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. 

The pandemic dumped jet fuel into the growing counter-disinformation machine while extending its controls into the physical world. That brought the information state into people’s everyday lives. This was something different from the drama of false allegations about Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia that plagued the Trump presidency. Though Russiagate dominated the news cycle, it was essentially a political crime against abstractions like the “rule of law” and the “democratic process.” Normal people who did not devote their time to scrolling newsfeeds could mostly choose to ignore the sordid Trump-Russia drama. Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates removed the “normie” exemption.

The senseless cruelty of preventing people from attending outdoor weddings and visiting sick relatives in their final moments. The images of authorities in New York City placing locks on children’s playgrounds. Authorities in Venice, California, using bulldozers to shovel thirty-seven tons of sand into the city’s iconic skatepark to prevent kids from playing outdoors. Prolonged school closures that isolated children and caused generational learning losses, hurting poor and disadvantaged kids worst of all. The brazen flouting of these restrictions by the upper classes and political elites. At Barack Obama’s 60th birthday party, for instance, where the former president and his hundreds of celebrity guests on Martha’s Vineyard danced with their faces exposed while the army of workers hired for the event were forced to wear masks. The fact that the technique of lockdowns was imported into the United States from the authoritarian surveillance state of China, where the virus originated. The even more galling fact that mere discussion of the virus’ origins was labeled a racist conspiracy by the most venerated institutions of science and journalism.

By imposing excessive and arbitrary policies while attempting to conceal vital information about the pandemic, the state provoked a public backlash. In turn, government officials treated the backlash not as legitimate democratic dissent, but as proof that unregulated misinformation was fueling domestic extremism. They responded by doubling down on the same policies, tightening their information controls, and imposing new methods of digital cancellation like “debanking” that cut off people’s access to their own financial accounts. Official repression and popular revolt fed off each other in a cycle that radicalized both sides and laid bare the realities of mass manipulation and digital dependency in the information state.

***

On February 15, 2020, as people were just learning about Covid, the World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced, “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as dangerous.” His statement came almost a month before the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared a pandemic. The “infodemic” not only preceded the physical pandemic, it was, in the words of the world’s foremost health authority, “just as dangerous.”

The following month, all the major tech platforms — Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube — released a joint statement pledging that they would be “jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus” while also “elevating authoritative content”.

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“The containment of the coronavirus pandemic will necessitate a global surveillance network capable of identifying new outbreaks as soon as they arise,” wrote Klaus Schwab, head of the Davos-based World Economic Forum (WEF), in a book published at the start of the pandemic that announced its aims in the title, COVID-19: The Great Reset. The global surveillance network Schwab described had a second purpose. Beyond detecting the spread of new viruses, it could monitor the information environment and shape the public’s response to new policies. Yet the category of “authoritative information”, which would supposedly prevent future “infodemics”, was less reliable than its name suggested.  

Members of the public who had eyes to see could not help but notice that whatever the experts vehemently declared about Covid could be reversed a day later. Health authorities like the WHO and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were often acting on incomplete information to rush out policies heavily influenced by political considerations in the name of “science”. Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of Google subsidiary YouTube, said her platform’s publishing policy called for “removing information that is problematic”. Examples of problematic information she named included people advocating vitamin C and turmeric as cures for the coronavirus and “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations”. Meanwhile, the WHO frequently changed its recommendations, which meant the meaning of misinformation changed from day to day.

By following its own rule, Google would have been forced, at various times during the pandemic, to ban posts that advocated wearing masks, that characterized the virus as highly contagious, or that suggested that it might have come from a laboratory, since all those went against official stances taken by the WHO. The CDC was similarly inconsistent, changing its policy on masking at least three times in the span of two years. The agency originally discouraged their use before endorsing it, then finally acknowledging that the cloth masks most Americans used could not stop the fine aerosols that spread Covid — a fact that Anthony Fauci had privately acknowledged at the outset of the pandemic in a February 2020 email.

Despite the inconsistencies of the public health authorities, experts from the disinformation field proved flexible enough to enforce every new pronouncement as if they were both moral imperatives and matters of settled science. When Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton suggested that Covid-19 could have escaped from the Chinese virology laboratory in Wuhan at the epicenter of the outbreak, he was swiftly attacked by journalists who all seemed to use strikingly similar language. The Washington Post labeled the idea of a possible lab leak a “conspiracy theory that was already debunked”. A reporter who was then at Politico accused Cotton of “spreading rumors… that were easily debunked within minutes”, while The New York Times chided Cotton for spreading what it called a “conspiracy theory.” Given the apparent consensus, Facebook banned users from discussing the lab leak theory under its misinformation policy. That May, The Washington Post’s top fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, wrote that it was “virtually impossible” for the virus to have come from a lab. A year later, Kessler published a new article explaining “How the Wuhan Lab-Leak Theory Suddenly Became Credible.” And a short time after that, Facebook quietly reversed its policy, posting a notice that read, “In consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”

In June 2020, the US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, sponsored the creation of a nominally independent organization called the Election Integrity Partnership whose mission was to monitor and remove election-related misinformation online in the lead-up to the November election. A consortium of four groups (two universities, a private defense contractor, and a Washington think tank), the EIP’s mandate, according to one of its founders, a former chief security officer for Facebook, Alex Stamos, was to “try to fill the gap of the things that the government could not do themselves”. With more than 100 employees scouring social media sites for speech that they deemed misinformation and flagged for suppression or removal by the tech companies, the EIP did the kind of work, according to Stamos, that the government “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations” to do on its own.

Immediately after the election, one of the four groups that made up the EIP, the Stanford Internet Observatory, spun off into a new information-monitoring initiative called the Virality Project. In a seamless transition from elections to public health, the project collaborated with the surgeon general’s office and the CDC while policing social media for what it labeled vaccine and pandemic-related misinformation. One email sent by a Virality Project staffer to multiple social media companies recommended that the platforms take action even against posts that described “stories of true vaccine side effects”, specifically “true posts which could fuel hesitancy”. 

Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organization or country”. Could constitutionally protected criticism of the US government be classified as malinformation? Only the information regulators could say for sure since all power rested in the authority to define the terms. The government seized the opportunity. In the very first month of the Biden administration, CISA rewrote its mission from focusing on foreign disinformation “to focus on general MDM”, an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — a three-part classification developed by the 2017 Harvard paper that coined “malinformation”. The machinery of the information state had completed its inward turn. Rather than defensively protecting critical infrastructure from outside attack, the agency would now “be responsive to current events” inside the US.

Without any public deliberation or legislative debate, without any formal amendments to the Constitution, the authority to censor that which was true but deemed harmful had become the law… not quite of the land, but of the society online that was ruled by code. The more arbitrary the health policies became, the better they propped up the authority of the information regulators.

***

At 77, Joe Biden was the oldest major-party candidate to ever run for president, and it showed. Heading into the November 2020 election against Trump, he looked unsteady, even feeble, in his limited and carefully stage-managed public engagements. Biden’s voice would trail off mid-sentence. He would forget what he was talking about or refer to someone who had died as if they were still alive.

Given his frequent verbal gaffes, blank stares, and ghost-white pallor, there were concerns about his health and mental fitness for office. But the powerful fact-checking bureaus in the press dismissed these concerns as Right-wing conspiracy mongering, misinformation, and ageist discrimination. One Homeland Security bulletin leaked to the media detailed an alleged Kremlin plot to manipulate American voters by spreading “unsubstantiated allegations” about Biden’s declining mental health.

With the election only a few months away, Biden’s campaign announced that he would not hold any public campaign rallies due to Covid-19. Biden added, in an offhand comment to reporters, “This is the most unusual campaign I think in modern history.” Not long after that, Biden won a most unusual election.

After losing the election, Trump spent two months challenging the results and stoking the fury of his supporters with a manic “Stop the Steal” campaign that mixed reasonable questions of electoral interference with absurd and wildly irresponsible claims that prodded at the fragile basis of civic peace. The effort culminated on January 6, 2021, when a large pro-Trump demonstration that had assembled in Washington, DC, to challenge the election results splintered off into a riot at the US Capitol building. Ugly scenes of Trump supporters rampaging around the Capitol and fighting with police officers blanketed the news.

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In a symbolic register, the images of protesters dressed like Vikings marauding inside the Capitol building were uniquely threatening to American democracy. But, despite the symbolism, the riots were disorganized and ineffectual. Moreover, January 6 fit into a larger pattern of political violence that had played out over the previous year. The nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, which had taken place six months earlier, were orders of magnitude larger and more destructive than the pro-Trump riot. Nineteen people were killed in violence connected to the BLM protests, which spread to more than a hundred cities across the US and caused over $1 billion in damages.

And yet the elite establishment overwhelmingly supported the BLM movement and sympathetically pandered to its demands such as defunding the police. Nancy Pelosi, the powerful Speaker of the House, posed for a photo op kneeling in a brightly colored African kente cloth to show solidarity with the protesters. Public figures who for months had vilified public gatherings as deadly superspreader events suddenly celebrated the sight of tens of thousands of demonstrators crowding in the streets for BLM marches. One petition signed by more than 1,200 health officials declared it incumbent on members of the medical profession to offer “unwavering support” to the protesters. The ruling tech platforms, like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, all vocally endorsed and amplified the BLM movement.

In contrast, the response to January 6 was as swift and decisive as any political fallout in recent history. One day after the Capitol melee, Facebook banned the sitting president from posting on its platform. Then Twitter banned Trump permanently, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence”. PayPal and its subsidiary Venmo blocked the accounts of individuals and groups involved in organizing the pro-Trump demonstrations, as well as a Christian crowdfunding site raising money for the protesters. GoFundMe announced that it would remove fundraisers promoting conspiracy theories and “misinformation” about the election. 

To be sure, one could reasonably argue that the threat posed by rioters storming the Capitol and threatening to overturn the election justified the response. That was a political judgment. But the coordinated campaign of digital disconnection reflected a profound transformation in the American system of government. It exposed the outline of a new power structure that operated outside of the formal government by controlling the strategic heights of the information space. A cartel of Silicon Valley tech companies had accomplished in days what Congress failed to do over four years: it shut Trump up and silenced his movement. For a while, at least.

Biden’s inauguration a week later came as a mere formality. The first Trump presidency ended the moment he lost his means of speaking directly to the public, which social media had initially provided, propelling him into the White House, and then unilaterally revoked. The invisible hand of the information regime, once it decided to reveal itself, simply hit mute on the most powerful man in the world. In doing so it revealed an essential rule of power in the digital age: sovereign are they who control the information.

This is an edited extract from The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, by Jacob Siegel (Henry Holt & Company).

***

Tolerance does not come naturally to mankind. For most of human history, what people have believed about morality, about government and about the natural world was laid down by authority, usually by people claiming to speak in the name of God. It is salutary to be reminded that freedom of expression, as an idea, has a short history. It is essentially the legacy of the European scientific revolution of the 17th century and the European enlightenment of the 18th century. These movements rejected the way that men had thought for centuries. They rejected mere authority as a source of truth, in favor of observation, reasoning and rational discourse. It took much longer for the same notions to penetrate people’s ideas about politics, government and law. The legal protection of free speech is barely two centuries old in Europe and North America. And it has only ever been accepted with reservations.

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 article was adapted from the Shrieval Lecture, given at Hereford Town Hall on 12 November 2025.

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

As part of the Democracy Shield, the Commission proposes the creation of a Monitoring Center that would identify and remove “false content” and “disinformation” from the internet. As Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice President for Security and Democracy, stated, the Shield will enable Europe to “respond faster and more effectively to information manipulation and hybrid threats”. The EU’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, made no secret of the anti-Russian nature of the initiative: “we are seeing campaigns, including from Russia, specifically designed to polarize our citizens, undermine trust in our institutions and pollute politics in our countries.”

The term “independent” appears repeatedly in the press release. A new “independent European network of fact-checkers” will be set up in all official EU languages, while the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), the EU’s flagship “fact-checking” network, financed to the tune of almost €30 million, will gain new “independent” analytical powers to monitor elections and crisis situations. But, remember, independence in Brussels translates to financial dependence on the Commission. Indeed, to guarantee this “independence”, the Commission promises generous funding to “independent” NGOs and media outlets.

The Democracy Shield builds upon the recent Digital Services Act (DSA), the most sweeping internet regulation ever implemented in Europe. In theory, these initiatives are meant to protect democracy; in practice, they do the opposite. Their aim isn’t to “fight disinformation”, as claimed, but rather to control the narrative at a time when Europe’s political elites are facing unprecedented levels of public distrust, by centralizing control over the flow of information and imposing a single “truth” defined by Brussels. In short, the European Commission is building a continent-wide censorship machine

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As one EU diplomat recently put it, in truly Orwellian fashion: “Freedom of speech remains for everyone. At the same time, however, citizens must be free from interference.” But who decides what constitutes “interference”? Who determines what is “true” and what is “fake”? The same institutions and corporate media outlets that have repeatedly engaged in fearmongering and disinformation themselves. Just a few weeks ago, Ursula von der Leyen claimed that the GPS system on her plane had been jammed by Russia — an allegation quickly debunked by analysts. Meanwhile, the BBC, often held up as a paragon of journalistic integrity, was recently caught editing footage of a Donald Trump speech to make it appear more extreme.

The EU claims to be protecting citizens from “falsehoods” but on what democratic or moral basis does the Commission assume the authority to decide what is true, especially when it is clear that the EU’s political-media establishment itself engages in disinformation and propaganda on a regular basis? Moreover, when so-called independent fact-checkers are hand-picked and financed by the Commission itself, the result is a closed feedback loop: the EU funds institutions that then “verify” and amplify the EU’s own narratives. The Democracy Shield, like its predecessors, thus institutionalizes the power to define reality itself.

In a series of reports, I have shown that the European Union already operates a vast propaganda and censorship apparatus that spans every level of civil society — NGOs, think tanks, the media and even academia. The cornerstone of this system is a network of EU-funded programs — notably CERV (Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values), Creative Europe and the Jean Monnet initiative — that collectively funnel billions of euros into organizations that are, in theory, “independent” but are in fact deeply enmeshed in the Brussels machine.

Through the CERV program alone — which boasts a budget of almost €2 billion for 2021-2027 — more than 3,000 NGOs have received funding to carry out over 1,000 projects. Officially, these funds promote “European values”. In practice, they finance progressive and pro-EU activism: gender ideology, multiculturalism, anti-nationalism and “countering Euroscepticism”. Many projects are explicitly designed to “increase trust in the EU” or “counter anti-EU narratives”. Meanwhile, NGOs in Central and Eastern Europe are generously funded to “combat autocratic narratives” and “challenge Euroscepticism”, often directly targeting governments in Poland (under the previous executive) or Hungary — external influence strategies not unlike those historically associated with agencies like USAID.

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The result is a pseudo-civil society — a network of nominally “grassroots” actors functioning as proxies for the Commission, amplifying its agenda and manufacturing the illusion of popular support for its policies.

The same pattern applies to the media. My research has shown that the EU channels at least €80 million annually directly to newspapers, broadcasters, news agencies and “journalistic partnerships”— amounting to nearly €1 billion over the past decade. Programs such as IMREG (Information Measures for Cohesion Policy) have paid media outlets to publish articles praising EU cohesion funds, in some cases without even disclosing that the content was EU-financed. The Commission calls it “raising awareness”. In any other context, it would be called covert advertising or propaganda.

The EU’s propaganda machine extends into academia as well. Through the Jean Monnet program, the Commission allocates about €25 million a year to universities and research institutes worldwide, financing over 1,500 Jean Monnet Chairs in 700 institutions. The goal is not to support independent scholarship but to embed pro-EU ideology into higher education. Official documents state explicitly that recipients are expected to act as “ambassadors of the European Union” and “outreach agents” engaging with media and NGOs. The academy has effectively been transformed into an ideological instrument.

With the Democracy Shield, the Commission now intends to vastly expand this machinery. It proposes to not only establish what amounts to a de facto Ministry of Truth, but also to inject even more money into NGOs, “independent” media and fact-checking networks tasked with promoting “European values”. Von der Leyen is, in effect, buying consensus — and using citizens’ own money to do it — collapsing the boundaries between the European super-state, media, civil society and academia.

And if the EU’s goal, here, were merely to manipulate narratives, that would be alarming enough. But the pattern now points towards direct interference in electoral processes. We have already seen this play out in countries like Romania and Moldova, where local elites — with open or tacit support from Brussels — invoked the specter of “Russian interference” (without providing much evidence) to justify blatant manipulation of domestic elections. In Romania, authorities canceled an election and barred the leading populist candidate from running. In Moldova, pro-EU authorities used “security concerns” to prevent Russia-leaning expatriates from voting. Protecting democracy thus becomes the pretext for suspending it, even as the Democracy Shield explicitly foresees strengthening the European Cooperation Network for Elections and, ominously, promoting “systematic exchanges on the integrity of electoral processes”.

The Commission’s appetite for control is not limited to information and elections. Ursula von der Leyen recently also initiated the creation of a new intelligence unit under the direct authority of the European Commission. The goal, according to the Financial Times, is to unify intelligence data from member states and “enhance the EU’s ability to detect and respond to threats”. The plan foresees the eventual creation of a European intelligence cooperation service, effectively a supranational agency that would operate alongside national intelligence services. Officially, it would enhance “strategic autonomy”. In practice, it would likely function as a subsidiary of Nato and, by extension, of the CIA, especially since the same proposal explicitly calls for “strengthening EU-NATO cooperation”.

It points to a broader worrying trend of power centralization in the hands of the Commission — and of von der Leyen personally. Understandably, many observers find the prospect of giving “Empress Ursula” an army of supranational spies — operating beyond the oversight of national parliaments — profoundly disturbing. Giving an unelected, opaque institution like the Commission its own intelligence apparatus would mark yet another milestone in Europe’s transformation into a techno-authoritarian juggernaut — one that surveils not foreign enemies, but its own citizens.

Seen in this context, the Democracy Shield appears like nothing more than a tool to further institutionalize a regime of managed speech and narrative control. Its goal is to police online speech according to vague, politically charged definitions of “disinformation”; to compel platforms, journalists, academics and citizens alike to conform to a narrow, Commission-approved worldview; and to silence dissent in the name of “fighting foreign interference”. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that the real war on democracy isn’t being waged by Moscow or Beijing; it is being waged from within, by the very institutions claiming to defend it.

The writer Abe Greenwald dubs this genre of late-night crankery “star-child radio”. These days, you don’t need to take a long drive through the middle of nowhere to catch it. It is everywhere online, especially on the online Right. Indeed, much of Right-wing media now resembles star-child radio writ large: a vast chamber of oft-malignant fantasies, where even once-reasonable minds go to get euthanized.

Each flick of the news feed pulls up a paranoia-monger more wild-eyed than the previous, warning about the evil machinations of all-powerful pedophiles, Jews, Davos “Communists”, and Brigitte Macron (née Jean-Michel Trogneux).

The standard partisan explanation is that this is a pendulum-like reaction to the high-handed censorship and information-control strategies deployed by the establishment during “peak-woke”, from the mid-2010s to 2022 or so. The explosion of what Theodor Adorno called the “paranoid disposition”, however, increasingly defies this logic. The establishment has been largely dethroned, populists are in power, and still there seems to be no stopping the online Right’s slide into irrationality.

Consider the pundit Michael Shellenberger (1.4 million followers on X). Reacting to a Tucker Carlson documentary on 9/11 last week, Shellenberger said: “So now it appears … that the CIA was probably behind the 9/11 attacks.” Later, he softened the claim somewhat, suggesting that the CIA “didn’t stop or at least contributed to” 9/11. In the same interview, Shellenberger linked “a lot of the UFO stuff” to “the occult” and “occult behaviors within NASA”.

In the summer of 2020, while serving as the op-ed editor of the New York Post, I commissioned a column from Shellenberger, then known as an environmentalist author who’d wearied of the movement he once championed. In it, he denounced the “hysteria” that characterizes much green activism — a pseudo-religion that “spreads anxiety” while justifying anti-growth, and downright anti-human, policies.

A green insider criticizing his own movement — that’s catnip to conservative publications like the Post (Lefty outlets equally relish publishing the Right’s internal critics). What made Shellenberger especially attractive was how sensible he was. He didn’t deny manmade climate change. Rather, he marshaled fact and reason to show that it’s a “manageable” crisis, not a warrant for undoing industrial civilization.

The Post continued to publish Shellenberger even after I left the paper in 2021. Expanding his range beyond environmental issues, he took on Big Tech censorship, as well as the crime and dysfunction that disfigured many blue cities; he even made a quixotic bid for governor of California. He became more explicitly identified with the Right in the bargain. That, too, was a reasonable response to the Left’s race-rioting and Covid authoritarianism in those febrile years.

Shellenberger, in short, was someone I knew, or thought I knew, and whose work I once promoted. By the standards of the post-2020 Right, he wasn’t even all that militant. He was more or less an old-school liberal repelled by liberalism as it actually existed in that era (and who could blame him?). Yet today’s Shellenberger blends legitimate critiques of the intelligence and security apparatus — CIA torture and Third World coups — with 9/11 troof and “occult” hooey.

Others with even bigger audiences have gone much further down the star-child-radio path — a reality driven home by the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination.

The alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, is entitled to his day in court. Yet if there ever were an open-and-shut case, it’s his. The evidence against him piled up high and fast as federal and local investigators went to work: the matching outfit; the bullet engravings; his messages to a trans friend (possibly his partner); his confession on an online message board; his family members’ recollection that he’d grown increasingly militant in defense of LGBT causes. The Left, at first, was eager to deny affiliation with Robinson, but the Right should have jumped at the theory of his guilt.

