to be made of the way his platform’s algorithms continue to monetise polarisation and forever culture wars on a scale of which Putin would be proud.

In the three-part BBC documentary broadcast about him last year, his evidently affectionate ex-wife Riley was more realistic, recalling how financial success made a sudden difference to how people responded to Musk: “Elon went from being ridiculed, to suddenly his word was gospel.” Now, she reported, “everyone listens to everything he says… I’ve had people say to me ‘oh I met Elon and I could tell he was a genius because he seemed a bit distracted and he was clearly thinking great things’, and I’d be thinking, really? He probably just didn’t like you or he was probably a bit bored.”

The unpalatable truth for those who would idolise Musk is that he’s as limited, self-interested, and hypocritical as the rest of us. The unpalatable truth for those who demonise him is that they are too. In fact, we are all “two-tier”, though it would be good if our justice system was not. Reality will always outstrip Manichean projections, whether about the world’s richest man or the state of the UK.

Musk’s revelation came shortly after Thierry Breton, the EU’s censorship czar, announced the Commission’s preliminary findings that X’s new “blue check” verification system was in violation of the DSA. Given that anyone can now subscribe and obtain a “verified status” — unlike before Musk when the platform arbitrarily decided who was worthy of the coveted blue check — this, he stated, undermines users’ ability to make informed decisions about account authenticity.

The Commission also accused X of “fail[ing] to provide access to its public data to researchers”, as mandated by the DSA. It urged the company to address such breaches or face a fine up to 6% of its total worldwide annual turnover, which was approximately $3.4 billion in 2023. Failure to comply could result in X being banned from operating in the EU altogether.

The line trotted out by the Commission is that this all about “transparency” and protecting users from deception and disinformation. But the truth, as Musk suggests, is that this is really about the EU’s desire — and the DSA’s ultimate goal — to secretly control the online narrative. So much for transparency.

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This mission to censor has been backed up by Mike Benz, a former Trump official and cybersecurity expert who has alleged that “granting researchers access to X’s public data” isn’t quite as benign as it sounds. In fact, it’s a cover for the EU’s attempt to “use the DSA to force X to restaff the censorship squad fired when Elon took over”. Elon got rid of the team because, as the Twitter Files revealed, their sole purpose was to act upon government requests for censorship. Hence Benz’s claim that these “researchers” are actually “political operatives”. Musk reposted Benz’s analysis with one word of comment — “Exactly” — adding that if the EU pursues an enforcement action against X, he will take them to court.

The language and accusations are nothing new. The ground rules for this battle were laid the moment Musk took over Twitter and tweeted “the bird is freed”. Breton immediately replied: “In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” with a reference to the DSA, which had been officially signed into law that same month.

Even though Musk initially pledged to “respect the future European regulation”, the honeymoon didn’t last long. In May 2023, he pulled out of the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, which started out voluntary but was subsequently made de facto legally binding under the DSA. This triggered an investigation, in December, into whether the platform violated the DSA in areas such as “risk management, content moderation, dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers”. Last week it concluded that it did, hence the latest showdown.

It’s hard to see how Musk can win this battle. Especially considering that his pro-free speech stance hasn’t just put him toe-to-toe with the EU, but also with a number of other governments around the world. Musk has attacked “takedown” requests in Brazil, India, Australia and Turkey and has even challenged some of these demands through national courts. In almost every case, however, the platform has ended up complying with governments’ requests. Indeed, a report from last year showed that under Musk, X had approved more than 80% of censorship requests from governments.

So even as Musk publicly challenges the EU, he is removing posts — as many X users have lamented — because of non-compliance with the DSA. On 10 October, for example, days after Hamas’s attack, Breton issued a warning to Musk over alleged “disinformation”; X responded by immediately removing or flagging tens of thousands of pieces of content.

Accusing Musk of hypocrisy, however, would be to miss the point. Complying with these requests is often the only way that the company can continue to operate — and at least Musk, unlike the other major platform owners, has brought online censorship into the open. The publication of the groundbreaking Twitter Files, remember, revealed the shocking level of collusion between the US administration and social media companies.