Nonetheless, the authorities failed to persuade some of the online Right’s biggest voices. Candace Owens and numerous lesser figures just knew who’d killed Kirk. You know, they. “Turning Point will not release the footage,” Owens told her audience, referring to the Right-wing campus group founded by Kirk. Claiming that TPUSA team members had removed the memory cards from cameras at the assassination site, she insinuated that maybe Kirk’s own organization was in on the killing. In addition to TPUSA, Owens’s theory weaves in Bibi Netanyahu and the pro-Israel billionaire Bill Ackman, who she claims threatened Kirk over his growing skepticism of the Jewish state.

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As is often the case, the star-child anchors spin their nutty theories out of more innocuous fact patterns. Kirk had indeed expressed public and private skepticism about the wisdom of America joining Israel’s 12-Day War with Iran, and he declined to remove Carlson from the TPUSA speaker lineup. Both steps likely irked some of his pro-Israel donors. Needless to say, it doesn’t follow that they or the Mossad or the US deep state had him murdered.

Your average amateur broadcaster raving about alien babies late at night could, at best, hope for a few thousand listeners. Today’s star-child anchors, by contrast, command enormous audiences. Carlson and Owens host the No. 1 and No. 3 top news podcasts on Spotify (as of this writing). Rounding out the top-five are podcasts from The New York Times (No. 2), National Public Radio (No. 4), and The Wall Street Journal (No. 5). Setting the Journal aside as a center-Right organ, this means that liberal America still generally tunes into mainstream outlets, such as the Times and NPR, while the Right half of the electorate is hooked on star-child radio. As UnHerd columnist Richard Hanania concludes, “the Right is in deep trouble”.

I have to agree. I spent much of my career in conservative media pointing out the ideological blind spots of the center-Left outlets: their near-total alienation from the Bible-believing sectors of society; or their tendency to select and present stories not on their own terms, but in the light least likely to help the Right. (Some tricks include burying the lede, or sitting on stories embarrassing for Democrats long enough to permit “Republicans Pounce” headlines — as in, “Republicans Pounce on Minneapolis Riots” instead of “Riots Destroy Minneapolis Neighborhood”.)

But ultimately, the Times and NPR are not star-child radio. There is a difference between a progressive (or conservative) worldview coloring the choice and framing of stories, on the one hand, and the quest to “prove” that Mrs. Macron was born with a penis, on the other. The first is just cause for anger and, in a competitive media environment, offers grist for daily partisan contestation. The second corrodes people’s sense-making capacities and their ability to discern reality.

What’s going on here?

One explanation is that what’s unfolding now isn’t a media aberration, but a return to historical norm. As the heterodox historian Christopher Lasch pointed out in his classic Revolt of the Elites, newspapers in the early American republic were financed by partisan factions and didn’t bother to hide their allegiances.

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Their rhetoric was fierce, and they weren’t above disseminating rumors or even straight-up calumniating their political opponents. Conservative opponents of President Martin Van Buren, for example, accused the widower of being a lecherous old man, who’d bade the White House groundskeepers to carve him a giant female breast out of the shrubbery behind the executive mansion, complete with a nipple on top.

The highly professionalized, supposedly “objective” journalism we now associate with the prestige papers wouldn’t emerge until nearly a century later. These took the upper hand thanks to a major shift in the industry, from newspapers as an artisanal, independent, partisan trade, toward a business dominated by large and profitable monopolies. The advent of radio, television, and (later) cable news didn’t break up the pattern of a consolidated media sector.

The internet, especially web 2.0 and social media, shattered this incumbency. The return-to-norm argument suggests that the era of professional, “objective” news — bound to establishment interests but also to certain norms of fairness and accuracy — was merely a blip in media history, and we are now back to an age of partisan, independent, almost single-person operations. Mrs. Macron’s alleged penis is the 21st-century equivalent of Van Buren’s leafy boob.

While comforting, this account doesn’t quite withstand historical scrutiny. Yesteryear’s partisanship and occasional salaciousness aren’t the same as today’s systematically conspiratorial worldviews, in which no event transpires without the intervention of some hidden hand. Niles’ Register, the leading conservative paper in the first half of the 19th century, though intensely partisan, was finally not insane.

A better argument is that the establishment’s earlier failings — a relentless insistence on certain frames and biases, even when they were radically distant from reality — led millions of Americans (and Europeans) to lose trust and become susceptible to star-child radio. I see the appeal in this line of reasoning. You can only tolerate so many headlines referring to an obviously male criminal suspect as “she” and “her” before you lose it.

These trends reached their mad apotheosis in 2020 and 2021. That was when the establishment media joined hands with government agencies and the Big Tech to enforce a total information environment that sidelined or suppressed countervailing views on everything from Covid’s origins and pandemic measures to the ethical probity of the Biden family.

In the case of Hunter Biden’s laptop, for example, the security apparatus called it “a Russian information operation”, which justified social-media censorship, which was in turn cheered by the traditional media. The “anti-disinformation” cottage industry first launched in the mid-2010s in response to Trumpism and Brexit triggered an explosion of actual disinformation. It summoned the very monster it was supposed to combat.

I’ve long made variations of this second argument. Several years later, however, it begins to lose its salience. Thanks to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (renamed X), the star-child podcasters can no longer complain of censorship. Judging by many anecdotal accounts, the new X algorithm not only doesn’t hinder, but positively promotes the crank Right. Meanwhile, even the mainstream media bends the knee to President Trump and the Right more broadly, partly as a result of ownership changes.

That leaves a third hypothesis — namely, that star-child podcasters and accounts thrive because they console their audiences about the failures of the Trumpian Right, seen nowhere more clearly than in the arena of foreign policy.

For many of his most ardent supporters on the online Right, one of Trump’s greatest appeals was his non-interventionism and professed desire for world peace. Yet so far, Trump II hasn’t strayed from the expansive vision that has characterized post-Cold War US strategy: the president continues to give Israel a blank check on Gaza; he joined the Jewish state’s invasion of Iran; and the Ukraine peace talks have stalled and Trump now envisions Kyiv retaking all of its lost territories. Domestically, meanwhile, the Trump administration has sought to severely restrict the range of acceptable speech on Israel and the Middle East, even placing entire departments under federal ideological supervision.

The likely explanation for this is that Trump is far more beholden to the traditional GOP agenda, especially rock-solid support for the Jewish state, than his online fans imagined. But that might be too painful to admit. Enter star-child radio: what if things aren’t going well for us because they are assassinating dissidents like Kirk? What if they have a mountain of kompromat material with which they blackmail Trump? What if they did 9/11? What if they control our minds through the occult?

Whatever the cause — an epistemic disaster on this scale has many fathers — we should be worried about the effect. A media system like this promotes mental degeneration and a sense of learned helplessness that can only yield destructive politics. People convinced that an amorphous they is in control of all events are unlikely to take political responsibility for the shape of our common life — and far more likely to fall in thrall to demagogues and dictators worse than any we can imagine today.

Few seem to believe those claims. But the more significant phenomenon is not the particular tendencies of this or that politician: it is the struggle of this government, and of all modern governments, to maintain control of information in an age when the internet has begun to pose a dangerous threat to that control. Today, information can be distributed far more easily, widely and quickly than in history’s most searing periods of revolution. It is a reality that traditional mechanisms of government find hard to accept — a discord that can have devastating consequences.

Seen through this lens, the recent flare-ups of the free speech debate — the arrest of Graham Linehan, the reprimanding of Starmer by Donald Trump over free speech in the UK, the introduction of the Online Safety Act — can all be understood as responses to the challenges to government posed by the new technology. Societies across the globe are still digesting an extraordinary change, and the crises spreading across the world are in part a reaction to it.

Yet if governments now seek to control information via new means, their desire to do so is nothing new. And, as Elias Canetti, a Nobel laureate for literature, wrote in Crowds and Power, secrecy is a fundamental component of power. Governments have always sought to monopolize information and to shape it. They have often kept large swathes of it secret, whether it is records of government meetings or the tabs they are keeping on criminal gangs and geopolitical adversaries. At the same time, they have generally sought to censor materials which are contrary to their vision.

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Any politician who is truly ignorant of this basic fact of history probably shouldn’t be anywhere near government. For if, in theory, we object to secrecy: in practice, citizens of Western liberal democracies have been quite happy to accept this reality. This is why, for instance, UK government files are kept secret for 20 years before being released to the public. No politician has ever contested this rule. That is because, until now, all politicians shared the unspoken opinion that secrecy was an important part of government; until, that is, they started leaking excerpts of cabinet meetings to friendly journalists, a symptom of the transformations now underway.

Though secrecy of information has always been a key plank of political authority, there are of course different tiers of secrecy enforced by governments. As Canetti noted, autocracy of information has often been a symptom of dictatorships. The Stasi’s network of “secret informers”, members of the public who informed on each other, remain in the living memory of the former East Germany. I saw a similar phenomenon myself in The Gambia. There, in the years preceding the end, in 2017, of Yahya Jammeh’s regime, I was doing research on Gambia’s precolonial history. Such was the fear of government informers that, at any mention of Jammeh’s increasing turn to authoritarianism, people’s eyes would cloud over and they went quiet.

It is a reaction that would have been visible at many other places and points in history. Take the Papal Inquisition, set up by the medieval papacy to police heretics like the Cathars. Where Starmer’s digital ID proposes authority over our biometric information, in late medieval and early modern Europe the Inquisition sought authority over what it too deemed to be the most important information about citizens: the purity or otherwise of their religious faith.

Having almost died in the 15th century, the Inquisition was revived as a state-backed institution in absolutist Spain, and then in Portugal, from the late 1470s onwards. The Inquisition soon became a bulwark of what were then the most powerful states in Europe, useful for attacking dissenters and confiscating their property. A cornerstone of the inquisitorial judicial process was secrecy: not only did witnesses have to swear that they would keep all aspects of the trial secret, but the accused were never told who had accused them, or even what they had been accused of.

We can understand what this meant for the human experience of power only through individual cases, which — fortunately for historians — the Inquisition archived meticulously. In 1665, for instance, the Inquisition arrested Crispina Peres, who was the most powerful trader in the port town of Cacheu (today’s Guinea-Bissau, West Africa). Peres was charged with “witchcraft” after several years of interrogations led by an ambitious cleric. Her downfall came in spite of an uprising of almost 1,000 troops marshaled by the local king, who was her ally. She was eventually deported via the Cape Verde islands to Lisbon, a journey of more than 2,500 miles. Peres languished for three years in the inquisitorial jail, at one point spending over 12 months in her cell without being summoned for an interview. By the time she returned to Cacheu, after confessing her guilt in an ritualized form of penance known as an Auto da Fé, her health was shot through and the power she had held as a trader in Cacheu was gone.

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For historians like me, the Inquisition’s insistence on secrecy is a gift. Because of their desire to rule out anyone whose evidence was partial, Peres and her husband Jorge spent long depositions mentioning all of their enemies, offering in the process a unique window into the daily lives of people who lived so long ago in West Africa. As her husband Jorge said, her actions were nothing out of the ordinary in Cacheu. Indeed, some of her main accusers freely admitted to partaking in the same African religious ceremonies as she did. In essence, she was arrested because her power threatened the secrecy which was the cornerstone of the political authority which Portuguese institutions of empire were developing in West Africa.

How does all this relate to the debates over digital ID and freedom of speech — and the recent comments by the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and many politicians, over what the Government can and can’t do to police speech and information on the internet? The answer is that breaches of secrecy have always been seen by political leaders as constituting a major threat to power. This is an insight that helps us understand several key global events of the past 15 years.

The Wikileaks affair, which led to the multi-year solitary confinement of Julian Assange in HMP Belmarsh, is about more than the specific information that Assange leaked. Instead, the harsh punishment stands as a warning to any others who might seek to challenge the secrecy of our political elites. For them, Assange’s real threat lay not so much in the details of what was revealed as in the structural challenge posed by Wikileaks to their view of politics, which required their unquestioned right to secrecy in the exercise of government. Nor has this relationship between secrecy and power been just a Western phenomenon, as the widespread “secret societies” in Sierra Leone and other parts of West Africa make clear.

In the 21st century, political elites impose censorship not only by punishing individuals, but through the actions of increasingly nebulous organizations. In June 2019 — two months after Assange was removed from the Ecuadorean embassy in London — an alliance of the world’s biggest broadcasters founded an organization whose putative goal was to combat misinformation. The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) is an alliance of the world’s biggest publishers: hosted by the BBC, it includes major news agencies, major newspapers from the UK, the US and abroad, and big tech companies such as Google and its subsidiary YouTube.

Within a year, the TNI played a key role during the Covid pandemic in censorship of “fake news” — including, in the first 18 months of the pandemic, the mere suggestion that Covid-19 could have leaked from a lab in Wuhan. Those from Left (such as me) and Right who questioned whether strict lockdowns were necessary, and whether a cost-benefit analysis including real-world harms to young and old in the West and the Global South should not be considered, had their views ruthlessly suppressed by the TNI in the press and in social media — with a price that the whole world is now paying.

The TNI was seen by conspiracists as a key plank in the “plandemic”. But skeptics of a different sort would see the TNI as a weapon created and deployed by political elites to defend their monopoly of information. In this sense, it doesn’t really matter whether the information is true or false. What matters is the importance of secrecy to political authority, and the vicious efforts which those in power will make to maintain their grip on this secrecy.

Thus it is no surprise that new research is revealing the lengths that the West’s political leaders are taking to impose their preferred information paradigm. During Covid, Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, tried personally to communicate in private with the then CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey — to precisely what end, we still do not know — while French state-affiliated NGOs sought special access to Twitter’s internal data and content moderation process. Similarly, the UK, like the EU, has sought backdoor access to digital communications services such as WhatsApp. Woe betide those who do not comply: Pavel Durov, the defiant founder of the Telegram app, was arrested last year.

All this shows the depth of the political reaction now in place to shore up Western authorities’ control of information, in which digital ID is a further move. Yet the accompanying debates often show a general lack of structural understanding of the historical relationship between political power, secrecy, and information. In its pugilistic response to the Linehan affair and the Online Safety Act, the Right shows its naïveté: these instincts to control information are a fact of political life.

But the Left is guilty of comparable naïveté in its railing against conspiracy theories and the Right’s alleged predisposition to swallowing them. While egregious conspiracy theories should of course be called out, the Right — contrary to the dismissive claims by the Left — is correct to see conspiracy as part of power. The Left, at times, has shown similar attentiveness. Indeed, prior to their 1917 coup, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks had a strongly conspiratorial critique of the levers of capital. And, in terms of more prosaic politics, Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair did not stumble into the leadership of their political parties. Instead, they reached the top thanks to conniving backroom deals, secret manipulation of information known only to a few, and conspiratorial deployment of relationships with various players which might often be kept hidden.

What this shows is that in this debate over information control and secrecy, both Left and Right are currently tilting at strawmen: the Left at the spread of conspiracy, the Right at supposedly unprecedented government secrecy and authority over perceived safety. Biometric information, which is the key resource for the “BritCard”, is simply the latest tug-of-war.

This is all quite normal in politics, and distracts from the broader issues at stake. What is true is that, as Canetti observed, the impulse to assert control through a strong-arm policing of information tends to be typical of more authoritarian governments. This is what historians can observe in the absolutist dictatorships of Spain and Portugal in the era of the Inquisition, and with the trial of Crispina Peres. It is what we can now observe with the trend towards policing the internet and using it to monitor citizens. The question is not, therefore, whether governments should control information, since all governments of all time always have tried to do this: but what levels of control and secrecy are compatible with democratic life. With neither politicians nor technocrats to be entirely trusted with the levers of power, a different playing field if society is to manage the circulation of information. Perhaps the mechanism might be a combination of judicial separation of powers and sortition (election from the general public via a lottery).

At the same time, the firestorms around this topic are also a distraction from the enormity of the crisis which current governments have plunged into. Fear for the future is mounting as quickly as fury at politicians. The distraction, then, is highly useful to political elites in an age when over-reaction to threats to their control of information has caused such massive harm.

As for creative freedom, that might be the biggest joke of all. Two Jewish comedians, Rachel Creeger and Philip Simon, have had their shows canceled at two venues. One of these, Whistlebinkies, at first claimed that this was due to “safety concerns” — presumably it feared that activists from “the right side of history” might turn up to assault audiences and staff in the name of compassion. Creeger and Simon say they were told of “staff discomfort at hosting Jewish shows”.

Of course, any appeal to “safety” in the context of a comedy show is mere sleight-of-tongue, a specious justification for the curbing of artistic freedom. The Banshee Labyrinth has canceled Simon’s solo show after trawling through his social media posts in search of heretical views. Chillingly, its managers have compiled a “dossier” of tweets in which Simon criticizes the hypocrisy of those who attend and organize “humanitarian” marches for Palestine while turning a blind eye to the atrocities committed by Hamas. The venue was particularly outraged that Simon pointed out that Greta Thunberg had not been “kidnapped” by the IDF when she sailed her flotilla to Gaza in her ongoing mission to save the universe and chronicle it all on Instagram.

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One would hope that a comedy venue of all places might appreciate that creatives do not always agree, and that it is not their place to cancel performers who do not pledge fealty to the fashionable omni-cause of the middle-classes. Alas, as ever, conformity is now being demanded from those we should least expect it from. It is particularly dispiriting to see this kind of groupthink take hold at the Fringe. Since its inception in the late Forties, performers have been accustomed to protests and demands for censorship from the Christian Right, but such calls today are coming from within the industry itself.

The ideological capture is evident from critics who laud shows for conveying the “correct message” and comedy commissioners who evidently prefer propaganda to art. Ever since Nica Burns, the director of the Fringe comedy awards, launched the 2018 festival with a paean to “comedy’s future in the woke world” which will “establish a clear marker for what is unacceptable today”, most performers and industry doyens have been diligently following the decree. Genuinely subversive acts have been edged out to make space for the mediocre and the bland.

This is a trend that is now firmly established. Three years ago, the Pleasance Theatre — one of the Fringe’s main provider of venues — canceled a show by controversial comedian Jerry Sadowitz. According to the director of the Pleasance, Anthony Alderson, this was because “this type of material has no place on the festival”, and “opinions such as those displayed on stage by Sadowitz are not acceptable”. When a leading comedy promoter openly admits that he doesn’t understand the difference between opinions and jokes, we know the rot is entrenched.

Kate Copstick, one of the few comedy critics who has refused to kowtow to the new orthodoxy, wrote the following after the Sadowitz cancellation: “In all my years of covering the Fringe, there has never been a more joy-stranglingly censorious August. Councillor Moira Knox in her heyday seems like a libertine now, in comparison to today’s recreationally offended. When the blood-chilling phrase “unacceptable and does not align with our values” is bandied about, and by a venue like the Pleasance, then it is time to fear for the freedom of our funny. The point of a Fringe is that it does not align with anything.

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All of which would be depressing enough, but the situation has been exacerbated by the complicity of comedians themselves. Many acts at the Fringe now fall into the category of what the Spanish call “cuerpo oficial de cómicos del Estado” (official body of comedians of the state). These “regime comedians” are aware that success in their careers is dependent on echoing the dogma of our times, one that has been promoted consistently by successive Conservative and Labour governments. These are the fools at court who have forgotten that their job is to criticize the king.

It was not always this way. Back in 2006, when Tony Blair’s government attempted to oppose amendments passed by the House of Lords that limited the scope of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill, comedians were outspoken in their dissent. Had the bill passed, any vexatious complaint about a show that mocked religious belief would have resulted in its suspension pending a police investigation. Acts have just over three weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe to recoup some of their losses; they simply can’t afford to waste time being interrogated by the Star Chamber.

But whereas there was near unanimity among comedians in 2006, by the time Markus Meechan (aka “Count Dankula”) was prosecuted for a joke video in 2018, there were few speaking out. Whereas they once understood that “the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended” — the phrase used by Rowan Atkinson during the 2006 campaign — they had now subscribed wholesale to the core woke belief that words and violence are synonymous and that suppression of free speech is essential for the preservation of a cohesive society. Where once comedians fought censorship, now they were defending it.

Up until relatively recently, punters would have been sorely disappointed at a fringe festival that offered a series of interchangeable comics all aiming their barbs at similar targets. When Scott Capurro took his show Islamohomophobia to the Fringe in 2013, and was depicted wearing a transparent burka in the publicity materials, nobody took offense or called for his deplatforming. A little over a decade later, and police are contacting a venue in London because of accusations that Capurro might be “homophobic”. Perhaps the investigating officers should have asked for evidence from his husband.

For the humourless and the doctrinaire, comedy will always be a dangerous phenomenon. Take George Monbiot, who recently produced a piece for the Guardian in which he argued that jokes are the equivalent of gateway drugs to the far-Right. “Dominant powers have for centuries used clowns to express their deepest, most unmentionable urges,” he writes, forgetting that the antics of clowns have always been the most effective tool to undermine authority. Citing jokes by Lewis Schaffer, a comedian whose every utterance is guaranteed to bewilder the congenitally literal-minded, Monbiot concludes that “Humorous suggestions of violence reveal and embolden real desires,” that they “soften us up for violence and misrule” and that “it’s the clowning that kills us”.

In this, Monbiot appears to be channelling the spirit of William Prynne, the puritanical firebrand who, in his Histrio-Mastix (1633), railed against the capacity of stage comedies to “empoison, endanger, and deprave” the audience. The elegance, wit and popular appeal of these shows, Prynne reasoned, had the effect of acclimatising the public to “adulteries, fornications, rapes, love-passions, meretricious, unchaste, and amorous practises, of lascivious wicked men or heathen idol-gods”. The claim that jokes lead to violence is often asserted but never proved. It is eternal cry of the sanctimonious and the philistine.

Monbiot’s logic is identical to that of the officers who last week arrested Jon Farley, a protester at a pro-Palestine rally in Leeds, who had been holding a placard bearing a cartoon from the satirical magazine Private Eye. The cartoon mocked the Government’s proscribing of Palestine Action as a terrorist group. Fully on board with the notion that comedy and satire are potentially toxic forces and can incite real-world harm, the police swiftly handcuffed Farley and detained him for nearly six hours. This is what happens when freedom of speech is no longer valued by the ruling class, and the ideology promoted by the likes of Monbiot becomes institutionalised.

No doubt this authoritarian attitude will persist at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Innately subversive comedians will continue to self-censor, and those who do risk the ire of the establishment will doubtless pay the price. We can expect increased conformity while activists insist that “nobody is being stifled”. Genuine fans of comedy would be advised to avoid the Fringe, at least until its gatekeepers learn that laughter is more satisfying than nodding along to the approved creed.

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.

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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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.

Vance delivered multiple messages with his speech, the broadest and most historic of which was that the era of “post-national” globalist liberalism is over. The United States, he indicated, now has a core interest in seeing a Western world that is collectively strong because its sovereign nations are strong, with the self-confidence to independently defend themselves physically, culturally, and spiritually. His emphasis on promoting free speech and democratic legitimacy tied into this message, but was about far more than “shared values”. Practically, it was an implicit warning that the role Europe has been playing as a proxy actor in the political and ideological conflict raging in the United States will no longer be tolerated. More specifically, it was a declaration that ongoing transatlantic institutional, technological, and legal support for America’s embattled Left-wing deep state must end — or else.

After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, America’s panicked establishment elites reacted by attempting to construct a system for managing public opinion through strict control of information, especially online information. The idea was that growing public support for populism was fueled by “low-information voters” and their consumption of “misinformation” and “disinformation”, including from foreign actors, and that if their “information diet” could just be controlled then they would stop voting wrong. The underlying assumption here was of course that the elite’s own increasingly radical policy preferences were the only rational path, opposable only by the stupid and easily manipulated. As Hillary Clinton would later put it, if social media companies “don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control.”

This intended system of thought-control would later grow into the censorship industrial complex that was partially revealed following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. But a big obstacle initially stood in the way: the US Constitution and its protection of free speech. The public might be receiving the “wrong” information on the internet, but “our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence,” as John Kerry lamented in a speech to the World Economic Forum.

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Under the Biden administration, this legal problem was partially solved by simply ignoring it, the federal government directly colluding with technology companies and a network of “independent” (i.e. state-funded) “fact-checking” organizations to impose mass censorship on American citizens. The result was effectively, as one federal judge later described it, “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

A more subtle and sustainable work-around was also discovered, however. This was to circumvent the Constitution by outsourcing the policing of the internet and populist movements to other countries. This could be done because the internet is global and so the whole network is affected by government regulations on any local market of sufficient size. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic immediately grasped that legal and regulatory structures imposed by the European Union, with the leverage of its huge unified market, could force internet companies the world over — including US companies — to change their behavior in order to comply and avoid losing access. This imperialistic regulatory strong-arming was dubbed the “Brussels Effect”, becoming Europe’s only significant innovation this century.

American “partners” quickly began setting up a network of structures to force global internet content “moderation” as part of a de facto counter-populist alliance. This began in 2016 when Brussels pressured Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube into signing the “Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online”, which required the “removal of illegal hate speech in less than 24 hours” and ordered them to “remove or disable access to such content” permanently. Decisions on what counted as illegal speech would henceforth be determined by a new category of “trusted reporters”, i.e. a network of ideologically aligned media organizations, often funded by the state. Others quickly joined in creating their own similar regulatory frameworks, such as Germany’s 2017 Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which criminalized a vast array of “misinformation”, or the UK’s “Online Safety Act”, which made illegal such vaguely hateful behavior as causing “needless anxiety” and “non-trivial psychological or physical harm”.

This process of regulatory political containment reached its ultimate form in the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which began to come into legal force in 2023 and is now fully operational. The DSA’s “main goal is to prevent illegal and harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation”, and it does so by threatening to fine any internet platform anywhere in the world (from social media to app stores) up to 6% of their annual global revenue if they fail to take down “false” or “harmful” content within a matter of hours. Information fit to be censored is determined by small committees of “experts” chosen by the European Commission. Overall the DSA is, as investigative journalist Matt Taibbi has rightly put it, “the most comprehensive censorship law ever passed in a Western democracy.”

For a long time, these regulatory methods worked. As revealed by the “Twitter Files” uncovered by reporters like Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and others, Twitter employees were for example regularly producing enthusiastic reports on the company’s global compliance with Germany’s NetzDG. Overall, Twitter’s legal policy office reported internally that it was “spending 50% or more” of its time “on global regulation” and compliance with foreign censorship demands by 2022.

The construction of this counter-populist system was formalized as a distinctly international project in 2019 with the “Christchurch Call to Action” summit, pioneered by New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern. This secured commitments from dozens of governments, online service providers, advertisers, and “civil society and partner organizations” to “eliminate terrorist and violent extremism content online”. These commitments were self-described as “wide ranging, covering everything from applying appropriate laws and regulation to specific technical measures, to efforts to address the underlying drivers of terrorism”. (“Underlying drivers” in practice here meaning Right-populist and anti-establishment political views, quickly expanding to include any dissenting views on Covid and misgovernance during the pandemic.)

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Following this, the world saw an explosion of hundreds of “non-governmental” organizations, think tanks, “fact checkers”, and academic misinformation “researchers”, all sprouting up to help coordinate censorship without borders. These organizations provided ready-made “expertise” on which governments and technology platforms could draw when deciding who to target for silencing or worse. Additionally, they could provide cover by giving the whole scheme a sheen of independence and scientific objectivity. They quickly became integral to the counter-populist project. In particular, these outfits became adept at coordinating campaigns to cut off financing for political opponents and ideological adversaries by pressuring advertisers into boycotting dissenting websites, platforms, and media outlets by smearing them as dangerous extremists.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British Labour Party cutout, proved especially effective at this ploy, successfully cutting off ad revenue flowing to perceived Right-wing sites. It also managed to drive away many advertisers from Twitter after its acquisition by Elon Musk, with leaked CCDH documents later revealing the outfit had explicitly listed “Kill Musk’s Twitter” as a top strategic priority. CCDH did far more than this, however; it worked hand-in-hand with governments to provide enemies lists and custom-made excuses for censoring political opponents. When CCDH published a report labeling 12 influential Covid lockdown skeptics as the dangerous “Disinformation Dozen”, 12 Democratic Party attorney generals in the United States all inexplicably sent a letter on the same day to the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook citing the CCDH report and demanding the Disinformation Dozen be deplatformed. It was later revealed that the NGO and the Democratic Party had regularly shared drafts and coordinated their attacks in advance, which was of course precisely the point.

Moreover, CCDH appears to have acted as a dedicated foreign lobbyist, meeting continuously with US legislative staff and reporting internally on making “progress towards change in USA and support for STAR” — STAR being a proposed “Global Standard for Regulating Social Media” that CCDH seemed convinced America could be cajoled into adopting if Democratic Party rule continued. Perhaps this is part of what Vice President of the European Commission Věra Jourová was referring to when, at Davos two years ago, she confidently asserted that European-style hate speech laws were something “which you will have soon also in the US”.

The US Department of Justice now appears to be considering whether CCDH has therefore engaged in a coordinated foreign influence campaign while failing to register as the agent of a foreign power (the UK). Given that the Labour Party was found to have sent as many as 100 staff to the United States to help campaign for Kamala Harris, something the Trump campaign blasted at the time as “blatant foreign interference”, the Trump DOJ seems unlikely to be sympathetic to arguments for the organization’s innocence and independence.

CCDH is just one of many similar organizations, however, including groups like Newsguard and the Global Disinformation Index. Collectively, these organizations have, as an UnHerd investigation found, successfully established a cartel of “invisible gatekeepers within the vast machinery of online advertising” and media “fact checking”. Their purpose has been to distort and control the factual information and narratives reaching the public. In other words, they were established as political weapons.

It is striking that a significant proportion of these organizations and similar outfits, such as the Atlantic Council and the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), are commonly both partially state-funded (often by multiple countries on both sides of the Atlantic) and maintain deep connections to the various agencies of the security state. ASD’s founding board, for example, notably included such figures as John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign, Richard Ledgett, Deputy Director of the National Security Agency during the Obama Administration, and Michael McFaul, Special Assistant to the President on the National Security Council for Obama.

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This overlap is no coincidence. As the reporter Jacob Siegel has expertly detailed, after 2016 the American security establishment began to turn the tools and tactics of counterterrorism, counterinsurgency warfare, and regime change that it had developed abroad back onto its own people. Particularly after the Christchurch Call, other Western intelligence and security services, especially among the “Five Eyes” Anglosphere intelligence sharing alliance, followed suit. They began to dramatically ramp up their direct cooperation to counter “disinformation” and leverage their own propaganda machines to “win hearts and minds”. In the US, for instance, the British Army’s 77th Brigade, a military intelligence unit tasked with “non-lethal psychological warfare”, began to surveil and report on British citizens (despite claiming operations were directed only overseas) while working with other British government agencies and cooperating with other Five Eyes intelligence services on influence operations.

These security services had folded the perceived domestic threat of populist movements into their emerging theories and doctrines of “fifth-generation warfare”, in which the digital revolution is believed to have transformed the world of geopolitical competition into a global “omnipresent battlefield” characterized by persistent cyberwarfare and a constant struggle over “information and perception”. In this view, the minds of citizens (or “cognitive infrastructure”, as governments began to unironically refer to them) are terrain that has to be constantly fought over with rivals like Russia. This made populists the equivalent of foreign adversaries, rather than merely normal domestic political opponents.

Such a pressing threat seemed to necessitate what was described as a “whole of society” approach, meaning the totalizing integration of government, military, private sector, and non-profit spheres, as well as international organizations, in service of defending “democracy”. This united front of public and private organizational power is the real “deep state”. And it is why we quickly began to see intelligence services working so closely with activist NGOs like CCDH, or with putatively private firms like Graphika, a for-profit “social network analysis” company that was initially funded by the US Defense Department to fight terrorist propaganda but then redeployed to identify and censor public discourse about Covid and other concerns.

In short, the transatlantic alliance has for years been waging a hybrid information war on the American public. Above all, its objective was to stop the rise of Donald Trump and the populism he represents. But that war failed: Trump is back and, as Vance warned the political and military leaders assembled in Munich, “there is a new sheriff in town”. The British and European allies of former president Joe Biden have been left stranded in digital trenches on the losing side of an American cold civil war. Vance was politely informing them that their cyber-soldiers had better pack up and leave the conflict zone immediately.

Vance reiterated this to UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the White House this week, saying: “Look, I said what I said, which is that we do have, of course, a special relationship with our friends in the UK and also with some of our European allies, but we also know that there have been infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British but also affect American technology companies and by extension American citizens.” He was not just talking here about American discomfort with British and European disregard for the abstract value of free speech, he was referring to their active information warfare against the United States, its new government, its companies, and its citizens. So when Starmer stammered in reply that “certainly we wouldn’t want to reach across US citizens, and we don’t…” that excuse was both transparently false and unlikely to cut it with the new sheriff.

If Britain and Europe don’t want to be treated as enemies of the United States, they are going to need to retreat from the war they’ve been waging on behalf of Washington’s old regime and disarm their censorship machines. That means reining in their intelligence services, completely cutting off support for their non-state armies of transnational censorship organizations like CCDH, and backing off of legal frameworks like the DSA and the Online Safety Act that are designed to control information and political discourse across borders.

Washington’s message to its putative allies is clear: end the information war and get the hell out. Or else they may find that the new US government is willing to impose real political and economic consequences for any continued aggression.

Uncritically reported by Politico at the time, their claims helped legitimate the Big Tech censorship of the New York Post — America’s oldest continuous daily newspaper, where I serve as a columnist — which broke the laptop story. The emails put the lie to Joe Biden’s claims that he knew “nothing” about his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings and apparent influence peddling, not least Hunter’s 2015 role in connecting his father, then Barack Obama’s vice president, with executives from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm on whose board Hunter served.

Thanks to the combined efforts of Twitter (now X), Facebook, the mainstream media, and the Deep State, all this was buried, and Biden eked out a win.

Four years later, a resurrected Trump piled on the punishments for the “spies who lied”, as the Post dubbed the 51 officials. “The signatories willfully weaponized the gravitas of the Intelligence Community to manipulate the political process and undermine our democratic institutions”, he wrote in his Day One executive order, followed by last week’s memorandum banning them from secure buildings.

Trump believes that the actions of the ex-spooks was a major reason why he lost the blisteringly close election of 2020, in which fewer than 45,000 votes in five states made the difference. Yet with Biden out of office, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the magnitude of the crisis that goes beyond a single election: the corruption of both America’s security apparatus and its establishment political class as embodied by the Biden family.

In hindsight, the letter signed by the 51 spies should be seen as a domestic CIA election-interference operation in cahoots with the Biden campaign. It was part of a coordinated Deep State effort to ensure that Donald Trump wouldn’t win a second term and that the sins of Joe Biden remained hidden from the American people.

Five former CIA directors or acting directors signed the letter: Mike Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan, John McLaughlin, and Mike Morell. That last was the principal author, who hoped he would lead the CIA if Biden won the election. In all, 41 of the 51 signatures came from the CIA.

Morell told congressional investigators from the House Judiciary Committee in 2023 that the letter had been solicited by the Biden campaign adviser and future secretary of State, Antony Blinken, in a call to Morell, who quarterbacked it through the CIA classification review process in record time.

We now know, thanks to Andrew Makridis, then the CIA’s chief operating officer, testifying before the Judiciary committee last year, that the letter was cleared for publication by then-CIA director Gina Haspel, a protégé of Brennan’s, who also had her fingerprints on Operation Crossfire Hurricane. The operation was the foundation of Russiagate, which framed the 2016 Trump campaign for “collusion” with the Kremlin, when she was CIA station chief in London in 2016.

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Morell told colleagues in an email that the letter was timed to appear on the eve of the final presidential debate to give Biden a “talking point to push back on Trump on this issue”. It worked like a charm, allowing Biden to deflect the bombshell revelations about his family’s international influence peddling.

“Look, there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant”, Biden coolly told the debate moderators. “Four, five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage”.

Trump kept harping on the laptop, with all its evidence of diamonds and millions of dollars that Hunter was paid by Chinese energy company CEFC, whose executives Biden had met in Washington. But Joe Biden denied it all: “My son has not made money in terms of this thing about — what are you talking about? — China”. He concluded his performance by looking down the barrel of the camera and addressing American voters at home: “You know his character. You know my character. You know my reputation is for honor and telling the truth. The character of the country is on the ballot.”

Yes, it was.

Getting Biden to his false vindication during the debate took a months-long team effort. In one of the regular meetings the FBI conducted with social-media companies to sound the alarm about supposed disinformation in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, somebody warned of a “hack-and-leak operations” by “state actors” involving Hunter Biden and “likely” to take place in October, according to a sworn declaration by Yoel Roth, who headed Twitter’s trust and safety department at the relevant time. The warnings were so specific that when the Post’s scoop first appeared, Facebook and Twitter recognized it and immediately throttled its reach.

Twitter claimed the story violated its “hacked-materials” policy. Officials with the company claimed that they couldn’t permit the release of journalistic material not authorized by the subject — a stance that would have rendered impossible the Pentagon Papers, the Abu Ghraib disclosures, and every other legendary scoop celebrated in journalism seminars across the land.

In the event, the laptop hadn’t been hacked. Rather, Hunter Biden had abandoned the waterlogged device in April 2019 at a Delaware repair shop without paying for services, granting the owner what lawyers call “constructive ownership.” Moreover, Twitter executives knew even at the time that their hacked-materials excuse was so much bosh, as we now know thanks to Elon Musk’s disclosure of the #TwitterFiles. But that didn’t stop them from locking the Post’s account for two weeks, silencing the newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton.

Something similar unfolded at Facebook. “Right on schedule,” a Facebook employee said of the timing of the laptop story in an internal chat obtained by the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the weaponization of government. “FBI tipped us all off last week that this Burisma story was likely to emerge,” an unidentified Microsoft employee wrote in another internal message.

The FBI, too, knew the Post story was not Russian disinformation. The agency had had possession of the laptop for 10 months, as prosecutors would tell a Delaware court during Hunter’s 2024 gun trial. The FBI’s forensic analysis, moreover, had concluded that the device belonged to Hunter, had not been tampered with, and was fit for use as evidence in court. CBS News reached the same conclusion after commissioning its own independent analysis of the laptop in 2022.

How did the FBI have possession of the laptop so much earlier? The Delaware store owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, became alarmed by content he found on the computer that he feared was a national-security risk. He handed the laptop to the FBI in December 2019. Nine months later, Mac Isaac handed Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, a copy of the hard drive, believing a batch of Ukrainian invoices would exonerate Trump during his first impeachment.

At the time, the Internal Revenue Service was investigating Hunter for tax violations related to his international dealings. But every time investigators Gary Shapley and Joe Ziegler tried to follow a trail of evidence that led to Joe, they were obstructed by prosecutors in the office of the US attorney for Delaware, David Weiss, as Shapley and Ziegler would later tell Congress.

After they blew the whistle, Shapley and Ziegler were dismissed from their jobs. Still, their testimony derailed the suspicious sweetheart plea deal that the Biden Department of Justice had stitched up with Hunter’s lawyers, which would have amounted to probation on a couple of tax misdemeanors and immunity from future prosecution over other crimes.

The FBI knew something else, too. It had been spying on Giuliani in 2020 using a covert surveillance warrant on his iCloud. Agents thus had access to an email from Mac Isaac to Giuliani, from August 2020, disclosing information from the laptop that would damage Biden’s campaign. The FBI also would have had access to messages between me and Giuliani two months later, indicating that the New York Post was interested in the story.

To sum up all this in other words: The American security apparatus knew that the laptop was authentic; and that buried in the laptop’s treasury of bank statements, corporate documents, and homemade porn were emails that made the Democratic nominee for president look pretty bad. Nevertheless, intelligence officials at the highest levels pretended that the laptop was “disinformation” and prevailed upon Big Tech to censor the Post, with the mainstream media dutifully justifying the censorship in the name of protecting democracy.

Which brings us to Joe Biden’s grift. Depicted through the adventures of Hunter and his fast-talking uncle, Joe’s brother Jim Biden, the scale of the family’s corruption has slowly dripped into the public consciousness over the last four years. This is mainly thanks to congressional committees with subpoena power that sprang into action once Republicans retook control of the House in 2022.

But back in October 2020, the Post was on its own. In its first story, the paper revealed a 2015 email from an executive of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm, which was then paying Biden’s son $83,333 a month to serve on its board (his pay was cut in half after his father left the vice presidency). Vadym Pozharskyi, the executive, thanked Hunter for “the opportunity to meet your father” the previous evening in Washington.

That meeting, we later discovered, was a dinner organized by Hunter in a private room at Café Milano in Washington on 16 April, 2015, at which his powerful father met some of his colleagues from Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan. Upon the story’s publication, Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates told the media: “They never had a meeting”. Months after the election, the White House admitted that Joe Biden did attend the Café Milano dinner.

It was just one of the dozens of meetings he had during his vice presidency with his son’s foreign partners, after which millions of dollars would flow into the family coffers. Hunter would also call his father and put him on speaker phone when he wanted to impress a prospective client or partner, according to Devon Archer, Hunter’s former business partner. Another email published by the Post described a plan to allocate 10 percent of a lucrative Chinese venture to “The Big Guy” — the code name Hunter’s partners used to refer to Joe Biden.

It would take another three years for James Comer, chairman of the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee, to identify 20 shell companies created by Hunter and his partners, into which more than $30 million flowed from Chinese and other foreign entities after Joe Biden became Obama’s vice president. Incremental payments were made from those companies to at least 10 Biden family members, including Joe Biden himself.

Comer released bank records revealing that “Joe Biden received $40,000 in laundered China money from the account of his brother, James [Jim] Biden, and his sister-in-law, Sara Biden, in the form of a personal check”. He uncovered another $200,000 check to Joe from Jim. Both checks were labeled “loan repayment,” and the White House maintained that Joe had kindly helped his brother when he was in need; Comer could find no proof to suggest otherwise.

Even so, evidence from the laptop suggests that Hunter had paid for upkeep and maintenance of Joe Biden’s Delaware estate, as well as the monthly bill for his father’s private cellphone. Hunter footed the bill for a lot of family expenses through the years and often griped in family discussions that he never got sufficient credit. In one message on the laptop, he complains that he has had to “pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years”.

For months after Joe was sworn in as president, Democrats and their media allies ignored the laptop. Some were still in denial right up until the moment last December, when Joe Biden broke his promise not to pardon Hunter.

Days before Hunter was to be sentenced over a felony gun conviction in Delaware and felony tax fraud in California, Joe Biden gave his son an unprecedented “full and unconditional pardon” for any crime he might have committed stretching back 11 years to January 2014, the year of Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution, which brought the country under the influence of the vice president from Delaware and opened the door to Biden-family self-dealing.