More to the point, though, X, despite the censorship, remains the only platform where information is allowed to flow relatively freely. Indeed, it remains the single biggest threat to the establishment’s desire for full-spectrum information control — and that is why they are coming down on it so hard. But one man, no matter how rich or powerful, cannot be expected to single-handedly stand up to some of the most powerful governments in the world — let alone to the European Union, the world’s most influential supranational institution.

There’s also another factor to consider. The global attack on free speech isn’t just the whim of out-of-control, power-hungry politicians and bureaucrats. It’s a systemic problem that relates to the structural decay of liberal-democratic institutions, particularly in the West. As our societies degenerate into de facto oligarchies controlled by increasingly delegitimised political-economic elites, this manipulation of public opinion — not only through propaganda delivered via traditional mass media channels but also, increasingly, by policing and micromanaging the public conversation taking place on social media platforms — has come to be seen as an imperative for keeping the status quo safe from the threat of democracy. This is compounded by the growing militarisation of the geopolitical context, which requires an even more compliant populace given its political and economic consequences.

It’s no coincidence that the censorship-industrial complex started emerging in the second half of the 2010s. This was the time when the West was rocked by an unprecedented “populist” backlash against globalisation and the neoliberal order — Trump, Brexit, the Yellow Vests, and the rise of Eurosceptic parties and movements across Europe.

It was also when the path of future confrontation with Russia was being laid in Ukraine — and when Nato started developing the hybrid or cognitive warfare doctrine, which conceptualises the management of Western public opinion as an integral part of warfare. As Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s former Secretary General, put it in 2019: “Nato must remain prepared for both conventional and hybrid threats: from tanks to tweets.”

The Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the first mass deployment of online censorship, bought Western elites some time. But not for long. Today, a “populist” backlash is once again engulfing the West: Right-populist parties are surging across Europe, and Trump is on course to winning the next US election. Meanwhile, escalating tensions in Ukraine have detonated into a no-longer-so-proxy war between Nato and Russia. From the perspective of Western elites, this all calls for a doubling down on the censorship regime, with a major difference: online censorship used to occur behind closed doors, extra-legally and in a context of plausible deniability of behalf of governments; today it is being institutionalised and constitutionalised through tools such as the Digital Services.

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Elites conveniently justify their censorship in two ways: by constantly expanding the scope of “hate speech” to cover almost anything; and, more ominously, by rebranding critical opinions, especially on foreign policy and geopolitical matters, as “disinformation” or examples of foreign interference. It’s no coincidence that the European Commission’s first-ever DSA report was entirely focused on the question of “Russian disinformation”. Tellingly, the report puts “Kremlin-aligned accounts” — potentially any account that is critical of Nato — almost on the same plane as accounts that are connected or associated with the Russian state.

This deliberate blurring of the line between illegal and harmful speech, and between critical opinion and foreign propaganda, is central to the censorship regime, as it effectively allows EU elites to determine what hundreds of millions of Europeans can or cannot say and read online. It’s state-sanctioned censorship, plain and simple. And it should come as no surprise that the greatest threat to free speech today comes from the EU: the bloc’s entire institutional edifice, after all, is geared towards constraining democracy, by transferring power to unaccountable elites largely insulated from the demos. In turn, the top-down imposition of unpopular policies on the people of Europe inevitably engenders opposition, which then requires the suppression of free speech to counter the backlash. It’s a vicious feedback loop.

This sort of mass censorship should really be understood as a desperate oligarchy’s last line of defence — and no one encapsulates this oligarchy better than Breton himself, a former businessman and military and intelligence contractor turned technocrat-in-chief. If this were a movie, one couldn’t imagine a better choice than him as the arch-enemy of the populist rabble rouser Musk. But it isn’t a movie. This is a struggle that will define the future of democracy for years to come. And if we expect Musk to fight for the rest of us, we’ve already lost.

On Friday, the new Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson notified Parliament of her intention “to stop further commencement” of the Act and “to consider options, including its repeal”. Few further details are provided, other than her awareness of “concerns that the Act would be burdensome on providers and on the OfS [Office for Students]”. Upholding campus free speech, it seems, is just too much of a hassle.