The pardon timeline covered all the Ukraine grift, and most of the China grift, everything that would implicate Joe Biden in Hunter’s influence-peddling. That’s another way of saying that Joe Biden effectively pardoned Joe Biden.

Then, on 27 December, new photographs emerged from an activist lawsuit against the National Archives showing then-Vice President Biden introducing Hunter to Chinese President Xi Jinping and other Chinese Communist Party dignitaries in Beijing a decade earlier. To Chinese eyes, it was clear when Hunter followed his father off Air Force Two that this was American power come to do private business. A few days later, Hunter would receive a 10 percent stake in the Chinese equity firm BHR. Hunter’s business partner in the venture, Jonathan Li, is pictured in several Beijing photographs gladhanding Joe Biden.

But the scope of Biden’s pardons went far beyond Hunter. Preemptive unconditional pardons were also granted to his brothers Jim and Frank and their wives, and his sister Val and her husband. Jim, who was deeply involved Hunter’s China dealings and had been under investigation by the Department of Justice over various deals invoking Joe’s name. Frank, the youngest, spent years avoiding paying a court-ordered $1 million to the children of a Florida man killed in a high-speed hit-and-run. A few years later, at age 49, he was arrested for shoplifting in a Florida Blockbuster when he allegedly stuffed two DVDs down his pants.

As with Hunter, Joe pardoned his siblings for all nonviolent crimes they may have committed going back to January 2014, in what seems to many like an implicit admission of guilt for the period when Joe’s power and influence in the world garnered a fortune for his family.

For many Democrats on the day of the pardon, disappointment with Joe turned to bitter rancor. Big Tech, the Deep State, and the corporate media conspired to suppress evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption, and then he made fools of them all. He refused to give up power when he should have, and when they discarded him too late, he snookered them with an unelectable nominee, Kamala Harris, whom he had selected as his veep to fulfill a pledge to hire a woman of color.

“No one fucks with a Biden,” he is reportedly fond of saying. You could see in the old man’s sly, lopsided grin as he turned away from the camera one last time after his party’s election drubbing, that the muscle memory of a machine politician was in full working order. In his one last act of political bastardy, Joe Biden blew up the Democratic Party. Now, as Donald Trump lays waste to all their works in Washington, they only have themselves to blame.

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.

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?

“Listen to the scientists, support masks,” Biden said at a campaign rally, four years ago, berating Trump for not wearing a mask after he had caught Covid. “Support a mask mandate nationwide,” Biden thundered to cheers and adulation. His campaign message captured a “follow the science” sentiment among Left-leaning American voters who derided anyone questioning mask effectiveness with the label “anti-mask”. This, despite a smattering of articles in Scientific American, Wired, New York Magazine and The Atlantic reporting that scientific studies found masks didn’t seem to stop viruses.

The debate over mask effectiveness took an odd turn last year when ardent mask advocate, Zeynep Tufekci, wrote a New York Times essay claiming “the science is clear that masks work”. Tufekci’s piece denigrated and belittled a scientific review by the prestigious medical nonprofit, Cochrane, for concluding that the evidence is “uncertain”.

Shortly after Tufekci published her essay, Cochrane’s editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, dashed out a statement, to assure mask advocates that Cochrane would update the review’s language. Cochrane reviews are widely considered as the “gold standard” for high‐quality information to inform medicine, and their process is laborious, with multiple rounds of internal checks and expert peer review. Having Cochrane’s head make a personal pronouncement about a published review is unprecedented — akin to having the executive editor of The New York Times write an essay expressing personal opinions about one of the paper’s own deep-dive investigations.

The incident also marked an odd point in the timeline of mask use. Before the pandemic, few, if any, prominent organisations promoted masks to stop influenza or other respiratory viruses. As the WHO concluded in their 2019 pandemic preparedness plan: “There have been a number of high-quality randomised controlled trials (RCTs) demonstrating that personal protective measures such as hand hygiene and face masks have, at best, a small effect on influenza transmission.” So, it was not surprising that both Tufekci’s claims “masks work” and Karla Soares-Weiser’s allegations that something was wrong with the Cochrane mask review were later found themselves to have no real evidence.

Earlier this year, Soares-Weiser issued another statement, this time explaining the mask review was fine and no changes would be made. Despite the 180, damage to Cochrane’s mask review had already been done. Google sends you straight to Tufekci’s New York Times essay alleging problems in the Cochrane review.

But why did Soares-Weiser change her mind?

I have discovered, through hundreds of emails provided to me by freedom of information requests and a Cochrane whistleblower, that Tufekci bumped Soares-Weiser into making the statement against Cochrane’s own mask review — a move that landed like a grenade inside the organisation.

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While Soares-Weiser runs Cochrane, scientists with expertise in each specific subject matter write and edit the reviews. When she rushed out her statement complaining about the mask review, the review authors charged that Cochrane had thrown science under the bus by working with “controversial writer” Zeynep Tufekci; meanwhile, the editor of the mask review reminded Cochrane’s leadership that changes were only being considered because of “intense media coverage and criticism”, not because there were any problems in the review’s science. “I had a very challenging meeting with the [governing board] yesterday,” Soares-Weiser wrote a few days afterwards. “I am holding on, stressed, but OK.”

But the story doesn’t end there. Because the attack by Soares-Weiser and Cochrane’s leadership on their own mask review is illustrative of how media and political pressure undermined and suppressed inconvenient scientific conclusions during the pandemic — and are still attempting to do so. The incident also raises questions about media ethics and whether Cochrane’s leadership is still fit for purpose.

When Cochrane published their 2023 mask review, it was the seventh iteration of a process that began 18 years previously. Back in 2006, Cochrane researchers raked through the scientific literature to see if they could determine what interventions could halt the spread of viruses. They found no good evidence that masks work. The scientists then updated their review in 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2020.

With all six updates, each time scouring any new peer-reviewed studies, Cochrane researchers concluded the same: there is no good scientific evidence that masks work to control viruses. And each time, the scientific community yawned. Because until the Covid pandemic, nobody had conceived of a political movement to advocate for masks. Not even Zeynep Tufekci.

“Don’t worry if you cannot find masks,” Tufekci wrote in a February 2020 article for Scientific American. “For non–health care people, washing your hands often, using alcohol-based hand-sanitiser liberally and learning not to touch your face are the most important clinically-proven interventions there are.” Promoting the article on X, Tufekci reiterated this point: “Clinical studies show hand-washing is the crucial step not masks.”

But the following month, a New York Times media reporter praised Tufekci for reversing her former opinion in a 1 March tweetstorm. This was followed by a 17 March essay for The New York Times that convinced the CDC to alter federal guidance and advise Americans to mask.

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What makes this all alarming is that Tufekci is an academic sociologist, with no training in medicine or public health. And yet, she managed to alter public health policy with a bunch of tweets and an essay followed, two months later, by a co-authored scientific preprint that promoted mask mandates. “We recommend that public officials and governments strongly encourage the use of widespread face masks in public, including the use of appropriate regulation,” it said.

The study’s lead author is Jeremy Howard, a mask advocate and Australian software entrepreneur, who, like Tufekci, has no training in public health or medicine. The review was later published in a medical journal and remains the only article I could find that Tufekci has published in the scientific literature on masks.

Despite such a thin publishing record in the scientific literature, the Raleigh News & Observer (an influential paper among academics) anointed Tufekci a Covid media hero who had challenged the medical and public health establishment and got the facts right — but with essays, not science. “Instead of conducting lab experiments related to Covid-19, she used her platform on Twitter and in the opinion sections of Scientific American, The Atlantic and The New York Times to inform the public with practical advice about what to do and why.”

In retrospect, it’s hard to read this article — celebrating an academic for doing science by essay — and not wonder if it’s a satirical piece for The Onion: “Monkey Solves Grand Unified Theory of Physics in a Single Tweet.” Nonetheless, Tufekci played along with the gag, amazed at her magical ability to solve complex scientific problems without doing any actual science — just writing essays.

“I never thought in a million years I’d be writing something that basically said the World Health Organization and CDC and medical establishment in the United States and Europe are wrong,” she told the paper. But one tiny obstacle stood between Tufekci and full acceptance of mask mandates: Cochrane.

When Cochrane released their mask update in January 2023, which again said the efficacy of masks was uncertain, critics of pandemic policies naturally used these scientific conclusions to cast doubt on the mask advocates. “Mask mandates were a bust,” wrote New York Times columnist Brett Stephens, citing an interview by Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane mask review. “Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as ‘misinformers’ for opposing mandates were right.”

Tufekci’s rise to public prominence is tied closely to her mask advocacy. Reading this column in The New York Times, the most prominent paper in the country, and where she also worked, must have been irksome for her. Three days after the Stephens column, Tufekci emailed Cochrane for an interview. But rather than contacting Jefferson or any of the scientists who authored the review, Tufekci went straight to Michael Brown, one of Cochrane’s editors. She also asked if he would introduce her to Cochrane editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, to which Brown agreed.

Some days later, Karla Soares-Weiser emailed a Cochrane official that she had been “back and forth with NYT about the mask review”, asking for help responding to questions. “I’m navigating a difficult situation,” Soares-Weiser emailed. Tufekci meanwhile, had contacted Jefferson for comment, but he ignored her.

The very following day, the Times published Tufekci’s “masks work” essay. Given the way American journalism works, the piece had most likely been written and edited before she had contacted Jefferson the night before for comment. Although 12 different scientists had been involved in writing and researching the Cochrane mask review, Zeynep singled out Jefferson. She named him several times in her essay for making alleged false statements about the pandemic. Hours later, Cochrane rushed out Soares-Weiser’s statement, and then apologised to the review authors. “We hoped to inform you all before publication but have been blindsided by the NYT and have scrabbled to upload our statement,” Cochrane emailed the review authors.

This did not go down well with the authors. “I will not speak for the others but am deeply distressed by this course of events which have occurred without our knowledge,” replied Jon Conly, a professor and former head of the department of medicine at the University of Calgary. He insisted that Cochrane had thrown the review authors under the bus. “Very naive to think you and the [editor in chief Soares-Weiser] spoke to the media at NYTs (without informing us) and would trust them and that they would not immediately publish what you said, especially with this woman who is well known as a controversial writer.”

“There was no intention to ‘throw you or anyone under the bus’,” Brown responded, “since I would be throwing myself under the bus as the sign-off editor.” He added that he had told Tufekci that he stood by the review and had asked her to contact the review authors for their statements.

Conly confirmed to me later that Tufekci — who did not respond to repeated requests for comment — never contacted him, even though he is named as the review’s corresponding author, who Tufekci should have contacted for comment. “Not sure who Tufekci would have corresponded with to find any of the authors who would have agreed with her,” Conly said.

As I have seen from internal correspondence, Cochrane’s editors then began discussing how to manage blowback from Soares Weiser’s statement. Brown reminded them the update used the same language from 2020 and that revisions were now being suggested because Cochrane was flinching from media critics, not because the science was wrong. “Although I agree that the proposed changes to the [summary] add clarity, it was only under intense media coverage and criticism that these revisions were suggested,” Brown wrote.

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Seeking another angle to quell criticism of Soares-Weiser’s statement, Lisa Bero, a professor medicine at the University of Colorado who serves as Cochrane ethics advisor, suggested that Cochrane publish comments being submitted by outsiders that were also critical of the mask review. “That should be published as soon as possible (following screening for libel or profanity),” Bero emailed. “It is important for readers to know that criticism has not just come through the media, but through the formal channels that we have.”

But according to Conly, the review had already undergone extensive, detailed peer review. “If the editor-in-chief and ethics officer were colluding to find criticism afterwards,” he told me, “that would appear to be unethical.”

Meanwhile, Soares-Weiser’s statement and Tufekci’s article were having a significant effect outside the organisation, spurring several news articles as well as ridicule of the mask authors on social media. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of several books on pandemics, Laurie Garret, accused the mask authors of fraud. “[T]hese bozos have undermined public faith in [masks] & biz/govt willingness to promote use,” she posted on X. (It is notable that, prior to the pandemic, Garrett posted on X in 2018 that masks don’t work for influenza and other respiratory viruses. “We have also known for 100+ years that masks do no good.”)

The argument was even reverberating through politics. Testifying in her final appearance before Congress, CDC Director, Rochelle Walensky, cited Soares-Weiser’s statement, falsely stating that Cochrane had “retracted” the mask review. Congressional staff were forced to correct her testimony: “The lack of trust in public health officials is becoming an enormous problem,” a congressional staffer later wrote.

Word of Soares-Weiser’s actions even reached the highest levels of the British government. That summer, while she was in London for a Cochrane event, an MP invited her to Parliament’s Portcullis House to explain her statement. However, according to a staffer in Parliament, Soares-Weiser dodged the invite and never appeared.

Although he was noted prominently in the “masks work” essay, Cochrane’s Michael Brown told me the Times had engaged in a lot of of “spinning” of his comments and he hadn’t been aware that Tufekci had campaigned for mask mandates, nor that she had published a review whose conclusions contradicted those of Cochrane. In her initial email to Brown, Tufekci had highlighted her ostensibly scientific background, introducing herself as both a New York Times columnist and an academic with a background in statistics and causal inference, and an interest in scientific reviews. “I use and participate in reviews myself (I’m writing one in my own field soon) and thus am familiar with many of the challenges and issues.”

This is something of an embellishment of Tufekci’s bona fides. According to Google Scholar, she has published no academic articles this year and the only one she published in all of 2023 was an opinion piece in Nature. As for the review article Tufekci had pointed to, it has never appeared.

“I’m a trusting person,” Brown told me, explaining that he had never looked up Tufekci’s history before speaking with her. “She’s definitely more of a journalist than a scientist. I didn’t agree with her, the way she then spun it: masks work.”

“The bottom line is that [our] review was well-done,” Brown said. As for the proposed changes to review’s language, Brown explained that the summary language had been written by Cochrane staff reporting to Karla Soares-Weiser, not Tom Jefferson and the other review authors.

“She sort of got caught in the crossfire,” Brown said of Soares-Weiser, adding that colleagues pressured her because they didn’t like the conclusions that there is no evidence masks work. “Which is really hard for her, for someone in her position as editor in chief.”

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Brown made his views on the science clear last September when he emailed the organiser of a talk he was giving that masks “do not make a major impact at the community level when promoted as a public health intervention”. He also told me that a recent scientific review in the Annals of Internal Medicine complemented the findings of Cochrane. “In the end, the conclusions were the same.”

But while Cochrane has ceased attacking its own mask review, The New York Times continues to promote the “masks work” narrative — despite evidence to the contrary. Last May, the paper ran an essay by Tulane University’s John M. Barry. In his piece, Barry wrote: “Masks present a much simpler question. They work. We’ve known they work since 1917, when they helped protect soldiers from a measles epidemic.”

And yet, we know this is not true. Even Barry does. As he wrote his bestselling tome, The Great Influenza: “The masks worn by millions were useless as designed and could not prevent influenza. Only preventing exposure to the virus could.”

But as has become clear, and as Brown confirmed in our conversation, masks are no longer about science: “Instead of just talking about the science, it became a political thing. And people fell on one side or the other,” he said. “And they said some things, and then they have to back up what they’ve said previously. And they’re just digging a hole deeper and deeper.”

What The New York Times did was to embrace a scientific opinion — masks work! — and then defend that notion like a divine ruling — ignoring contrary evidence and attacking researchers such as Tom Jefferson who have spent decades toiling away on a once-obscure topic. “This is what the future holds,” Jefferson told me. “It’s an upside-down world. It’s the death of science.”

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.

When I saw the book — Grandad’s Pride by Harry Woodgate — on the senior librarian’s acquisitions spreadsheet, to be ordered for June’s month-long Pride display, I quickly alerted them to the scandal. Although, in truth, “scandal” was wishful embellishment on my part. Other than a report on MailOnline, the book’s content didn’t attract great interest in the mainstream media. On the contrary, Woodgate was later a panellist at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, participating in an event about diversity in children’s publishing. Very recently, the book was longlisted for the Little Rebels prize, an award that is “designed to recognise the rich tradition of radical publishing for children in the UK”.

Grandad’s Pride isn’t the only eyebrow-raising nomination I recognised from my time working as a children’s librarian in Scotland. On the Little Rebels longlist was also L.D. Lapinski’s Jamie, a novel I read in one incredulous sitting. It tells the story of Jamie, a child of purposefully undisclosed sex who identifies as non-binary and is faced with the “unjust” decision of whether “they” attend all-boys or all-girls high school. As well as author Lapinski (who identifies as non-binary) portraying Jamie in such a way that makes it seem “they” have no birth sex, the book also contains a deliberate rewriting of the Equality Act that obfuscates the reality of sex to young readers; Jamie asserts “gender” is a protected characteristic under the law rather than “sex” and “gender assignment”.

Grandad’s Pride was the only book I was bold enough to flag, using the minor media coverage of the controversy to present an objective case against adding it to the school library collection. As much as I wanted to, I didn’t express my aversions to Jamie or any of the other — at least 30 — fiction and non-fiction children’s books steeped in unfalsifiable ideology I came across.

Why didn’t I speak out about them all? I’ll confess some of it was timidity. In Scotland at the time, the Gender Recognition Reform Bill was not yet defeated. Plus, I had little authority as the assistant librarian. Within my small department, I was the only one who felt unease about these resources. Perhaps the boiled-frog effect shocked me into stunned silence too. In my first post-university job, in a public library in 2018, I’d witnessed children as young as six being signed up to a summer reading challenge where the form invited them to list their gender “girl”, “boy” or “other”. Back then, it had seemed ridiculous, a brief blip in sanity — an administrative error, even. That blip was now a hydra with heads sprouting everywhere I looked.

This was the real problem. My fight was not with my school library, it was with the whole library sector, and beyond this, the entire world of children’s publishing and bookselling. Activists disguised as children’s authors are not falling through the cracks of publishing — they are being actively promoted and lionised by the industry. It’s extremely hard to make the case that a book is deeply unsuitable for children when major bookshop chains such as Waterstones are singing its praises on their website and media reviews are glowing. Revered children’s authors such as Malorie Blackman and Philip Pullman have lent their support to trans ideology; the few children’s authors who have had the integrity to express concern, including Gillian Philips and Rachel Rooney, have been hounded and cast out.

Not long before I left my library post last year, I attended a webinar on the subject of censorship hosted by the School Library Association (SLA). I had hoped for a robust discussion on censorship from all angles, but there was a notable cognitive dissonance from the hosts. Much of their focus was on the book-banning conflicts going on in US school libraries, where the parents and authorities challenging books were implicitly framed as Christian Right-wingers. Secular parents, reluctant to expose their children to gender or critical race theory, were conveniently grouped in with evangelicals trying to purge Judy Blume and Harry Potter from library shelves. The same webinar also discreetly advised librarians how to ensure they could justify why they might have chosen to “weed” (remove) certain books: for instance, we were told that writing up an (unofficial) library policy is a good way to safeguard against objectors.

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Something that dawned on me during that meeting was the demographic of modern school librarians, something I also observed at the 2023 annual conference for the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). Most were young, progressive women, and perhaps this makes sense: consider the unique mixture of power and nurture librarianship holds; especially in a school library, where you are revered as the moulder of innocent minds, an ambassador for kindness and tolerance as much as literacy. Librarians may not write the books but it is them (us) who decide what books to display and promote, which authors get invited to give talks, and — almost as important — who and what does not get platformed.

Another, perhaps unsurprising, factor in the rise of activist librarianship is social media. Most schools and public libraries have X or TikTok accounts (“Librarians of TikTok” has posted almost 40 million times). A key part of a school librarian’s job is now online PR to show that reading is not only a crucial life skill but also “cool”. I’m not opposed to this: one of my favourite parts of the job was designing funky, enticing book displays and murals to showcase the range of the library collection. However, one of the best ways to get trending is to latch onto viral hashtags and, given that every other day is #SomethingAwarenessDay or someone’s day of “visibility”, the parts of the collection on show end up being heavily steeped in DEI and LGBTQIA+. The old-fashioned image of the librarian as an elderly, stern, technophobic, cardigan-wearer has changed dramatically — the cardigans still exist, except they now come adorned with pronoun badges and progressive slogans. And as with the worrying trends in children’s publishing, none of this is considered radical, it’s simply the new norm.

The flip side of questionable material being marketed to children is the material being hidden from them. Barely 20 years ago, a model librarian strained for utmost political neutrality. Their role was to ensure the efficient and thorough provision of the information members of the public wanted to access, not judgement of it. The 2005 intellectual freedom guidance issued by CILIP stated this clearly: “[Works] should not be excluded on moral, political, religious, racial or gender grounds, to satisfy the demands of sectional interest.”

In contrast, a CILIP guide published in September 2023 about making a public libraries “safe and inclusive” is notably less resolute in tone. There are references to protecting people from (undefined) “hate speech” and “misinformation” as well as librarians “working in a context of a highly polarised society”. With the best will in the world, such nebulous guidance has given the green light to librarians with agendas to act on biases with flimsy justification.

Evidently many are. Only last year, public libraries in a West Yorkshire council area were revealed to have blacklisted a number of “gender-critical” books, including Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls, and were hiding them in stockrooms (they were later reinstated to the shelves but forbidden from being “promoted” on displays). In parts of America, the war on intellectual freedom has progressed from the front desk to the catalogue, where content warnings and deeply biased subject tags are added to databases, making it harder for citizens to access resources that don’t pass the progressive smell test. As with so many cultural trends, it’s a censorious aberration that could easily spread to the UK.