During the dying days of the Conservative regime, many of us feared that this new Labour government would use its new powers to continue waging its culture war, and this is not the first red flag. Phillipson had already announced her intention to compel free schools and academies to teach the national curriculum, and that it will be rewritten under the guidance of Professor Becky Francis, an academic whose publication history has a clear activist bent. While head of UCL’s Institute of Education, she launched the Centre for Sociology of Education and Equity, which prioritises “equity and social justice” in schools. The emphasis on “equity” rather than equality is telling: it is a keystone of intersectional ideology, meaning that equality of outcome is sought over equality of opportunity.

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In light of this, it makes sense that the next step would be to ensure that dissenting views continue to be stifled in higher education. After all, the introduction of the Higher Education Act was a much-needed attempt to make sure that universities uphold freedom of speech and plurality of opinion. It requires universities to guarantee academics the freedom “to question and test received wisdom” and “to put forward controversial or unpopular opinions” without risk to their livelihoods or future job prospects. It protects visiting speakers from being disinvited for controversial views. And it demands that governing bodies formulate a Code of Practice which upholds these responsibilities, and that these are annually brought to the attention of all students. The intended effect, suffice it to say, is to cultivate a more intellectually open climate by promoting academic freedom and the importance of free speech within the law.

In a sense, it is disappointing that such ideas require legislation at all. Partly this is due to an activist contingent within academic circles that has become adept at intimidating colleagues into silence. The result has been the development of a new monoculture in higher education in which self-censorship is rife. A 2020 report, for instance, found that one in three Right-leaning scholars censor themselves “for fear of consequences to [their] career”. A further study in 2022 found that three in four conservative academics occasionally self-censored while at work.

But censorship isn’t binary, and Left-wing academics are also increasingly at risk, notably those who are sceptical about activists’ demands that the highly contested belief in “gender identity” ought to supersede biological sex in matters of public policy. As far back as 2011, Julie Bindel was officially “No Platformed” by the National Union of Students (NUS), when delegates at the LGBT conference passed a motion called “This conference believes Julie Bindle is vile”. They couldn’t even be bothered to spell her name correctly. In the decade to come, she would be joined on the list of undesirables by a number of leading feminist thinkers: Linda Bellos, Selina Todd, Kathleen Stock and Jo Phoenix, to name a few.

One of the key ways in which the Higher Education Act would address these problems is its creation of a “free speech tsar” at the Office for Students, a role until now fulfilled by Professor Arif Ahmed. Initially, part of his job was to design a “free speech complaints scheme”, whereby universities who fail in their responsibilities could be fined. There was also a “statutory tort” provision, which enabled academics who had lost their jobs for exercising their free speech to sue their universities. However, peers in the House of Lords attempted to see this aspect of the Bill jettisoned and, after it was reinstated by the Commons, a watered-down version was passed.

And now it seems that it is going to be binned in its entirety, in spite of previous cross-party support. However this situation unfolds, it should remind us that the threat to free speech is very real, and its erosion is often accelerated by those in power. The universities have been the laboratories for the creeping authoritarianism of our times, and so it seems clear that the problem needs to be tackled at the source. Only a few weeks ago, the new culture secretary Lisa Nandy was declaring that “the era of culture wars is over”. It looks, however, as though it’s only just begun.

The fog of war was real, though involved no confusion about body counts or potential crimes against humanity. Instead, the burning questions were about whether a Jewish student at Yale really had been “stabbed in the eye” by pro-Palestinian protestors as was initially reported, or whether she had accidentally got in the way of some exuberant flag-waving; whether a UCLA student had been “beaten unconscious”, or instead fallen over in a chaotic kerfuffle and gone deliberately limp. Never mind for the moment what atrocities were or were not being committed in Gaza: more to the point, did pro-Israel supporters at UCLA knowingly risk the life of someone with a severe banana allergy, by throwing several pieces of the fruit into the “liberated zone” there?

Enterprising postgraduates across the land were seizing their media moment, perhaps breathing a sigh of relief that there was now a good excuse not to finish that dissertation for at least one more year. At Columbia University, Johanna King-Slutzky — a 34-year-old specialist on the Romantic imagination — apparently drew upon acquired reserves of Byronic hyperbole to suggest to journalists that fellow protestors who had deliberately barricaded themselves into a university building were at risk of “dehydration and starvation”. Upon questioning, she clarified that she wanted the powers-that-be “to not violently stop us from bringing in basic humanitarian aid”; a counterfactual scenario which, she admitted after further probing, had not yet happened, nor had even been threatened. Near-universal derision followed, absolutely correctly.

Though Columbia hogged most of the headlines, many other universities had encampments too. Visiting Cornell to give a talk, I saw its version: a huddle of tents, cringe-inducing artwork, and earnest placards in a corner of the main quad, sporadically erupting to the sounds of loud hailers and chanting. One of the main spokespeople for the Cornell protest was 30-year-old Momodou Taal: a British postgrad and veteran of many previous media interviews, who also happens to be the great-grandson of former Gambian President Sir Dawda Jawara. (Here I should declare a personal connection: it was on Taal’s podcast last year that philosopher Judith Butler first aired the perfectly sane theory, later prosecuted in her new book, that the Pope, Vladimir Putin, J.K. Rowling, and I are the four horsemen of the “anti-gender” apocalypse.)

Back in November, a CNN report about the impact of the war upon US college students included an interview with Taal, and described how he was tired of being questioned about whether he supports Hamas or not. As a black Muslim, he said, he “felt like there was an implicit presumption in the question that he supports terrorism”. Granted, an unfair connection with his race and religion might be the best explanation for the presumed association: or maybe it was Taal’s tweet from 7 October, still publicly available, which stated: “Today has shown us what is possible when you are organised… It’s not about the numbers. But how you organise and execute”.

In short, then, the past week served up ample material for riotous mirth or contemptuous eye rolls. Though many students are sincere and well-intentioned in their objections to what is unfolding in Gaza, watching self-appointed leaders role-playing at Left-wing radicalism in the hope of future glittering career prizes will never not be ludicrous. Equally, approaching a bloody war like a rabidly partisan football fan on matchday, as Taal seemingly does — automatically primed to deny atrocities committed by your favoured side, and to downplay the devastating effects on opponents — is hardly a sign of moral sainthood, albeit that the phenomenon is now near-ubiquitous.

But there are more alarming aspects to this situation other than the presence of narcissistic millennials. Scorn should also be reserved for those supine university bosses who — having spent years positively incentivising an entire generation to think of themselves as pleasingly disruptive social radicals, acting on behalf of a variety of oppressed victim classes — have now swung to the other extreme without missing a beat, and are cracking down excessively on behaviour they used to tolerate or even encourage. At Columbia, university president and member of the House of Lords Minouche Shafik eventually gave up on negotiation and brought in police against protestors, resulting in more than 100 arrests. At the University of Texas in Austin, riot gear and pepper spray were employed against those camping out; the encampment at UCLA was also flattened by law enforcement, with 200 arrested there. There have also been large-scale arrests at Dartmouth, George Washington University, Massachusetts Amherst, Wisconsin-Madison, and other places too.

It is often remarked that the modern liberal quest to free both self and society from traditional cultural norms and boundaries tends to coincide with increased acceptance of state surveillance and authoritarian social control. Even so, it is rare to see institutions openly inciting both liberation and repression at the very same time. Small wonder that susceptible young people are confused. “I thought that this university accepted me because I am an advocate, because I am someone who will fight for what they believe in, no matter what,” mournfully recounted one Vanderbilt alumnus, originally lauded by faculty and administrators for making a stand against perceived oppression, but now expelled for the very same thing. You can laugh with enjoyable schadenfreude at the naivety; but you should probably also be horrified at the unprincipled ease with which Frankenstein has set the dogs upon the pious, guilt-ridden young monster he had a hand in creating.

Equally depressing has been the way that many conservative commentators, normally professional scourges of wokeness, have become apparent fans of safetyism for Jewish students (please note — not safety, but safetyism). Just as the modern Left either tends to cheer or stay silent as Right-coded views are eliminated from the academy either by stealth or by force, many on the supposedly freedom-loving modern Right apparently have little to say about the violation of the basic right to peaceful speech and assembly, when it comes to defending the perceived interests of Palestinians. (Though some of the university protests sought illegitimately to impose a heckler’s veto upon the free speech or movement of others, many did not.)