How can we defend against this? The road back to common sense in children’s publishing will be a long and fraught one. But describing the water in which we are drowning is a start. Libraries may be renowned as spaces of quiet, but this is a silence that desperately needs breaking.

To clarify: the purpose of PEN is to defend freedom of speech and to protect writers from political oppression and persecution. It makes perfect sense, therefore, that a significant cadre of its membership would seek to stifle freedom of speech and engage in political oppression and persecution. Or: we’re all for free speech so long as you say what we tell you. These folks are athletes. It requires considerable intellectual acrobatics for Writers Against the War on Gaza to regard the shutting down of events to advance free expression as “a win for free expression”. Presumably, the fact that a number of withdrawals from both occasions were motivated by fear of being attacked by a mob of pro-Palestinian zealots is also “a win for free expression”. PEN itself stated its concern “about any circumstance in which writers tell us they feel shut down, or that speaking their minds bears too much risk”.

PEN is by its nature a big tent. It represents not only Muslim writers but Jewish ones too, some of whom might just support the existence of Israel, might just regard Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza as justified, and might just find alliance with genuinely genocidal terrorists whose unembarrassed aim is to wipe Israel and the Jewish people off the map as a teeny tiny bit obnoxious. While one PEN member decries the non-profit’s “both-sidesing”, the truth is that PEN has no business taking a position on this issue whatsoever.

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Unfortunately, the Left has successfully installed the expectation that, regardless of their established purpose, all institutions — companies, museums, theatres, universities, charities, you name it — must proclaim their fealty to the “right” (which is to say Left) position on a host of inflammatory issues of the day. This hyper-politicisation of entities that ought sensibly to remain politically neutral has been systematically debauching everything from the National Trust to the NHS, from Anheuser-Busch to the Chicago Art Museum. First, all such outfits were required to fly Black Lives Matter flags, then garishly incoherent Pride flags, and now these banners have all to be swapped out for Palestinian flags, never mind what constituency or customer base might be alienated by this gratuitously partisan branding. Thus, an organisation established for the defence of free speech of every sort — including the overtly Zionist kind — is necessarily obliged to openly advocate for Hamas, a murderous, cheerfully antisemitic cult whose interest in free speech on its home turf would fit in a thimble.

Of course, PEN’s membership has form when it comes to hypocrisy. In 2015, under armed security, PEN awarded its Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Six writers withdrew from participating in the proceedings to protest the magazine’s ostensibly offensive printing of cartoons that depicted Mohammed. Yet funnily enough, what your average normal person found offensive was the vicious massacre of 12 of the publication’s employees, most of them journalists, for neglecting to adhere to one religion’s hysterical blasphemy laws in a secular country that famously celebrates “liberté”. Yet over 200 writers — including, to my astonishment, the likes of Joyce Carol Oates — signed an open letter to PEN criticising the Charlie Hebdo award. For these authors, defence of free speech, promotion of tolerance, and opposition to violent political oppression — the very purpose of PEN — counted for nothing when weighed against any injury to the delicate feelings of fundamentalist Muslims.

Much has been written about the unholy and in some ways hilarious alliance developing between the progressive Left and Islam (Lesbians for Palestine, etc). But for Western writers to embrace a restrictive, prescriptive, and stifling culture isn’t merely ironic or comical; it’s self-defeating. One needn’t consult a professor of Middle Eastern Studies to conclude that these fair-weather friends in Gaza may welcome useful idiocy, but the permissive ethos of the Anglo-Left is diametrically at odds with despotic Islamic theology. Moreover, for American writers to express increasingly shrill and little-disguised hostility to Jews is to disavow a substantial chunk of the country’s distinguished literary canon: Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, and Elie Weisel just for starters.

But then, the past 15 years have demonstrated with depressing clarity that writers, along with artists of every stripe, aren’t special. Although our occupation is more at risk from censorship than most, we’re all too capable of perversely embracing suppressive viewpoints that violate our own interest. We’re paid not only to write but to think, yet we don’t think; we listen keenly for whatever tune is playing in our fellow travellers’ AirPods and whistle along. Apparently, we’re no more creative than the average bear, and as soon as the memo goes out, we’ll chant along with the kiddies camped at Columbia University, “From the river to the sea!” whatever that means. We’ll obediently switch out one cause for another whenever we’re told, as nimbly as using “find and replace” in Microsoft Word.

We’re cowards, conformists, and copycats. Real freedom of expression is too scary; we’d rather hide in a crowd whose keffiyeh-masked members all shout the same thing. PEN has a laudable history of advocating for writers who’ve been persecuted for their opinions in repressive polities — polities much like the contemporary United States. But too many of its members would have the non-profit corrupt its global mission to protect free speech across the board so long as they can bully its leadership into pointless partisan posturing for progressives’ acrid flavour of the month.

It didn’t matter that the book was critical of the Border Patrol; as the protesters saw it, to treat that agency’s operations with literary nuance and moral complexity was as obscene as doing so with the Gestapo. They tried to shame attendees into leaving, then repeatedly shouted down the author, derailing the discussion until the store manager called the police. After loudly denouncing her, they left.

I don’t know whether any of these hecklers called themselves “Antifa”, but their disruption of a minor literary event was just one small indication of the extent to which the movement’s values and tactics went mainstream during the Trump era. For decades, Antifa activists had focused their attention on shutting down the activities of fringe far-Right groups with violence if necessary. But with Trump in the White House, many concluded the domain of the struggle needed to be extended. In their panicked state post-2016, many liberals and mainstream progressives who might have once eschewed Antifa’s rejection of free speech and advocacy of violence against ideological opponents came to regard them as a last line of defence against a surging Right.

In reaction, Antifa became a central element of conservative demonology in the Trump era, especially during the riots set off by George Floyd’s killing in 2020, in which masked “black bloc” agitators were often seen setting fires and causing mayhem. As Minneapolis burned, Trump claimed on Twitter that his administration would designate Antifa a terrorist organisation. This never happened — and since the United States lacks a domestic terrorism law, it is unlikely it will in the event of a second Trump term.

At the local level, however, conservatives are now testing out other ways of cracking down on the movement. This month, the District Attorney of San Diego, California, brought conspiracy charges against two Antifa activists who were involved in street brawls in early 2021, in effect trying to prosecute them using a legal toolkit created to fight organised crime.

Both the prosecution and the defence in the Antifa trial lay claim to free speech. In her opening statement, the Deputy District Attorney alleged that the defendants conspired “to shut down the speech and the assembly of a patriot group” (they were protesting a pro-Trump rally of the Proud Boys and other far-Right groups). In response, as well as arguing the prosecution is politically motivated — plausibly, given that the government opted not to prosecute any of the Right-wingers involved in the street fights in question — defence attorneys contend that the conspiracy charge threatens free political expression, because it will have a “chilling effect” on anyone protesting Right-wing gatherings.

The irony of the defence attorneys’ argument is that Antifa advocates are often explicit about doing what prosecutors allege — conspiring, or at least coordinating, to prevent those it defines as “fascist” from speaking and assembling. They are also open about the fact that they reject the liberal conception of free speech. In Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, the historian and activist Mark Bray writes: “At the heart of the anti-fascist outlook is a rejection of the classical liberal phrase incorrectly ascribed to Voltaire that ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’.” Bray, whose book is at once a history of Antifa, an apologia for its approach, and a how-to guide for aspiring militants, writes that the movement is “committed… to fighting to the death the ability of organized Nazis to say anything”. (“To the death” here is literal: Bray approvingly cites historical instances of murders committed by anti-fascists.)

Like many Antifa sympathisers, Bray directs much of his ire at liberal free-speech advocates, whom he believes are naïve devotees of the “marketplace of ideas”. The reality, though, is that after Trump’s election, many liberals and liberal institutions embraced Bray’s position. Indeed, the popularity of his book — which garnered many positive reviews in the mainstream press and scored Bray multiple NPR interviews — was an indication of this shift. The most dramatic about-face occurred at the ACLU, long notorious for defending the right of a Nazi group to hold a rally in Skokie, Illinois, in 1977. The organisation took the same consistent free-speech stance prior to the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, but after the deadly events of that day, it began to waver, with many of its employees publicly disavowing its prior position.

In another sign of the patina of respectability Antifa acquired in the Trump era, in early 2018 Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison — then the deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee — promoted Bray’s book on Twitter, saying it would “strike fear in the heart of [Donald Trump]”. This was quite a reputational upgrade for a movement that, as Bray’s historical account details, existed for many decades mainly as a minor skinhead subculture devoted mainly to brawling with equally marginal groups of neo-Nazi skinheads.

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For much of its existence, however, Antifa had a more ambivalent relationship with the liberal mainstream than its frequent denunciations of liberal proceduralism would imply. The movement first emerged alongside and in response to the rise of fascism in interwar Europe; the first anti-fascist militants were communists, socialists and anarchists who took to the streets to confront fascist paramilitary groups such as the SA in Germany and the Blackshirts in Italy. At this time, their violent struggle was part of a broader revolutionary agenda. Defeating fascists, viewed as the shock troops of capital, was one piece of the larger radical social transformation they sought, often inspired by the recent Bolshevik triumph in Russia (the fascists, for their part, saw their violent activities as justified by the threat of Bolshevism). Yet in nearly every country, they failed not only to bring about a communist revolution but to block the rise of the far-Right.

It was only in the post-war era, with the West settled under liberal-democratic rule, that Antifa re-emerged in something like its current form. With the dream of universal communist revolution deferred, the movement focused largely on beating back the scattered far-Right groups that persisted. While still deploying the rhetoric of the revolutionary Left, these militants were for the most part resigned to policing the outer fringes of acceptable discourse, following terms set by the liberal mainstream they despised. To the extent their use of political violence was tolerated, it was in large part because their far-Right targets had already been pushed to the margins of society by other means, or because they unfolded in subcultural spaces of little broad political significance.

In making the case for the efficacy of Antifa tactics, Bray and other apologists often point to concrete successes at preventing some particular neo-Nazi group from gathering or speaker from speaking. But it was the subtler, more comprehensive methods of enforcing ideological consensus employed by the liberal mainstream that rendered these fringe groups vulnerable to the antics of a handful of activists in the first place. Conversely, Antifa has had less success lately at shutting down Right-populist leaders and parties it dubs fascist, from Trump to Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni — for the simple reason that it is unable to muster sufficient numbers to physically confront their mass base of support. Even Bray concedes the movement’s tactics are inadequate to take on this new enemy.

Hence, Antifa faces the problem that its approach is more likely to rack up successes when the stakes are lowest; when those it dubs “fascist” manage to command a broad base of support, it seems unable to scale up its approach. An approach calibrated to shutting down a bar show by a neo-Nazi hardcore band is unlikely to have much effect on a Trump rally. The liberal establishment, it would seem, began to embrace Antifa just as its tactics were becoming irrelevant.

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And yet, the possibility of effective collaboration between the centre-left and Antifa activists was on view this week, in the briefly successful attempt to shut down the National Conservatism conference in Brussels. Belgian anti-fascists had repeatedly demanded the conference be prevented from happening, and the local mayor used the pretext of potential violence from counter-protesters to justify asking the police to break up the gathering on public safety grounds. Ultimately, a court forced the city government to allow the conference to go forward, but the affair revealed something novel: that Antifa’s willingness to use violence can furnish sympathetic authorities with a useful rationale for limiting the freedom of speech and assembly of their enemies.

If Antifa has contributed anything to public discourse other than shrill slogans, it is having forced the consideration of what the limits of tolerance and freedom are in a society that claims to revere these values. But this question also applies to them too, as the San Diego prosecution’s case makes clear. Can a liberal society tolerate the activities of a group that openly seeks to deny the speech and assembly rights of whomever its members deem “fascist”? (In the final chapter of his book, Bray implies all Trump voters are “everyday fascists”, but doesn’t clarify whether he and his comrades therefore consider half the US electorate legitimate targets for violence.)

Lately, Antifa has lost much of the prominence it enjoyed in the Trump era but the questions raised by its activities persist. Amid the Gaza war, pro-Palestinian protesters have used Antifa-style tactics to prevent pro-Israel speakers and groups from holding events, but have also fallen victim to tactics long used by Antifa, such as doxxing. If the San Diego prosecution of Antifa succeeds, we can expect further crackdowns on Left-wing protest by conservative DAs along similar lines — but this, in turn, may only confirm fascism is imminent, prompting more aggressive action on the Left. The question, it seems, is less whether we are lurching into a new age of illiberalism than which side will go further, sooner.

This was part of an email sent to UnHerd at the start of January from an organisation called the Global Disinformation Index. It was their justification, handed down after a series of requests, for placing UnHerd on a so-called “dynamic exclusion list” of publications that supposedly promote “disinformation” and should therefore be boycotted by all advertisers.

They provided examples of the offending content: Kathleen Stock, whose columns are up for a National Press Award this week, Julie Bindel, a lifelong campaigner against violence against women, and Debbie Hayton, who is transgender. Apparently the GDI equates “gender-critical” beliefs, or maintaining that biological sex differences exist, with “disinformation” — despite the fact that those beliefs are specifically protected in British law and held by the majority of the population.

The verdicts of “ratings agencies” such as the GDI, within the complex machinery that serves online ads, are a little-understood mechanism for controlling the media conversation. In UnHerd’s case, the GDI verdict means that we only received between 2% and 6% of the ad revenue normally expected for an audience of our size. Meanwhile, neatly demonstrating the arbitrariness and subjectivity of these judgements, Newsguard, a rival ratings agency, gives UnHerd a 92.5% trust rating, just ahead of the New York Times at 87.5%.

So, what are these “ratings agencies” that could be the difference between life and death for a media company? How does their influence work? And who funds them? The answers are concerning and raise serious questions about the freedom of the press and the viability of a functioning democracy in the internet age.

***

Disinformation only really became a discussion point in response to the Trump victory in 2016, and was then supercharged during the Covid era: Google Trends data shows that worldwide searches for the term quadrupled between June and December 2016, and had increased by more than 30 times by 2022. In response to the supposed crisis, corporations, technology companies and governments all had to show they were taking some form of action. This created a marketplace for enterprising start-ups and not-for-profits to claim a specialism in detecting disinformation. Today, there are hundreds of organisations who make this claim, providing all sorts of “fact-checking” services, including powerful ratings agencies such as GDI and Newsguard. These companies act as invisible gatekeepers within the vast machinery of online advertising.

How this works is relatively straightforward: in UnHerd’s case, we contract with an advertising agency, which relies on a popular tech platform called “Grapeshot”, founded in the UK and since acquired by Larry Ellison’s Oracle, to automatically select appropriate websites for particular campaigns. Grapeshot in turn automatically uses the “Global Disinformation Index” to provide a feed of data about “brand safety” — and if GDI gives a website a poor score, very few ads will be served.

The Global Disinformation Index was founded in the UK in 2018, with the stated objective of disrupting the business model of online disinformation by starving offending publications of funding. Alongside George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the GDI receives money from the UK government (via the FCDO), the European Union, the German Foreign Office and a body called Disinfo Cloud, which was created and funded by the US State Department.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, its two founders emerged from the upper echelons of “respectable” society. First, there is Clare Melford, whose biography published by the World Economic Forum states that she had previously “led the transition of the European Council on Foreign Relations from being part of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation to independent status”. She set up the GDI with Daniel Rogers, who worked “in the US intelligence community”, before founding a company called “Terbium Labs” that used AI and machine learning to scour the internet for illicit use of sensitive data and then sold it handsomely to Deloitte.

Together, they have spearheaded a carefully intellectualised definitional creep as to what counts as “disinformation”. Back when it was first set up in 2018, they defined the term on their website as “deliberately false content, designed to deceive”. Within these strict parameters, you can see how it might have appeared useful to have dedicated fact-checkers identifying the most egregious offenders and calling them out. But they have since broadened the definition to encompass anything that deploys an “adversarial narrative” — stories that may be factually true, but pit people against each other by attacking an individual, an institution or “the science”.

GDI founder Clare Melford explained in an interview at the LSE in 2021 how this expanded definition was more “useful”, as it allowed them to go beyond fact-checking to targeting anything on the internet that they deem “harmful” or “divisive”:

“A lot of disinformation is not just whether something is true or false — it escapes from the limits of fact-checking. Something can be factually accurate but still extremely harmful… [GDI] leads you to a more useful definition of disinformation… It’s not saying something is or is not disinformation, but it is saying that content on this site or this particular article is content that is anti-immigrant, content that is anti-women, content that is antisemitic…”

Larger traffic websites are rated using humans, she explains, but most are rated using automated AI. “We actually instantiate our definition of disinformation — the adversarial narrative topics — within the technology,” explains Melford. “Each adversarial narrative is given its own machine-learning classifier, which then allows us to search for content that matches that narrative at scale… misogyny, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-black content, climate change denial, etc.”

Melford’s team and algorithm are essentially trained to identify and defund any content she finds offensive, not disinformation. Her personal bugbears are somewhat predictable: content supporting the January 6 “insurrections”, the pernicious influence of “white men in Silicon Valley”, and anything that might undermine the global response to the “existential challenge of climate change”.

The difficulty, however, is that most of these issues are highly contentious and require robust, uncensored discussion to find solutions. Challenges to scientific orthodoxy are particularly important, as the multiple failures of the official response to Covid-19 amply demonstrated. Indeed, one of the examples of GDI’s work that Melford highlighted in her LSE talk was an article about the Delta variant of Covid-19. “This is a Spanish language site talking about how a third of deaths in the United Kingdom from the Delta variant are amongst those people who are vaccinated, which is clearly untrue,” says Melford. “It is Chipotle that has been caught next to this ad unwittingly, and unfortunately for them have funded this highly dangerous disinformation about vaccines.”

The statistic being reported comes from a June 2021 Public Health England report into Covid variants that sets out the 42 known deaths from the Delta variant from January to June: 23 were unvaccinated, 7 vaccinated with one shot and 12 fully vaccinated. In other words, 29% were fully vaccinated — around a third — and 17% partially vaccinated, making a total of 45% vaccinated. To further complicate the question, Melford misread the Spanish headline, and it actually referenced two thirds, or 66%, which is wrong again.

Examples like this are far from rare. The GDI still hosts an uncorrected 2020 blog about the “evolution of the Wuhan lab conspiracy theory” surrounding Covid-19’s origins, which concludes that “cutting off ads to these fringe sites and their outer networks is the first action needed”. This is despite the fact that Facebook and other tech companies long ago corrected similar policies and conceded that it was a legitimate hypothesis that should never have been censored.

***

In the US, a number of media organisations have started to take action against GDI’s partisan activism, prompted by a GDI report in 2022 that listed the 10 most dangerous sites in America. To many, it looked simply like a list of the country’s most-read conservative websites. It even included RealClearPolitics, a well-respected news aggregator whose polling numbers are among the most quoted in the country. The “least risk of disinformation” list was, predictably enough, populated by sites with a liberal inclination.

In recent months, a number of American websites have launched legal challenges against GDI’s labelling system, which they claim infringes upon their First Amendment rights. In December, The Daily Wire and The Federalist teamed up with the attorney general of Texas to sue the state department for funding GDI and Newsguard. A separate initiative to prevent the Defense Department from using any advertiser that uses Newsguard, GDI or similar entities has been successful, and is now part of federal law.

But GDI is a British company and, on this side of the Atlantic, the Conservative Government continues to fund it. A written question from MP Philip Davies last year revealed that £2.6 million was given in the period up to last year, and that there is still “frequent contact” between the GDI and the FCDO “Counter Disinformation and Media Development” unit.

***

Yesterday, I was invited to give evidence to the House of Lords Communication and Digital Committee during which I outlined the extent of the threat to the free media of self-appointed ratings agencies such as the Global Disinformation Index. The reality, as I told Parliament, is that GDI is merely the tip of the iceberg. At a time when the news media is so distrusted and faces a near-broken business model, the role of government should be to prevent, not encourage, and most certainly not fund, consolidations of monopoly power around certain ideological viewpoints.

But this isn’t simply a matter for the media. Both companies and those in the advertising sector also need to act: it cannot be good marketing for brands to target only half the population. Last year, Oracle announced it was cutting ties with GDI on free speech grounds, but as we discovered, it seems they are still collaborating via the Grapeshot plaform: is Larry Ellison aware of this?

At its heart, the disinformation panic is becoming a textbook example of how a “solution” can do more harm than the problem it is designed to address. Educated campaigners such as Clare Melford may think they are doing the world a service, but in fact they are acting as intensifying agents, lending legitimacy to a conspiratorial world view in which governments and corporations are in cahoots to censor political expression. Unless something is done to stop them, they will continue to sow paranoia and distrust — and hasten us towards an increasingly radicalised and divided society.

***

This article has been updated to reference the fact that Clare Melford misread the headline about deaths from the Delta variant, and it actually claimed 2/3 not 1/3.

In recent months, people who lost their jobs amid this or that spasm of ideological intolerance have begun to reappear in places where they would have been previously blackballed, telling stories that sound like modern-day versions of The Crucible, except much stupider. The memoir of #MeToo hero Christine Blasey Ford was released last week to surprisingly little fanfare, while a NYMag exposé of womanising podcaster Andrew Huberman — which only a few years ago might have resulted in the boycotting and deplatforming of the man in question — made barely a dent in the discourse. Brands that went all in on social justice are now quietly — and in some cases, desperately — distancing themselves from the excesses of the era. Even the painfully hip young progressives who run Biden’s social-media channels have stopped using inane terms like Latinx, and resumed posting like normal people, or close enough.

And yet, there is also a sense that we cannot pull back from the edge, particularly in the rarefied spaces where high culture is made. Consider this month’s imbroglio at the literary journal Guernica, which lost virtually all its volunteer staff in a wave of mass resignations following the publication of an essay by writer and translator Joanna Chen. Titled “From the Edges of a Broken World”, it described Chen’s complicated and conflicted relationship with her adopted country of Israel — to which she immigrated at the age of 16 after the death of her brother — in the wake of the October 7 attacks that left 1,400 people dead, and the retaliatory bombing by Israel which augmented that number by tens of thousands more. Within days of the essay’s publication, Guernica‘s co-publisher and nearly a dozen editors announced that they were resigning in objection, accusing Chen of trying to “soften the violence of colonialism and genocide”. The magazine unpublished the essay with apologies, although apologies for what remains unclear; a “more fulsome explanation” for the retraction was promised but has yet to appear, and the magazine’s website has not been updated in weeks.

It’s hard to understand how someone could read Chen’s words and see a woman who is “speaking for power”, and blind to the plight of the Palestinians, let alone defending genocide. “There is a limit to which the human soul can stomach atrocities and keep going,” she writes, in a paragraph that mentions both the October 7 slaughter by Hamas terrorists and the ongoing massacre in Gaza. The essay, which has since been republished by Washington Monthly, is interspersed with lines of poetry by Palestinian writers, people Chen knows personally from having translated their work, and also describes her ongoing work as a volunteer driving Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals. But of course, most of the essay’s fiercest critics didn’t read it, at least not comprehensively — and of course, not reading it was exactly what they wanted everyone else to do. That’s the thing about censors: they don’t really care what you’re saying. They just want to stop you from saying it.

In truth, the most interesting thing about Guernica‘s collapse is how familiar its contours seem. The substance of the controversy changes, but its shape remains the same. There was the cherry-picking of one allegedly offensive line — in this case, Chen grimacing as a friend tried to comfort her children by describing the sounds of rocket fire as “good booms” — which was then repeated ad nauseam, like a magic password that allowed critics to condemn the essay while bypassing any actual engagement with its content. A search for the phrase “good booms” on X is an illuminating, if depressing, reminder that what you cannot bring yourself to read charitably you will also inevitably struggle to comprehend — and that even the most literate among us are not above pretending, for the sake of tribal signalling, to have the intellectual capacity of a turnip.

But of course, this was just step one; eventually, and particularly if a backlash has begun to brew, the censors will pivot to a litany of secondary indictments: a lack of oversight by the editor (“A rigorous editorial process might have produced something worth reading!”), an error in the publication process (“Only one editor saw it!”), the quality of the censored work (“It’s not even good!”).

For those of us who come to these debates based on a sincere and principled commitment to free expression, this rhetorical barrage is disorienting; it’s like being invited to a scrimmage only to find your opponent repeatedly picking up the goalposts and carrying them all over the field, jeering at you over their shoulders for wanting to play in the first place. It would be almost hilariously bewildering, if it weren’t so damned bleak. The journal editors who are supposed to be the custodians of the literature that allows us to know ourselves, our world, and each other — people who spend their lives bewailing the dangers of book bans from the Right — become a pack of sneering authoritarian bullies when confronted by work that dares to empathise with anyone but their chosen side. The artists who are supposed to be our truth-tellers, our rule-breakers, whine that a story wasn’t subject to proper editorial process, like a snotty bureaucrat sending you to the back of the line because you didn’t properly fill out Section 320A of Form 981 at the DMV.

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It doesn’t matter if the story was good; it doesn’t even matter what the story was about. Anyone who cares about art, and especially the ones who care about it enough to make it, knows this for the cringing, callow conformity it is. It is — or at least, it should be — utterly beneath us.

A common criticism of Israel is that, in its treatment of the Palestinians, the country has become the thing it once hated. This seems too facile to adequately describe the complexities of a conflict thousands of years old, in which all parties involved have suffered, and struggled, and spilled the blood of others as surely as others have spilled their own. But it could perhaps describe the current state of the arts in America, in this moment of absolute hegemony by the Left in every place where culture is produced — and in which the flag of the progressive cause can be found literally flying over everything from corporate headquarters to the White House.

We call this a “culture war”, but in truth, it feels like that war has been over for some time, and that the Guernica controversy is just the latest flex by a regime that has been in power for over a decade. Consider how long we’ve lived in thrall to the shrieking, puritan mode of cultural critique first advanced on the Your Fave Is Problematic Tumblr. Consider how long we’ve been policing books and films for “harmful tropes”, or obsessing about the racial makeup of the Oscar nominees. Consider that it was 2017 when progressive folk hero Roxane Gay effectively torpedoed HBO’s Confederate, an alternate-history drama led by Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, by calling it “slavery fanfiction” in the pages of the New York Times.

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I often think about Confederate. Who knows: maybe the concept was, if not slavery fanfiction, too flawed to pull off. Maybe it would have been in truly bad taste. But maybe it would have been interesting, or provocative, or even great — and we’ll never know.

This, too, is the thing about censorship: at its worst, it isn’t just about one book, one film, one painting going up in flames. At its worst, it yanks the paintbrush from the artist’s hand before he’s painted a single stroke, all for fear of what he might create. It’s why, even now, it still seems so strange and terrible to me that so many of these avid censors are often artists themselves. The one-time counterculturalists who overthrew the scolds of the Moral Majority, ascending into power through the sheer audacity of their art, their stories, their songs — how long did it take before these same people started using their newfound influence to silence the voices of the artists they didn’t like? A year? Five years? Was it always going to be thus?

Maybe. What matters, I think, is that we are fully living on the other side of that moment, and have been for a while. The spasms of the past few years, whatever you want to call them — wokeness, cancel culture, something else — were not a power struggle, but the aftermath of one: the part where the winner shows his strength and supremacy by stamping his boot on the faces of the losers, not forever, but certainly until everyone knows exactly who’s in charge.

Seen this way, what happened at Guernica is simply what has been happening. Not a revolt from below, but a reminder from above of who holds the power, the influence, and the censor’s pen in their hot little hands. That Guernica has published nothing since the meltdown over Chen’s essay seems less like accidental fallout, and more like things going exactly as planned.

Such reactions bear witness to our shallow times. They focus on the similitude of the gesture with others (from Dada to Banksy and some “eco-vandalists”), while ignoring the crux of the matter: the fate of Assange. Molodkin is not performing an act of modern art — he is trying to save a human life. Nor is he alone in this. Behind the WikiLeaks founder stands a collective of artists and patrons animated by a profound insight: do we have the right to enjoy great works of art while ignoring the horror from which they emerged?

In his essay, “Theses on the History of Philosophy”, Walter Benjamin wrote: “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.”

The act of Molodkin’s collective heroically makes visible this barbarism. It is desperate and brutal, of course, but what if it is the only way we can raise awareness about what goes on in HMP Belmarsh? The true question is therefore: why is Assange such a thorn in the side of the knaves of our political establishment? And the answer is: because he is not a fool like the majority of the critical Left.

In his “Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis”,[1. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge 1992, p. 182-183.] Lacan makes the distinction between two types of the contemporary intellectual, the fool and the knave. In short, the Right-wing intellectual is a knave, a conformist who refers to the mere existence of the given order as an argument for it and mocks the Left on account of its “utopian” plans which necessarily lead to catastrophe. By contrast, the Left-wing intellectual is a fool, a court-jester who publicly displays the lie of the existing order, but in a way that suspends the performative efficiency of his speech. Today, after the fall of Socialism, the knave is a neoconservative advocate of the free market who cruelly rejects all forms of social solidarity as counterproductive sentimentalism, while the fool is a postmodern cultural critic who, by means of his ludic procedures destined to “subvert” the existing order, actually serves as its supplement.

A joke from the good old days of Really-Existing Socialism perfectly illustrates the futility of fools:

In 15th-century Russia, a farmer and his wife walk along a dusty country road. A Mongol warrior on a horse stops at their side and tells the farmer that he will now rape his wife. he then adds: “But since there is a lot of dust on the ground, you should hold my testicles while I’m raping your wife, so that they will not get dirty!”

After the Mongol finishes his job and rides away, the farmer starts to laugh and jump with joy. The surprised wife asks him: “How can you be jumping with joy when I was just brutally raped in your presence?” The farmer answers: “But I got him! His balls are full of dust!”

This sad joke revealed the predicament of the period’s dissidents: they thought they were dealing serious blows to the party nomenklatura, but all they were doing was getting a little bit of dust on the nomenklatura’s testicles, while the nomenklatura went on raping the people. Is today’s critical Left not in a similar position?

Our task is to discover how to go a step further. Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach held: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Our version should be: “Critical Leftists have hitherto only dirtied with dust the balls of those in power; the point is to cut them off.”

This is exactly what Assange did. To cut a long story short, Assange is our Antigone, for a long time kept in the position of a living dead — isolated in a solitary cell with very limited outside contact and no conviction or even official accusation. He is just waiting for extradition, as the snare around his neck is gradually but inexorably pulled shut.

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Why even Julian Assange's critics should defend him

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In the case of Assange, time is on the side of the US and UK: they can afford to wait, counting on the fact that the public interest will gradually dwindle, especially due to other global crises that dominate our media (the Ukraine and Gaza wars, global warming, the threat of AI). What is happening to Assange is thus increasingly reported on the margins of the mainstream media: the fact that he sat in solitary confinement for years was just part of our lives. Assange is thus the victim of the new apolitical neutrality.

Assange should be mentioned whenever we are tempted to praise our Western democratic societies with their human rights and freedoms, or whenever we criticise Muslim, Chinese, or Russian oppression: his fate is a reminder that our freedom is also seriously limited. Assange is thus the victim of a new apolitical neutrality. We no longer care for him, his imprisonment increasingly met with indifference.

Some liberals criticise Assange for focusing on the liberal West and ignoring the even greater injustices in Russia and China, but they miss the point. WikiLeaks, after all, also exposed many documents that bear witness to the horrors outside the liberal West. However, these injustices are highly visible in our media — we read about them all the time.

The problem with the West is that we tend to ignore countries with even greater injustices (suffice it to mention Saudi Arabia, which is definitely worse than Iran). Sometimes we feel free because we ignore our unfreedoms, while in Russia and China people are fully aware of their unfreedoms. “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?”(Matthew 7:3). Assange taught us to pay attention to the plank in our own eyes. More precisely, Assange taught us to see the hidden complicity between the planks in our eye and in our enemy’s eye, to discover the solidarity and parallels between our opponents. For our own good, we should not allow him to fall into this darkness of invisibility.

And if you still think Molodkin’s gesture is wrong and counterproductive? OK, but then don’t lose time analysing it as an artistic gesture and instead search for more efficient ways to help him. In this situation, nobody with a clear conscience has the right to engage in distanced aesthetic judgments — our fate is at stake.

But Musk isn’t the only tech baron causing people to worry about freedom of thought. Before Neuralink’s “brain-reading” technology works out how to decode thoughts from neurons, Artificial Intelligence might be able to read our minds simply by observing our behaviour. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, recently warned that it might observe our internet browsing history or what we’ve liked on social media in order to manipulate us with persuasive tailored messages.

Yet all this fretting about futuristic mind-reading technologies distracts from the reality that the biggest threats to freethinking today come from carbon, not silicon. Corporate influence is one such menace. Not only can companies control, block or obfuscate our thinking, but employers can also fire people for holding the wrong opinions. Bertrand Russell pointed out the danger of this a century ago. And today, in an age of mobs, online and offline, Left and Right, how many people dare form opinions?

In the UK, we are protected from being discriminated against for our “philosophical beliefs” by the Equality Act 2010. And a series of recent employment tribunal cases have decided that this means people cannot be fired for holding gender-critical beliefs. But, to count as a “philosophical belief”, specific criteria must be met. The thought in question must be “a belief” rather than merely an “opinion or viewpoint”, and one which is “worthy of respect in a democratic society” in a judge’s view. This leaves our more tentative, exploratory ideas — in short, the process of thinking itself — unprotected. But being kept in mental solitary confinement until we have fully formed “philosophical beliefs” is not conducive to thought.

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You could object that employers are firing employees for what they say, not what they think. But there is an overlap between thought and speech that the law doesn’t recognise. If we start believing that thought only happens inside our heads, then the battle for free thought is already lost. Thought is very much a social process; we think with each other. And in many situations, a group thinking together is more likely to get to the truth than if each individual has only their own mental biases to rely on. Thought should be regarded as both private and social, internal and external.

We also think externally with technologies: in our diaries, drafting documents on a computer, or googling something on an iPhone. And as technology is increasingly pervasive, we think externally more than ever before. Yet widespread online surveillance, and the ability of law enforcement to access our devices, means that the more we use these technologies, the more we expose our thinking to punishment. And those technologies may yet be turned against us.

So does the law protect such external thinking? While our right to freedom of thought is more than 75 years old, we are only deciding now what it means in practice. There’s a good chance that the legal profession will adjudge that thinking only happens inside our heads, in our “forum internum”. But a right to freedom of thought that does not protect external thinking is not worthy of the name. We should not put up with such crumbs from the high table of law.

Which leaves us with an even more fundamental threat to free thought: ourselves. Whereas free speech is never out of the headlines, freedom of thought rarely features in the national conversation. An alien observer would probably conclude that humans are more concerned with the liberties of their tongues than their minds.

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By Jonathan Sumption

The truth is that firing off opinions is often a far more pleasant pastime than thinking. Thinking is hard and anxiety provoking, and one can get through life quite well, perhaps best, without ever doing it. As one psychologist argued, evolution has encouraged us to make decisions using the least possible energy, leading us to become “cognitive misers” who are “as stupid as we can get away with”. We will do anything to distract from our thoughts. A 2014 study found that when students were left in a room for 15 minutes with the choice of either thinking or giving themselves electric shocks, two-thirds of men and a quarter of women electrocuted themselves.

It has never been easier to drown out our inner thoughts. Increasingly, we flood the spaces where thought was once possible, such as when washing-up, walking or weeding the garden, with other people’s thoughts. We gorge on podcasts, YouTube, Spotify playlists — anything to stop us having to sit with the anxiety of thought. We have become addicted to digital benzos.

We also steer away from freethinking because it can threaten our sense of belonging. The more you believe the falsehoods of your particular political tribe, the better a member you are. And so it’s easier to not think about anything too much. As the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue, “most people make their party choices based on who they are, not what they think” and act based on “emotional attachments that transcend thinking”. We then become more loyal to our party than to reality. Especially since, ultimately, we want to act more than we want to think. If someone offers us an idea or cause that will justify our actions, we will love them for it.

These feelings are exacerbated in a democracy, where, in order to be taken seriously, one must have an opinion to-hand on every topic. What matters is to be able to loudly articulate this opinion, rather than its truth. Democracy encourages us to feel as though we’re thinking when forming these opinions — when most often, we are not. We keep happily banging our own podiums like millions of sweaty Khrushchevs.

If we truly want to protect the right to think freely, we need to radically reorganise society: governments must support freethought; corporations can neither be allowed to monopolise information flows nor make earning a living dependent on our opinions. And, most important, we must start to value thinking far more highly. Then, when the machines come, as they inevitably will, we will clearly see both how they threaten freethought as well as how they can support it. Musk may have proclaimed himself a “free speech absolutist” — but whether Neuralink technology will uphold his principles remains to be seen. I have a feeling we might not like it.

If the court rules out a further appeal, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks could be immediately extradited to the United States, where he will almost certainly be incarcerated for the rest of his life on charges of espionage — most likely in extremely punitive conditions. “If he’s extradited, he will die,” his wife Stella has said.

The British Government’s lack of concern for Assange’s fate is not surprising: they are the ones that put him in prison in the first place, after all. More worrying is the fact that much of the public also seems relatively unconcerned. This is probably the result of a campaign waged against Assange over the past decade and a half, aimed at destroying his reputation and depriving him of public support. Those not privy to the case’s details may even think that Assange is in jail because he’s been convicted for one of the many crimes he’s been accused of over the years — from rape to cyber-crime to espionage.

Yet this would be a gross misreading. Since 2019, Assange has been imprisoned in Belmarsh — and subjected to “prolonged psychological torture”, according to a UN report — despite being technically innocent before British law, since he’s never been convicted of any crime except violating his bail order when, 12 years ago, he sought political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, a crime that carries a maximum sentence of 12 months.

Assange’s ordeal began in August 2010, when he was investigated in Sweden for rape and sexual molestation. Four months later, the Swedish authorities ordered his arrest. Many viewed the timing as deeply suspicious: that year, WikiLeaks’ series of exposes had rattled Western governments and dominated front pages.

By releasing hundreds of thousands of confidential Pentagon, CIA and NSA files, the organisation had exposed civilian massacres in Iraq and Afghanistan, torture, illegal “renditions”, mass surveillance programmes, political scandals, pressure on foreign governments and widespread corruption. Assange took on the ultimate level of power — that which operates behind our societies’ official democratic façade, where state bureaucracies, military-security apparatuses and all-powerful financial-corporate enterprises collude in the shadows. The Italian investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi, who has collaborated with WikiLeaks for several years, coined the term “secret power” to describe this reality, over which citizens have no control, and often don’t even know exists.

Until WikiLeaks came along, this secret power had been largely shielded from public scrutiny, except for rare occasions, and thus allowed to operate with impunity. “For the first time in history, WikiLeaks ripped a gaping hole in this secret power,” Maurizi wrote. Today, many of us are aware of the way in which the national-security complex operates in lockstep with Big Tech and the media to censor dissenting voices. But Assange was warning us about it more than a decade ago. No wonder the system came down on him so hard.

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Was there any basis to the accusations that kickstarted 14 years of “lawfare” against Assange? Several years after the Swedish authorities opened the investigation, it emerged that neither of the two alleged victims had wanted to press charges against Assange — let alone accuse him of rape. As Nils Melzer, former United National Special Rapporteur on Torture, wrote in a scathing report on the Assange case, there are “strong indications that the Swedish police and prosecution deliberately manipulated and pressured [at least one of the alleged victims], who had come to the police station for an entirely different purpose, into making a statement which could be used to arrest Mr Assange on the suspicion of rape”.

One of the many myths surrounding the case is that it never went to trial because Assange evaded justice. In reality, Assange, who was then in the UK, made himself available for questioning via several means, by telephone or video conference, or in person in the Australian embassy. But the Swedish authorities insisted on questioning him in Sweden. Assange’s legal team countered that extradition of a suspect simply to question him — not to send him to trial, as he had not been charged — was a disproportionate measure.

This was more than a technicality: Assange feared that if he were extradited to Sweden, the latter’s authorities would extradite him to the US, where he had good reason to believe he wouldn’t be given a fair trial. Sweden, after all, always refused to provide Assange a guarantee of non-extradition to the US — the reason why, when in 2012 the British Supreme Court ruled that he should be extradited to Sweden, Assange sought political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy. From there, however, he continued to make known his availability to be interrogated by the Swedish authorities inside the embassy, but they never replied.

And thanks to a FOIA investigation by Maurizi, we now know the reason. During this period, the UK Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), then led by one Keir Starmer, played a crucial role in getting Sweden to pursue this highly unusual line of conduct. In early 2011, while Assange was still under house arrest, Paul Close, a British lawyer with the CPS, gave his Swedish counterparts his opinion on the case, apparently not for the first time. “My earlier advice remains, that in my view it would not be prudent for the Swedish authorities to try to interview the defendant in the UK,” he wrote. Why did the CPS advise the Swedes against the only legal strategy that could have brought the case to a rapid resolution, namely questioning Julian Assange in London, rather than insisting on his extradition?

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In hindsight, the motivation behind this was more than murky: it appears to have been a matter of keeping the case in legal limbo, and Assange trapped in Britain for as long as possible. A year after Assange sought refuge in the embassy, the Swedish prosecutor was considering dropping the extradition proceedings, but was deterred from doing so by the CPS. She was concerned, among other things, about the mounting costs of the British police force guarding the embassy day and night. But for the British authorities this was not a problem; they replied that they “do not consider costs are a relevant factor in this matter”.

Meanwhile, it took the Swedish prosecutor five years to finally agree to question Assange in London — but only because the statute of limitations for two of the allegations was about to expire. However, deliberately or out of sheer incompetence, the request was sent too late for the Ecuadorian authorities to process it in time. The case relating to the two allegations thus expired.

The case regarding the third allegation, minor rape, was also closed two years later — thus ensuring that the two alleged victims would never receive any closure, and the accusations would stick to Julian forever. At this point, there was no arrest warrant hanging over Assange’s head anymore, but he remained in the embassy because if he had stepped off the premises, he would have been immediately arrested by the British police for violating his bail order (and, he feared, extradited to the US).

As a result of the Swedish authorities’ highly unusual behaviour, Assange had by then been arbitrarily and illegitimately forced into detention for seven years, as was concluded even by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Melzer, the former UN Rapporteur, would later list 50 perceived due-process violations by the Swedish authorities, including “proactive manipulation of evidence”, such as replacing the content of the women’s statement unbeknown to the latter. “[T]he Swedish authorities did everything to prevent a proper investigation and judicial resolution of their rape allegations against Assange,” Melzer concluded.

It seems, then, that the Swedish “investigation” was never about bringing justice to the alleged victims or establishing the truth; it was a way of destroying Assange by setting in motion the legal machinery that has been crushing him ever since — and of course sullying his reputation by associating his name, in the public sphere, with rape.