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There has also been relatively little pushback against the sort of hyperbole purporting to justify aggressive managerial and police interventions on campuses; even where its format and tone vividly reminds one of the activist guilt-tripping of which the modern Left is so fond, and the Right normally so critical. Many cultish identitarian tics familiar from social justice activism turn up in pro-Israel discourse about the protests, and yet remain uncriticised from the Right. These include: a total failure of charity when it comes to construing the various motives of pro-Palestinian and anti-war activists, collapsing all of them into a single simple narrative of “hate” towards Jewish people, despite evidence to the contrary; exhortations to move from subjective perceptions of antisemitism by particular Jewish students or groups of students to immediate protective or punitive action (or both); the glossing over of reasonable disagreement between Jewish students on, precisely, whether the protests are antisemitic or not; and accusations of confusion and self-hatred towards those who dissent.

The emerging rubric seems to hold that when those with whom you have little political sympathy complain of intense feelings of threat, in response to still objectively small levels of risk on campus overall, you can minimise and scoff away with impunity; yet when your own family, friends, or political allies do it, we are suddenly plunged into the sort of dramatic counterfactual territory also beloved of King-Slutzky and her ilk. No doubt such sympathy-dependent reactions are understandable wherever they are found, and particularly in those Jewish people deeply worried about antisemitism; but the whole point of rights to free speech and assembly is that they are supposed to be rigorously maintained even as polarising emotions swirl around society, demanding that they be partially rescinded for some particular group on the basis of imaginary future scenarios.

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Often in thrall to the American cultural landscape, elite UK campuses such as Oxford, Cambridge, and UCL now have their own, somewhat more repressed, versions of the Ivy League protests. And here too, there are influential voices urging us to take all or most such protests as evidence of deep-rooted antisemitic hatred. Only yesterday, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan told Sky News that: “What we don’t want is our campuses becoming unsafe environments for students or staff and going down the route that you see in other places like the US” — as if it was obvious that US campuses were now unsafe places for students, simply in light of the protests there. And as in the US, UK university bosses are being exhorted by some to prioritise the subjective feelings of certain Jewish students over the feelings of others — including those of other Jewish students participating enthusiastically in the protests, or who feel unaffected by them.

A Times column by the Prime Minister on Wednesday suggested he is committed to rooting out genuine antisemitism from universities, while preserving freedom of speech and the right to protest, including against Israel; and of course, that is exactly what he and others in power should be doing. But the task will be fiendishly difficult, requiring nerves of steel to avoid hastening the slide of our academic institutions towards the suppression of lawful speech, all in the alleged interests of certain identity groups. In attempting this, perhaps it will help to remember that, whatever the ideological struggles to come on manicured college greens, in elegantly appointed quads, or in scruffy common rooms, they will have almost nothing to do with what is happening on the ground in Gaza.

And there’s more. Ostensibly introduced for those victims of hate crimes too intimidated to speak to the police directly, there will now be designated “third-party reporting centres” for accusations of hateful crime, including one in a Glasgow sex shop. Snitch on someone you dislike and pick up a dildo at the same time — isn’t modern life wonderful?

Also accompanying the introduction of the Act has been an infantilising and much-derided publicity campaign, featuring a ginger “Hate Monster” strongly reminiscent of a Sesame Street character, and who is supposed to represent “that feeling some people get when they are frustrated and angry and take it out on others, because they feel like they need to show that they are better than them. In other words, they commit a hate crime”. Given the vagueness of this characterisation, upon first encountering the Hate Monster, I myself probably committed one — in imagination, at least — both upon the Monster and whatever lanyard-bedecked zealot invented him.

But not everyone feels the same. First Minister Humza Yousaf is an enthusiast for the new piece of muppetry, including its application in the home, and thinks that perception-based recording of non-crime hate incidents gives the police “an idea of where there might be spikes in hatred”. Perhaps he pictures the police station from Taggart, with glum-faced officers putting red pins into a wall map featuring J.K. Rowling’s house.

Growing up in Scotland as the offspring of sassenachs, I have certainly been made aware of the presence of spikes of hatred at various times in my life; but strangely enough, animus against the English does not figure heavily in defences of the policies. Instead, the focus is upon more fashionable victims. You may not understand what a non-binary person actually is, let alone be able to summon up enough negative emotion to persecute one, but according to the Scottish government such people are sufficiently threatened as to justify their specific inclusion in the Bill. Also included under the characteristic of transgender identity are people who “cross-dress”: good news for the many Scotswomen who wear trousers, as otherwise females don’t get much of a look-in, with sex not mentioned as a protected characteristic at all.

Meanwhile, another social tinderbox allegedly waiting to explode, according to policymakers, is widespread resentment against that 0.018% of the population “with variations in sex characteristics” — colloquially known as intersex people, and who will also be specially protected under the new law. If you didn’t know any better, you might conclude that several aspects of the legislation are a frivolous distraction from the country’s real problems.

Worse, you might infer that all of this is implicitly a cudgel with which to bash people who are poor and/or haven’t been to the University of St Andrews, as is heavily suggested by another aspect of the “Don’t Feed Hate” ad campaign: namely, its focus upon “young men aged 18-30” as being “most likely to commit hate crime”. In particular, we are told to watch out for “those from socially excluded communities who are heavily influenced by their peers”, and “who have deep-rooted feelings of being socially and economically disadvantaged, combined with ideas about white-male entitlement”. In other words, if you are a young white male, being influenced by your peers is bad (as opposed to being influenced by a big ginger muppet, one assumes); and your poverty and social exclusion are now reduced to mere “feelings”. Still, it seems that some feelings are taken more seriously by the Scottish ruling classes than others.

Many commentators are concerned that the whole Act will chill legitimate free speech, either via actual criminal sanctions or via misinterpretations of the law by police and others; and there are particular worries about speech that is critical of religion, either of the traditional or transactivist kinds. But the smooth-tongued rainbow mandarins paid to dictate equality policy to a mostly vacant-eyed political class have told everyone to take a deep breath and relax. As the chief executive of Equality Network in Scotland Rebecca Crowther soothingly told Sky News: “This legislation is not going to catch people online saying things that I might disagree with, that you might disagree with, things that might upset me, things that might upset others in the community… What it does legislate against is when that freedom of speech strays into something that is abusive, that could cause fear and alarm, and that also incites hatred or incites people to act on that hatred.”  Meanwhile Yousaf himself has said that he has “full confidence” that the police will look beyond “vexatious” complaints.

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What is Judith Butler afraid of?

By Kathleen Stock

But what this trite sort of response obviously ignores is that, as social norms change, it is increasingly difficult for people to distinguish between that which is merely disagreeable and upsetting, and that which is genuinely hateful and abusive. It is an irony of the present situation that so many seem to think that biology is socially constructed but that the meaning of hatred is natural and fixed. In fact, what counts as an adequate expression of a particular emotion is at least partly culturally determined, and these days the category of hatred seems to be a lot more expansive than it used to be. Previously, its presence was indicated by otherwise random-looking outbursts of violence towards outgroups, and the use of aggressive slurs. In present day Scotland, however, it seems detectable from saying things like “choosing to identify as ‘non-binary’ is as valid as choosing to identify as a cat” — a recent statement by the Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser, subsequently recorded by police as a non-crime hate incident, a verdict he now intends to contest in court.

The wording of the Act tries to solve this problem by referring to what a “reasonable person” would think: so that, for instance, it is a necessary condition of committing a stirring-up offence that either one “behaves in a manner that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive”, or “communicates to another person material that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive” — and, in doing so, intends to stir up hatred against a protected group.

In this formulation, there is a pleasing echo of the Scottish Enlightenment and its emphasis on the tempering of emotion with more impartial rationality. For instance, despite thinking of moral judgement as mainly a matter of feelings not reason, David Hume still placed emphasis on the importance of “steady and general points of view”; meaning that we should not just blindly sympathise with what others are feeling but also apply rational discernment to get rid of prejudice and partisanship. Meanwhile, Adam Smith, another famous sentimentalist about morality, placed great emphasis not just on imaginatively simulating the feelings of others, but also upon taking the more distanced perspective of an “impartial spectator” in order to hone judgements of approval or disapproval about those feelings.