What role, if any, did Starmer play in all this? During the period when the CPS was overseeing Assange’s extradition to Sweden, Starmer made several trips to Washington as Director of Public Prosecutions. US records show Starmer met with Attorney General Eric Holder and a host of American and British national security officials. Using the FOIA, the British media organisation Declassified requested the itinerary for each of Starmer’s four trips to Washington with details of his official meetings, including any briefing notes. CPS replied that all the documents relative to Starmer’s trips to Washington had been destroyed. Asked for clarification, and whether the destruction of documents was routine, the CPS did not respond.

Similarly, when Maurizi submitted a FOIA request to the CPS to shed light on the correspondence between Close and the Swedish authorities, she was also told that all the data associated with Close’s account had been deleted when he retired and could not be recovered. The CPS added that the Close’s email account had been deleted “in accordance with standard procedure”, though Maurizi would later discover that this procedure was by no means standard. Since then, Maurizi has been waging a years-long legal fight to access documents related to the CPS and Assange case, but she has been systematically stonewalled by CPS — even though a judge ordered the CPS to come clean about the destruction of key documents on Assange.

Assange’s worst fears came true when, in 2019, the British authorities finally arrested him, after reaching a deal with the new pro-US Ecuadorian government. Following his arrest, the US immediately announced that it was charging Assange for computer fraud — to which they added 17 much more serious counts of alleged violations of the Espionage Act — and requested his extradition. This was the first time, in the 102 years since the draconian law’s enactment, that a journalist was charged under the Espionage Act, which makes no distinction between a spy working for a foreign government and a journalist like Assange.

The WikiLeaks founder has been fighting his extradition to the US ever since, against a British judiciary system apparently intent on punishing Assange, even disregarding fundamental principles of due process. Melzer has described the proceedings as “a show trial more redolent of an authoritarian regime than a mature democracy… whose sole purpose is to silence Assange and to intimidate journalists and the broader public worldwide”.

Paradoxically, however, this simply confirms what WikiLeaks’ had already exposed: that nominally democratic states are willing to bend and even break the law to silence those who threaten the status quo, including journalists.

This is why, even if you disagree with Assange’s methods or political ideas, this case should matter. For it is about so much more than one man: it is about whether you want to live in a society where journalists can expose the crimes of the powerful without the fear of being persecuted and imprisoned. If the British state allows Assange to be extradited to the US, it won’t be dealing a potentially deadly blow just to one man, but to the rule of law itself.

The below forms part of the testimony Lee Fang delivered to the House Select Committee on Weaponization on 6 February, 2024. 

***

Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Plaskett, esteemed members of the Select Committee,

As an independent investigative journalist, it is my duty to serve the broad public interest, to watch over governmental and corporate conduct, to safeguard the principles underpinning a free society, and to spotlight wrongdoing — whether it comes from the Left, the Right, or the centre. It is a privilege to present my work to this committee. Over the past 15 years, I have uncovered a variety of different forms of surveillance and censorship, documenting how special interest groups, politicians, and law enforcement agencies use these tactics to silence or weaken their enemies.

I am committed to reporting on surveillance and censorship, because I regard free speech as the bedrock of our republic and the linchpin of our democratic process. These principles are the defining characteristics that set America apart on the global stage. But freedom of speech has not endured without a fight. In every generation, political and corporate actors from across the ideological spectrum have seized on crisis and moral panics to demand restrictions on speech.

Now as ever, we must remain vigilant against efforts to undermine free speech and free expression. Recent technological advancements have created new opportunities to restrict speech without public input or accountability. The rapid development of artificial intelligence tools, in particular, offers powerful entities the unprecedented ability to monitor, flag, and censor billions of individuals at a scale and scope never before conceivable. While this technology holds significant benefits, it also carries substantial risks. Private security firms are increasingly marketing AI solutions to both government agencies and corporations. Mounting evidence suggests that state and business interests are already deploying this technology with the goal of stifling lawful discourse and silencing dissent.

Some of you may be familiar with my October 2022 investigation delving into the history of the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) and the FBI’s concurrent expansion into the policing of social media. Using court documents and evidence provided by a DHS whistleblower, I reported that government programs initially designed to curb foreign influence and incitement to terrorism had transformed into a broader campaign to suppress ordinary domestic speech. CISA’s expansive focus eventually touched on a wide range of political topics, from the 2020 presidential election to the origins of Covid-19 to criticism of the Ukraine-Russia war.

Two months later, in December 2022, I reported on a cache of Twitter’s internal corporate documents that became known as the Twitter Files. I gained access to internal emails, tools, and chats that confirmed my earlier reporting about CISA. I revealed that law enforcement agencies like CISA and non-governmental partner organisations consistently pressured Twitter executives to censor political speech under the guise of combating misinformation. I have since published many articles on my Substack based on these documents, including a piece released on Monday.

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In my latest report, I reveal that a non-profit anti-misinformation election consortium provided an inaccurate tip to CISA in November 2020 about a New York Times journalist’s observations about delays in the presidential vote count in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Instead of verifying the validity of the tip, CISA hastily produced a “Misinformation Report” about the incident, arguing that the tweet had promoted falsehoods about the election. The agency then lobbied Twitter to restrict access to the reporter’s tweet. In response, Twitter shadowbanned the Times reporter’s tweet, effectively rendering it invisible to most users — despite substantial evidence supporting the journalist’s accuracy.

I understand the stated intent behind these efforts — the desire to uphold the highest standards for our elections and deter any illicit manipulation. However, as this and many other cases illustrate, the government often errs and acts in a politically motivated manner. For this reason alone, it is inappropriate for law enforcement or intelligence agencies to act as the arbiter of permissible journalism. Moreover, government censorship of truthful and accurate speech — rather than dispelling conspiracy theories — serves only to exacerbate the erosion of public trust in our elections.

My work on the Twitter Files and other reporting on this topic differs slightly from recent testimony heard by this committee. I have also shed light on private entities’ attempts to control and curtail public discourse on major areas of public policy. I revealed that a group called Public Good Projects regularly collaborated with Twitter during the pandemic to censor specific social media accounts because of their criticism of establishment views around Covid-19 vaccines, while amplifying accounts supportive of vaccines and government viewpoints. This particular censorship campaign was entirely funded by biopharma lobbyists that represent Moderna and Pfizer.

In some instances, the censorship demands targeted users who simply expressed opposition to “vaccine passports” – the proposal to make a person’s right to travel and engage in certain forms of commerce dependent on their vaccination status. The validity of the idea of “vaccine passports” is a reasonable topic of debate in a free society, and should not be repressed by a drug company with financial interests at stake.

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More recently, in collaboration with UnHerd and RealClearInvestigations, and with co-author Jack Poulson, I reported that Moderna relaunched efforts to influence vaccine discourse, again working with Public Good Projects. Moderna also employed the services of the artificial intelligence firm Talkwalker to monitor vaccine-related conversations across 150 million websites, including social media and gaming platforms like Steam. Moderna labelled almost any critic of the company or vaccine policies as “high risk” for spreading misinformation, including reputable academics like Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya and local elected officials who simply voiced objections to vaccine mandates.

The company even targeted tennis champion Novak Djokovic in its misinformation reports, not for any statement he made but for his accomplishments. In one report, Moderna warned that: “The optics of Djokovic, whose vaccine opposition barred him from competing in the 2022 US Open, returning to and winning the Moderna-sponsored [2023 US Open] competition bolsters anti-vaccine claims that vaccines — and mandates — are unnecessary.” In other words, Djokovic’s alleged act of “misinformation” was his unvaccinated athletic ability. There are many other examples in my reporting, beyond the Twitter Files and Moderna documents, that show government and corporate interests trying to stifle free speech on public safety and national security grounds.

Last month, I reported on confidential documents chronicling the activities of Logically, a British artificial intelligence firm that has expanded into the US market with the guidance of former DHS intelligence director Brian Murphy. This individual was previously responsible for the illicit surveillance of Left-wing protesters and the creation of dossiers on journalists critical of the government. Logically has quietly secured US military contracts and piloted a program for the Chicago Police Department to employ its AI platform to analyse local hip-hop music to predict crime. The state of Oregon also retained Logically to combat so-called election misinformation during the 2022 midterm elections. The company is now competing for contracts to monitor and remove alleged social media misinformation in the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

It is important to underscore why the American public should be aware of the British AI firm Logically. The United Kingdom government awarded Logically multi-million dollar contracts to combat misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. The company instead surveilled activists and academics who expressed legitimate forms of speech, including thoughtful concerns about pandemic lockdowns and vaccine passports, according to a recent watchdog report on the firm’s activities. Logically previously boasted of a special partnership with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to automatically suppress and label content they deemed as misinformation, giving the company immense influence over content moderation decisions. It is another case of the government outsourcing censorship to a private entity with a record of targeting lawful speech around hotly contested political issues.

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I want to emphasise that this focus on corporate influence and government surveillance is not a recent development in my work. In 2015, I uncovered evidence of agricultural industry lobbyists ghostwriting state legislation designed to criminalise the recording of slaughterhouses and dairy facilities. The legislation was designed to imprison journalists and animal rights activists who document conditions in slaughterhouses. Many of these “Ag-Gag” laws have since been overturned by the courts for violating the First Amendment. I have also previously reported on government and private sector surveillance and censorship targeting environmental groups, Black Lives Matter activists, and labour unions.

In December, I exposed the efforts of pro-Israel activists to stifle pro-Palestinian voices. One notable example, relevant to today’s hearing, involves the deployment of artificial intelligence bots to mass-report social media posts expressing solidarity or sympathy for Palestinians as violations of platform terms of service. Many of the targets appear to be individuals using innocuous hashtags like #FreePalestine, unrelated to hate or violence. There are over 1,000 documented cases of Meta removing peaceful content advocating for Palestinian human rights. The use of artificial intelligence bots to suppress nonviolent and benign forms of political expression during a conflict illustrates another case of organised censorship.

Last summer, I profiled the activities of Flashpoint, among the cottage industry of so-called threat intelligence firms that use artificial intelligence to monitor activist behaviour. The company began by infiltrating al-Qaeda chat rooms and selling that data to the FBI. Critics argue that the firm played a central role in the wrongful convictions of several Muslim Americans. Flashpoint, which still maintains ties with the FBI, has more recently infiltrated the private communications of ordinary airline workers who organised against coercive and ultimately unconstitutional vaccine mandates. Many of these anti-mandate activists were conservative Trump supporters.

I present these examples to underscore how censorship affects dissenting voices of all ideological stripes. I understand that in our intensely polarised environment, free speech has become a divisive issue — often misused by politicians seeking a scapegoat for societal ills. But free speech is critical for activists spanning the ideological spectrum, and to every journalist committed to uncovering the truth. And history teaches us that when governments and private entities demand new censorship authority to attack dissidents of a particular stripe in one era, those tools are just as likely to be used against an entirely different set of actors a few years later. Today’s cheerleaders for an unaccountable “content moderation” regime may very well be tomorrow’s victims of that same system.

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By Jonathan Sumption

Before I close, I wish to draw your attention to a hearing held nearly 12 years ago by another House committee, addressing a remarkably similar topic. The committee convened a hearing to demand answers from the Department of Homeland Security about revelations that the agency had retained General Dynamics, a defence contractor, to conduct round-the-clock monitoring of social media.

Republicans controlled the House at the time, but members of the committee from both sides of the aisle raised concerns about DHS practices. Then-Rep. Jackie Speier, a Democrat from California, called for assurances that DHS was not infringing upon “civil rights and civil liberties of those who choose to use social media” or “spying on lawful activities”. Then-Rep. Patrick Meehan, a Republican from Pennsylvania, cautioned against DHS and its contractors monitoring private citizens’ speech, which he said “could have a chilling effect on individuals’ privacy rights and people’s freedom of speech and dissent against their government”.

That hearing looks quaint today. In terms of bureaucratic and technological capabilities, the General Dynamics scandal was a relic of another era. It occurred prior to the emergence of CISA, the DHS agency with a multi-billion-dollar budget, actively monitoring Americans for wrong speak on contentious issues. It transpired before significant advancements in AI allowed for far more invasive monitoring of constitutionally protected speech through sentiment analysis. And it pre-dated the creation of numerous anti-misinformation NGOs and private-sector firms competing for contracts to control and censor the internet.

Nonetheless, the 2012 hearing serves as a reminder that concerns about censorship and surveillance need not break down along partisan lines. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle can still unite to voice concerns about the erosion of free expression and government efforts to regulate political discourse. I implore this committee to rise above partisanship and treat the threat posed by online surveillance and censorship as an American issue, affecting all of us equally. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to testify today, and I eagerly await your questions. Thank you.

All of this activism has propelled him from just another Democrat megadonor and lockdown enthusiast to the latest hero of the political Right. But while you can understand conservatives’ excitement at sticking it to overpromoted DEI hires at elite universities, there has been a distinct lack of questioning over his methods. Putting the plagiarism to one side, surely conservatives should deplore these tactics on principle: publishing lists of people guilty of political wrong-think on university campuses, abandoning the much-vaunted value of free speech, orchestrating pile-ons and demanding resignations on social media. This is what they have been campaigning against for years.

This won’t be popular among my many conservative friends, but since the terror attacks in Israel on October 7 and the divisive war that followed, the tenor, emotion and heavy-handed tactics employed to control the current debate across campuses and throughout our institutions reminds me of how the BLM narrative was ferociously politicised during the summer of 2020. Back then, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the people who lost jobs for incorrect political positions were almost entirely those who were critical of BLM or leftist identity politics. Since October 7, while the circumstances of each termination vary, the firings have all been of people holding pro-Palestinian views.

The departure of Gay, along with Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, has given conservatives much to celebrate. Activist Christopher Rufo sees the whole event as a “successful strategy for the political Right”, while politicians such as J.D. Vance regard Gay’s defenestration as a decisive victory against DEI hegemony. But their original crime — the event that made them a target — was the refusal to crack down on pro-Palestinian activists in the wake of October 7, followed by their congressional testimony on the subject of anti-semitism on campus. The video clip of each leader apparently failing to condemn alleged calls for the genocide of Jews has gone viral worldwide, and on the face of it seems impossible to defend.

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But if you watch the full hearing, instead of just the clips, it is very clear what took place. Republican attack dog Elise Stefanik spends her entire questioning slot trying to trap the university heads in specific logical sequence: first, do they agree that calling for “intifada” and chanting “from the river to the sea” are direct calls for genocide? They refuse to concede this point, insisting (I think reasonably) that both terms are context-dependent, and that students must be allowed to express political opinions even if they are personally abhorrent to university administrators. At the end of the hearing, in her final round of questions, Stefanik returns to the theme, asking in summary whether calling for genocide of Jews constitutes bullying and harassment and is against their colleges’ code of conduct? If they were to answer a simple yes, then every student calling for “Intifada” or chanting “from the river to the sea” would have to face disciplinary proceedings, so naturally each university head refuses to bow to that logic and continues to insist that each incident would be a “context-dependent decision”. Hence the now-infamous smirks: everyone in the room could see what the congresswoman was trying to get them to say.

In the event, Stefanik won the day, because their prevaricating clip looked just as bad out of context. She went on to point out the hypocrisy of university administrators spending the past decade training students that “fatphobia” and “using the wrong pronouns” constituted violent and dangerous speech and yet couldn’t condemn actual calls for genocide. The argument landed. But consider the principles that have been conceded in the process of deploying it: not only should the most hateful and extreme interpretations of every word or phrase be used when judging them, but speech is, after all, violence. These are far-Left ideas that conservatives were supposed to be against.

During the height of BLM furore, the far-Left pursued and cancelled high profile targets by inflating the risks posed by conservative speech. In 2020, James Bennet, editor of the opinion desk at The New York Times, was forced into early retirement after running a column by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton. In it, he called for the military to disperse violent BLM riots sweeping the country. Such was the political tenor at the time that the Times’s labor union claimed the article was a call to “invoke state violence” against racial minorities — the mere publication of the piece, the union claimed, placed “Black staff members in danger”. Bennet issued an apology and promptly resigned. And yet the column contained no demand for violence against Black Americans. When the National Guard was indeed called in to restore order by a variety of mayors and governors, just as Cotton had requested, there weren’t any instances of soldiers harming minorities. Was this so different from the current campaign against the university presidents?

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The new mood in the political Right goes far beyond Claudine Gay. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who launched his presidential bid promising a war on “woke censorship”, is now demanding the removal of Students for Justice in Palestine, a group his administration claims provides material support for terrorism. This may well be a radical organisation with, at times, poorly informed views. And its toolkit did appear to glorify Hamas’s paragliders. But rather than ban the organisation outright, would it not be more prudent for conservatives to address its insensitive shortcomings in the cold light of day? The Left has long attempted to cancel conservative leaders on campus who were accused of legitimising torture and advocating for pro-American death squads — policies that one might find odious but which should be debated, not deplatformed.

Where direct violence isn’t being threatened, shouldn’t we trust students and readers to digest and assess for themselves? Is it not the duty of a university to allow students to grapple with contentious beliefs and slogans in the marketplace of ideas? Authoritarian states such as Russia and China stigmatise and remove dissenting views on foreign policy on university campuses, broadly categorising any protest as dangerous to national security — Western democracies should be wary of following this path.

Even supposedly neutral academic studies are beginning to show some of the same motivated reasoning that has infuriated conservatives in the other direction in recent years. Exaggerated claims of racism have abounded since 2020, when a widely cited University of Michigan study claimed to have found surging hate incidents against Asian Americans. A closer look at its methodology, however, showed that the researchers counted every major public figure who raised the lab-leak hypothesis to explain the origin of Covid-19 as an example of “anti-Asian” racism. Hardly an example of overt bigotry.

Today, the highly influential Anti-Defamation League has reported a nearly 400% increase in antisemitic attacks across the country. There is every indication that antisemitism is on the rise worldwide, and that Jews are uncomfortable and unsettled with the rising heat of the argument. But the presentation of evidence must be rigorous if it is not to be dismissed as propaganda. In fact, the ADL study counted rallies and protests among its list of hate incidents, including a recent rally by Jewish Voices for Peace and other pro-Jewish groups opposed to Israel’s occupation and military assault on Gaza. This is only one example, but it is a prominent one that cheapens the charge — and by conflating all criticism of Israel’s government with antisemitism it ignores precisely the distinction that some pro-Palestine activists need to be reminded of.

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As usual, politicians are the worst offenders and the quickest to jump on a new division for partisan advantage. Democrats have long leaned on fear of fringe white supremacists and minor hate groups to galvanise voters: President Joe Biden even launched his campaign with images of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, to draw a comparison with President Donald Trump. Now, Republicans are capitalising on fears of terrorism and anti-Jewish discrimination. Republican groups are flooding competitive districts with messages denouncing opponents for failing to condemn campus protest rhetoric. In a sad twist, the Republican House committee overseeing academic issues went from hosting hearings just months ago that proclaimed the “ability to speak freely to build one’s knowledge is a cornerstone of the American system and postsecondary education” to demanding speech rules.

No group better embodies this shift than Ackman’s conservative supporters. Gone are the days when appeals to “free speech” were a useful defence for them in the culture wars on race and gender. Instead, its virtues have been abandoned amid a climate of fear and outrage. Ultimately, this calls into question whether these conservatives really believed in free speech in the first place. And this, I fear, could end up being their undoing. For perhaps more than anything, in America, the past months have revealed how swiftly the tables can turn when it comes to censorship. Whatever happens in the coming weeks, however many more academics are defenestrated, the Right should be careful what it wishes for.

Our approach to the whole issue of free speech is still largely moulded by attitudes born in the Enlightenment, when the main enemy of freedom of expression was the state and certain quasi-state institutions, such as the established churches. But in modern liberal democracies, the real enemy of free speech is not the state but the pressure of opinion from our fellow citizens. This is not a new insight, but it is a frequently forgotten one. Most of our issues were recognised by the great Victorian apostle of free speech John Stuart Mill, a thinker whose uncanny ability to anticipate the dilemmas of our own age can still take us by surprise. Mill foresaw that in a democratic age, such as was just dawning in Victorian Britain, a culture of conformity would be a greater threat to freedom of expression than any action of the state. Society, he wrote, is capable of practising “a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life and enslaving the soul itself”.

Tolerance does not come naturally to human beings. For most of human history, what people believed about the natural world, about government and society and about the moral codes of humanity was laid down by authority, usually by people claiming to speak in the name of God. Pluralism and diversity of opinion have only been accepted as desirable for the last three or four centuries. They are essentially the legacy of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century and the European Enlightenment of the 18th. These movements rejected mere authority as a source of truth, in favour of observation, reasoning and rational discourse. But like all cultural phenomena, theirs was a fragile construct. In recent years, we have reverted to the older, more authoritarian model which prevailed before the 17th century, although God no longer has much to do with it.

A large part of the explanation has been the decline of individualism. Mill’s outlook on life was profoundly individualist. He once declared that if all mankind were of one opinion and only one person of the contrary opinion, there could be no justification for silencing him. But today individualism is widely rejected as a social value. It is regarded as selfish, uncaring and antisocial. This attitude has undermined the case for freedom of expression; it reflects a view of society as a single great organism which must have a single collective notion of what is true and good. Free speech is seen as a tool of oppression.

It is true that in a world of free speech, the most powerful voices will belong to people influential enough to have a public platform. This is so even in an age when speech has been democratised by social media. However, in a world of free speech, what the powerful say will be open to challenge. The alternative is a world in which public discourse is dominated by a different and more sinister form of power — the power of those with loud enough voices and sharp enough elbows to drown out others. That power will not be open to challenge. The idea of a community with a common outlook on the world sounds more inviting than a community divided by ideological or economic conflict. However, as long as human beings retain their individuality, their intellectual curiosity and their scepticism, a common outlook cannot be achieved without systematic coercion — which is what we are witnessing today.