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By Jonathan Sumption

Equally, though, both Hume and Smith were clear that you can only exercise reasoned judgement about the aptness or otherwise of another person’s emotional state if you are also adequately informed about what he or she is getting aerated about in the first place. And yet, this is precisely the level of information lacking these days from the average person’s perception of things like “abusiveness” or “hatred”. Instead, large numbers of citizens have been socially conditioned to take the barest presence of formerly standard features of ordinary discourse — expressed scepticism about certain popular values; unfamiliarity with middle-class speech codes; demurrals from progressive articles of faith, and so on — as automatically implying a hateful attitude, and to proceed to the nearest third-party reporting centre on that basis.

A reasonable person wouldn’t have gone along with any of this, and yet in Scotland crazily myopic and illiberal measures continue to be waved through, with stunning condescension on the part of their smug originators. In other words, there’s no use appealing to what some hypothetical reasonable person would think, when there appear to be no such people in the vicinity. They’ve probably all gone down the sex shop to report J.K. Rowling for saying homosexuality is a thing. It’s almost as if these people hate us.

In the Daily Mail we read that policies at Glasgow University and Imperial College London now direct staff and students to avoid the phrase “the most qualified person should get the job” because this counts as a microaggression. Over in the US, yet another professor resplendent in beadwork and buckskin has admitted to falsely claiming possession of Native American ancestry. And an article just out in the Applied Linguistics Review provides a brand new excuse to lazy researchers: the requirement of a literature review in some disciplines imposes “particular configurations of privileged knowledge” amounting to an “enactment of symbolic violence”. Or, at least, that’s what students will be telling linguistics lecturers from now on.

The organisation that first uncovered the story about microaggressions is the Committee for Academic Freedom, newly formed by philosophy lecturer Edward Skidelsky to push back against institutional incursions on free inquiry. During drinks at the committee’s launch, where I was a guest speaker, more astonishing tales were aired. I heard of endocrinologists at one Russell Group institution being forced to disavow binary theories of biological sex; of male trans-identified dance students at a prestigious arts establishment insisting they be allowed to perform lead ballerina roles and be hoisted aloft during lifts; and of a reading list in one department with pronouns added for every cited author, including those of Osama Bin Laden (“He/Him”, in case you’re wondering). As I mingled, I added each new tale to my mental inventory of university batshittery, already creaking at the seams.

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But while the general public increasingly gets the joke, and a growing band of disgruntled renegades joins organisations like CAF, it is still true that most employees within relevant institutions remain po-faced and acquiescent in the light of blatantly stupid initiatives by their managers and colleagues. Partly this is because they are frightened to do otherwise, as new research also published this week by CAF suggests. But partly, perhaps, it’s because nearly all of the personality types who might in the past have viciously mocked, scathingly critiqued, or otherwise put up an intellectual fight have been weeded out of the system.

It is not so much that these characters have been removed deliberately; but rather that as they retire, like is not being replaced with like. I now look back with great fondness at the sort of philosophy research seminar I would encounter in St Andrews or Leeds in the mid Nineties, where “home” faculty would make a point of trying to psychologically destroy whichever tremulous visitor from another university had arrived to present their nascent research. Back then, there was a general understanding that it was the role of listeners to identify any weak point in an argument, and then to pounce mercilessly in the hour-long question period with no quarter given. Back-and-forths with the speaker could be grippingly dramatic. Philosophy as I first knew it was full of rude weirdos, heedless of social norms and unable to tell one end of an email inbox from the other, but whose brilliant performances at the lectern or in a discussion period would make up for any lapses in efficiency or personal hygiene.

In academic publishing too, there was scope to be savagely biting. In battles over theories of mind, one might find Colin McGinn feuding bloodily in the reviews section with Ted Honderich: “This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad”, began one notorious review of Honderich’s work by McGinn. Or the late philosopher Jerry Fodor, personifying his main intellectual opponent Paul Churchland as a conservative and strait-laced “Auntie”: “Auntie rather disapproves of what is going on in the Playroom, and you can’t entirely blame her. Ten or fifteen years of philosophical discussion of mental representation has produced a considerable appearance of disorder…She sighs for the days when well-brought-up philosophers of mind kept themselves occupied for hours on end analysing their behavioural dispositions.”

Part of the official reason for the elimination of flamboyant academic styles such as these was that they tended to be off-putting to new entrants to the profession, and in particular to women. Indeed, I’ve written before about the professional feminist activism in the 2010s which resulted in a change of approach within the discipline of philosophy, an influx of guidelines and policies governing “conduct” within professional associations and departments, and a consequent stigmatising of gladiatorial theatrics and abrasive personalities.

But perhaps an even bigger causal factor in the UK was the move towards conceiving of the student as a customer. Among the many unintended effects of this unfortunate reframing was a difference in the kind of candidate who would get appointed into lecturing positions. And the change is significantly responsible for the idiotic atmosphere we now see.

For trailing in the wake of the new breed of customer came the smooth professionals good at customer service — lecturers adept at producing fancy PowerPoints and ticking items off on promotion checklists, but low on intellectual aggression and the will to stand against the mob. Out were the mercurial and antisocial intellectuals of yore, in love with complex ideas for their own sake and gloriously scathing when others trampled all over them. It’s hard, for example, to imagine that a man as ribald and eccentric as the brilliant political philosopher G.A. Cohen would be allowed in these days — someone for whom, according to his best friend and fellow philosopher Gerald Dworkin, “nothing was too inappropriate, private, bizarre, or embarrassing to be suddenly brought into the conversation”; and someone who for a long time due to “technological conservatism” was unable to answer email, so that “all correspondence had to go through his lovely wife, Michelle”.

And yet we need such characters more than ever. Or at least, we need to adopt their magnificently scathing contempt for daft claims, sloppy thinking, and fallacious reasoning. Not all ideas are created equal, and academics must stop acting as if they are: nit-picking endlessly over small intellectual differences but going quiet about the big ones. It is admirable that there are legislators and organisations now talking about the value of academic freedom in the abstract, and attempting to create a space for it. But unless thinkers fill that space with arguments that take deliberate aim at the stupidity of colleagues and managers, it will remain a vacuum.

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And philosophy itself has a crucial role to play here. So many humanities departments house people who call themselves philosophers but who are no such thing, according to the traditional understanding of that term. Out of politeness or fear of intellectual confrontation, they have been allowed by actual philosophers to get away with it. The predictable result is thousands upon thousands of former students who sincerely believe that truth is relative, sex is fluid, cis het white men are scum and all the rest of it. We need to wrest the discipline back from these charlatans.

Right-wing podcasters are fond of analysing the free speech crisis in universities as a result of deliberate nefarious activity by Gramsci-inspired cultural Marxists trying to undermine liberal values from the inside. But the truth — at least in the UK — is far more mundane and familiar. It’s cock up rather than conspiracy. Various governmental initiatives over the years have inadvertently played their role in creating our current fearful and obsequious academic culture: most notably the introduction of student fees, but also the Research Excellence Framework and its emphasis on public-friendly “impact”, and the Office for Students’ pressure on vice-chancellors to protect student mental health. Under a weak pretence of provocation, fashionable academics may write op-eds suggesting that the value of academic freedom is overrated and even sinister; but in doing so, they are only pretending to open the door for a horse that has already bolted. And in fact, they are the ones supinely propping up the status quo.

One worry expressed by this lot is that incoming legislation to protect free speech in universities might be used illegitimately to curtail the role of robust criticism and sound academic judgement — because someone might be able to claim, with the help of such legislation, that non-publication of their cranky and conspiratorial views amounts to suppression. Yet the force of this worry rather depends on the notion that things are fine as they are. In fact, journals and university policies are already flooded with cranky and conspiratorial ideas; and it is hard to see how the legislation could make things worse. Academics need to start openly laughing at the idiocy on their own doorstep. If they don’t, there are plenty of enemies of universities who will be happy to do it for them.