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When fear leads to tyranny

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John Stuart Mill anticipated many things, but he did not anticipate the internet. Social media can conjure up instant online lynch mobs. They make a powerful amplifier available to the most intolerant strands of opinion. The algorithms which determine what material is placed under people’s noses expose them only to sentiments which they already agree with, thus intensifying their opinions and eliminating not only dissent but even nuance and moderation. Mill assumed that the pressure to conform would come from self-righteous majorities. But social media has conferred immense power on self-righteous minorities, often quite small minorities.

The most remarkable illustration of this is the vicious campaign currently being conducted to silence those who believe that gender is based on an immutable biological fact. Polling evidence suggests that the overwhelming majority of people believe that gender is determined at birth and cannot be altered by medical or surgical intervention, let alone by simple choice. That view is consistent with the current scientific orthodoxy, which regards gender as binary. Yet pressure from a noisy minority has created a situation in which the public expression of the prevailing and probably correct view about gender can lead to dismissal from employment, the cancellation of speaking engagements and publication contracts, and an avalanche of public shaming and abuse.

John Stuart Mill taught that the only purpose for which power might properly be exercised against individuals against their will was to prevent harm to others. But what we are presently witnessing is a subtle redefinition of the whole concept of harm to include the harm said to be caused by having to endure contradiction. The argument is that words wound, especially when they relate to another person’s identity or status; a university or a workplace where a person is exposed to disagreement must therefore be regarded, in the standard catchphrase, as “unsafe”.

The difference between violence and words is obvious. Violence is coercive. Words, even if offensive, are not coercive except in those cases where they are calculated to provoke violence. Yet in North America, Britain and much of the Anglosphere, this notion of harm has captured institutions. Recent research in the United States suggests that 29% of university professors have been pressured by university authorities into avoiding controversial subjects; 16% have either been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their words, their teaching or their academic research, while another 7% say that they have been investigated. Those working on any subject involving ethnic or religious sensitivities are particularly vulnerable. More than 80% of students report that they self-censor their work for fear of stepping out of line.

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Underlying much of this debate is a fundamental challenge to the objective notion of harm. When interest groups object to someone’s opinion, harm is whatever they perceive as harm. It depends on “lived experience”, as the phrase goes, particularly when the offended group is an ethnic, religious or sexual minority. The desire to accommodate minorities who feel themselves oppressed is understandable. It assists social inclusion. But carried to its logical extreme it gives them a right of veto, an entitlement to silence opinions. And it is being carried to its logical extreme. In many countries, including Britain, hate speech is in some circumstances a criminal offence or an aggravating factor when accompanied by some other criminal conduct. The British police and prosecution authorities have agreed upon a definition of their own devising, according to which a hate crime means any action which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by hostility or prejudice. In other words, they have adopted a subjective definition dependent on the feelings of the victim rather than an objective assessment of the words used.

All of these problems have been intensified by a powerful generational divide. A mass of anecdotal evidence suggests that venues, publishers, and other media who shun controversial views are often pushed into it by their junior staff. This rage of a younger generation against their own societies is not wholly irrational. Liberal democracy has always depended on economic good fortune. The turn in the economic fortunes of Western democracies has persuaded a whole generation that they will be the first cohort for many decades who will be worse off than their parents. The postwar generation seems to them to have lived on the fat of the land, deferring intractable issues like climate change, capricious patterns of inequality and poisonous race relations for their children and grandchildren to deal with.

The perceived power of vested interests and the inertia of democratic decision-making have combined to persuade much of the younger generation that debate is worthless and direct action the only answer. The European and American sense of moral and intellectual superiority provokes attempts by a younger generation to discredit their legacy. Hence the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement (even in societies such as Britain where the police do not routinely murder people of colour), the demands for “decolonisation” of school and university syllabuses, and so on. The influential French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that what people regard as objective truth or independent opinion is really no more than the product of entrenched power structures. Debate is pointless in such a world; to get anywhere, you have to break the power structures. I do not imagine that the young enemies of free speech have read Foucault’s opaque prose. But many of them act on the same principle. An angry and frustrated generation is unlikely to accept the conventions of rational discourse or the messy compromises of democratic politics as readily as their parents did. Indeed, successive surveys by the Washington-based Pew Research Institute suggest that support for democracy is declining among the young in much of the West, especially in Britain and America.

These developments have fundamentally changed the argument about freedom of expression. The issue now pits different groups of citizens and different generations against each other. The people who scream abuse at their adversaries from the roadside or from their social media accounts would claim to be exercising their own rights of free expression. The impact of their anger is indirect. They create an oppressive climate in which other people are silenced and may lose their careers, their livelihoods and their reputation, or else may simply be forced to keep away from controversial subjects. The screamers do not themselves bring about these consequences. They simply influence the mood in a way which causes other people, such as editors, publishers, universities and employers, to persecute dissenters, because in a world of heightened intellectual tensions they prefer to keep their heads down. An editor is under no obligation to give space to people of controversial views. A publisher is under no obligation to publish them. A university cannot be made to employ them. So, when the freedom of expression of one group is used to silence others, how is the state to mediate?

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The law has generally been on the side of free speech. In the United Kingdom, to be criminal, words have to be inflammatory and intended to — or known to be likely to — stir up hatred against vulnerable categories of people. For good measure, there is a broad exemption for the protection of free speech which in principle permits discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse. The British police have recorded as “hate incidents” gender-critical tweets, tweets critical of the police, accidental damage done by schoolchildren to a copy of the Koran, even speeches by ministers proposing restrictions on immigration. But when these cases have come before the courts, they have usually been thrown out. In one case where the police took action against a gender-critical tweeter, the judge remarked that their conduct offended against a “cardinal democratic principle”. “In this country”, he added, “we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society.”

But there are limits to what law can achieve. The government and the courts are impotent to protect people against the worst threats to free speech: the howling trollers of the internet, the addictive outrage of the street protesters, or the oppressive self-censorship of publishers, journalists and academics. These things can only be addressed by a profound cultural change, which it is beyond the power of law to bring about. Changing this culture depends on you, on me, on every one of us. The only reason that activists try to disrupt and suppress unwelcome opinions is that experience shows that it works. Venues do not book controversial speakers. Publishers do not publish controversial books. Prominent commentators do not step out of line or, if they do, they are bullied into issuing cringing apologies.

None of us has to behave like this. All of us can contribute to the solution by being willing to make it clear where we stand, not just on free speech itself, but on the subjects which have become taboo. I return to the ideas of John Stuart Mill. He recognised that what was needed was the courage of individuals to defy the mob. In language which might have been directed at our present problems, he wrote that “precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable in order to break through that tyranny that people should be eccentric”. By eccentricity, he meant diversity of opinion. “That so few now dare to be eccentric”, he wrote, “marks the chief danger of the time”.

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The death of historical truth

By Jonathan Sumption

If, for example, we believe that gender is not an optional status but a biological fact, we can say so, instead of being shamed into silence. If we reject concepts dear to particular ethnic or religious groups, we should say so and refuse to back down or apologise when they take offence. We have to discuss the unmentionable, challenge the unchallengeable. I am not recommending rudeness or abuse, but there is a larger place for reasoned objection than we realise.

The greatest challenge will be self-censorship by venues, publishers, the media, and academic institutions. They will say, perhaps only to themselves or in the privacy of their editorial boards or faculty meetings, why should we expose ourselves? Why should we quarrel with our young and idealistic junior staff or students who do not wish to sully their hands with this or that book, film, or lecture? Why should we court the unpleasantness involved in speaking up? The answer to that was given by Mill in his inaugural address at the University of St. Andrews, after he had been elected as its Rector in 1867. “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion,” he said; “bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing”.

Free speech is not a luxury. Ever since the 17th century, the civilisation of mankind has been based on the notion that there is such a thing as an objective truth, 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 by objective study of the available material, by logical reasoning and by willingness to engage with dissenting opinion. These are not just social constructs. They are universal principles, which are necessary if we are to discuss controversial issues in the same language. They have made possible the phenomenal economic prosperity and intellectual achievement of the last four centuries.

The basic principles of rational discourse on which all this depended are now under challenge. Reason is rejected as arrogant. Feeling and emotion are upheld as suitable substitutes. Freedom is treated as domineering, enlightenment as offensive to the unenlightened. Current campaigns to suppress certain opinions and eliminate debate are an attempt to create a new conformity, a situation in which people will not dare to contradict, for fear of provoking their outrage and abuse. These things are symptoms of the closing of the human mind and the narrowing of our intellectual world. Something in our civilisation has died.

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The law can't end the culture wars

By Adam King

No one can be entitled to intellectual safety. That is because statements of fact or opinion are necessarily provisional. They reflect the current state of knowledge and experience. Once upon a time, the authorised consensus was that the sun moved round the Earth and that blood did not circulate round the body. These propositions were refuted only because current orthodoxy was challenged by people once thought to be dangerous heretics and disturbers of the peace. Historically, most societies have abhorred democracy, rejected religious and political tolerance, and regarded the whole idea of racial or gender equality as ridiculous. These ideas, which were thought to reflect obvious moral truths, died out in most countries in the face of rational argument. Knowledge advances by testing conflicting arguments, not by suppressing them. Understanding increases by exposure to uncomfortable truths.

For those of us who live in democracies, our collective life depends on the resolution of issues between citizens by marshalling objectively verifiable facts. It depends on ordered debate about their implication under common rules which exclude coercion and falsehood. It depends on a culture in which the outcome of our processes of collective decision-making is accepted even by those who disagree with it. That is what is at stake in the current debate about free speech. The alternative is a narrow-minded, intolerant and authoritarian society in which the fear of giving offence or challenging existing shibboleths eliminates the most creative and original products of the human spirit.

Ultimately, we have to accept the implications of human creativity. Some of what people say will be wrong. Some of it will be hurtful. Some of it may even be harmful. But there are greater values at stake. We cannot have truth without accommodating error and tolerating the challenge to received ideas. We cannot live together in society without allowing people to say things that other people regard as foolish, hurtful or untrue. It is the price that we pay for allowing human civilisation to advance and flourish. It is worth fighting for.

This is an edited version of a speech delivered last weekend at the Christchurch Town Hall, for the New Zealand Free Speech Union.

Plato observes that poets love their poems like fathers love their children. That’s why writers hate to cut their own work — to “murder their babies”, as they must learn to do if they hope to be any good. But they hate it more when others murder their babies, and are even ready to die for the ones they’ve raised and sent out into the world.

D-503 — the protagonist of We, the dystopian sci-fi novel of totalitarianism published in 1921, for which the Soviet author Yevgeny Zamyatin was lucky to be exiled rather than shot — calls the diary he has just begun “a new, still tiny, still blind little human being. It is I and, at the same time, not I.”

And when the KGB confiscated the manuscript of Vasily Grossman’s magnum opus Life and Fate, Grossman wrote to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, asking: “What is the point of me being physically free when the book I dedicated my life to is arrested?”

A famous passage from the Talmud helps to explain why writers feel this way — and why we should, too: “Adam was created alone to teach you that whoever destroys a single soul, Scripture regards him as if he destroyed the entire world. And whoever saves a single soul, Scripture regards him as if he preserved the entire world.”

Had the first human being died alone, neither Eve nor any of her descendants would have existed. The destruction of a soul is the annihilation of all of its potential offspring, physical and spiritual, until the end of time. But a human soul is an entire world in another way. Perception, thought and feeling open the soul to very many things beyond itself — in principle, to all things — whose impressions it absorbs and assembles into a more or less meaningful whole. Apart from this humanising work, the notion of a universe, a single, all-encompassing whole, might never have occurred to anyone. But this inner world can also be destroyed, corrupted by forgetfulness and publicly erased.

For writers, this Biblical passage rings true: “In the beginning was the Word [logos].” God is said to have fashioned the waters of primordial chaos into a universe by divine speech. One need not be a believer to learn from this story. Human beings are obliged to sort social and psychological chaos by way of logos — reason, speech, order, proportion — in the first instance through law, ritual and the cultural memory of myth. Communities of shared meaning and purpose are woven of language, without which individual experiences would otherwise be poor possessions held in dumb isolation by lonely hominids.

Like the poets and chroniclers of remote antiquity, novelists and dramatists speak to the enduring questions of human life: who we are, where we’ve been and where we’re going. They fabricate buzzing microcosms peopled by characters that live and breathe on contact with other minds and fertile imaginations. Censors don’t just cut out writers’ tongues and stop up readers’ ears, they obliterate worlds.

But the public response to the extensive and aggressive censorship of our time has been depressingly muted. In part, this reflects a widespread loss of what the Germans call Sprachgefühl, a feeling for language and the meaning of words. Most people don’t read books, let alone good ones. They produce and consume short, easily digestible “texts” through electronic media, but hard-won habits of literacy rust in disuse.

Few people know the thrill of repeatedly casting into the depths of a difficult piece of writing, feeling a tug on the line and hauling up a catch of meaning. That experience was more common when deep and challenging books were recited, studied and memorised as sources of wisdom. “Turn it and turn it,” an ancient commentator said of the Bible, “for everything is in it.” Generations of our forebears thought the same of Homer and Dante, Aristotle and Confucius. Who reads like that anymore?

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Books won't save you

By Sarah Ditum

The metallic clang of abstractions now drowns out the living word of particular human minds. Like all bureaucratic and ideological jargon, the governing language of our time is flat, colourless and crude. It is no longer that of poets, prophets and statesmen, but of what Nietzsche called “the coldest of all cold monsters” — the increasingly unified, propaganda-generating, information-gathering-and-monitoring conglomeration of public and private entities that is the post-modern State.

The contemporary sclerosis of language has profound psychological and political consequences. One of Samuel Beckett’s characters wistfully contemplates the dance and hum of bees as they enter and exit their sun-drenched hives, exhibiting a kind of connectedness from which he is excluded by his lonely consciousness. That consciousness of exile is both quintessentially modern and distinctively human. It envies the bees, but cannot find satisfaction in any socially-ordered aggregation of identical units. It yearns for the inner connection between individuals that distinguishes a community from a characterless crowd. But censorship and the decay of language serve only to strengthen the hive-mind and the crowd.

The corruptions of language, politics and society we are now witnessing were foretold in some great dystopian novels of the 20th century. But the English and American authors of those novels had the evidence of history before them, in the form of ideological tyranny: Leninism, Stalinism, Hitlerism and Maoism. And they’d learned from the Bard that what’s past is prologue.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words,” one of the characters in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four remarks. In the regime of Oceania, which is ruled by a technocratic elite “shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government”, books are everywhere hunted down and destroyed. The State language is crudely binary (like one university’s definition of a lesbian as “a non-man attracted to non-men”), purged of nuance and full of “telescoped words and phrases”, of which its very name, Newspeak, is exemplary. A large department meticulously destroys and reproduces newspapers on a daily basis, rewriting the past to conform with the demands of the present. (Orwell couldn’t have guessed how easy this would be in the digital age.)

The vocabulary of Newspeak is constantly shrinking, because its “whole aim … is to narrow the range of thought”. The State hopes that restricting speech to “short, clipped words which could be uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind” will ultimately eliminate “thoughtcrime” — or independent thought — if only because “there will be no words in which to express it”.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, elite technicians govern a stratified society composed of classes of virtually identical human beings grown in scientific hatcheries. While a global State founded on eugenics hasn’t yet materialised, much that Huxley imagines has already come to pass. The society he foresees is debased in familiar ways. It is characterised by a cult of youth; an economy driven by entertainment and the pleasures of virtual reality; the near-universal, habitual use of psychoactive drugs, contraceptives and aphrodisiacs; overt public sexuality; general promiscuity; and a swarming media that makes a great public spectacle of non-conformists.

Love and friendship are hardly possible under these conditions. The citizens of the World State are mere shadows of human beings: smiling surfaces without tragic depth. Little wonder that the one surviving lover of Shakespeare is driven to suicide.

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I was sacked for writing about trans censorship

By Julie Szego

Most people in Brave New World are content with their lot. Thankfully, we are not quite there yet. Ray Bradbury envisions a society more like our own, one full of vague foreboding. Fahrenheit 451 describes a rushing world of violence, suicide and looming war in which a depressed populace distracts itself from the slow death of love and longing with vapid entertainment. Bradbury explicitly connects the fact that “our civilisation is flinging itself to pieces” with the destruction of literature and the deliberate falsification of the past.

Montag, the protagonist, makes a living burning books, in accordance with rules said to have been established in 1790 by the “First Fireman”, Benjamin Franklin. His wife Mildred, who claims to be happy, spends her days in a room with three walls of television screens, surrounded by her “family”: soap-opera uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces and nephews who “said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud”. She has no recollection of swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills one night.

An old professor who’s been unemployed since the last liberal arts college shut its doors tells Montag that the magic of books lay in “how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us”. But they are hated because they “show the pores in the face of life” to a world that wants “only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless”.

Chief Beatty, Montag’s deeply conflicted boss, explains how we got here. Everything sped up in the 20th century, when horses, dogs and carts were replaced by faster and faster machines. Time contracted. Books were condensed and pre-digested, “levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm”. School was shortened, “discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored”. Sound familiar?

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Fahrenheit 451 concludes apocalyptically, with a revelatory global catastrophe. Bradbury draws on some very old stories to make the meaning of this ending fully intelligible. Montag flees a doomed city like Lot escaping the burning of Sodom. The world collapses and must be rebuilt. Insofar as there is hope, it lives in the hearts and minds of scattered old men who remember the writings of Plato, Swift, Jefferson and Lincoln, as well as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Montag himself recalls passages from a forbidden volume of Ecclesiastes.

At the novel’s end, Montag remembers a verse from Revelations, The Book of the Apocalypse: “And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruits every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”

The Jews called the Bible — in Greek, to biblion, or “the book” — an etz chaim, or tree of life. In Revelations, the river of the waters of life sustains two trees of life: the Hebrew Scriptures (whose fruits were the twelve tribes of Israel) and New Testament. The “leaves” of these trees, their pages, were understood to be medicine for the sickness of “the nations”, people who knew nothing of the Bible.

Despite the best efforts of some of our greatest writers, the healing power of books has been mostly forgotten in our time. Must we really wait until our world is thoroughly burned and broken before we begin to mend it?

You can see its shadow in every Western country, from the US and Canada to Ireland and Australia, as well as in every multinational organisation, from the EU to the UN. Rising levels of hate speech and misinformation, we are told, make it more urgent than ever for governments, corporations and multilateral organisations to adopt stronger measures to protect vulnerable populations online.

It is for this reason that Biden’s Department of Homeland Security recently created a “Disinformation Governance Board”, the European Commission crafted a new Digital Services Act and Code of Practice on Disinformation, and the UN is proposing a “Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms”. All of these initiatives are allegedly the product of good intentions; all of them, however, are rooted in the same fallacy: there is little evidence to suggest that hate speech and misinformation are on the rise. On the contrary, Western countries are more tolerant of racial, religious and sexual minorities than ever before. To take one example, the percentage of Americans who approve of marriages between white and black Americans has risen from 4% in 1958 to 87% in 2013 to 94% in 2021.

There are, of course, plenty of examples of misinformation and hatred online, and Twitter and Facebook are right to reduce their spread — but often the threat is exaggerated. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), for instance, recently published a study that concluded that antisemitism was increasing on Twitter. But there is no definitive evidence of rising hate online. The ISD study counted tweets criticising George Soros which didn’t mention his Judaism as antisemitic. Elsewhere, “hate speech” includes the reluctance of some people online to use female pronouns when referring to transwomen — even though one might oppose using female pronouns for natal males and harbour no animus toward transwomen.

Here we can see that what people label as “hatred” and “misinformation” is often merely an opinion they don’t like or which they fear will encourage bad behaviour. In both the UK and the US, this led to government officials demanding that social media platforms censor “often-true” content, including about Covid vaccine side effects, out of fear that such stories would result in vaccine hesitancy.

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The media is spreading bad trans science

By Jesse Singal

What’s more, Facebook and Twitter have also started deleting a significant amount of true content. Between 2020 to 2021, for example, Facebook censored claims that the coronavirus came from a Chinese lab, even though that was always as likely, if not more so, than the natural-origin hypothesis. Twitter also censored an accurate New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop while allowing supporters of his father, Joe Biden, to falsely claim it was a result of “Russian disinformation”.

The global campaign to censor disfavoured views on Twitter and Facebook is therefore rather curious. If there is no evidence that hatred and misinformation are increasing, and ample evidence of inappropriate censorship of true and accurate information, why are politicians across the West calling for greater power to censor?

Some of the demand certainly appears to be grassroots. Since 2016, an increasing number of psychologists have started to document the rise of “concept creep”, the dramatic expansion of what people in Western societies consider to be “harmful”. It used to be that one would have to show physical or financial harm from speech for it to be restricted: often, one would have to commit fraud, incite violence or ruin a person’s career. Today, by contrast, a growing number of people consider petty offences, such as calling a transwoman “he” or denouncing Soros as a “globalist,” to be the cause of “real-world harm”.

Yet this support cannot be taken in isolation; more often than not, it is the result of funding from governments. It was, after all, Renee DiResta, a former CIA Fellow at Stanford University, who proposed that DHS create a “Disinformation Governance Board”; in Brazil, meanwhile, a Supreme Court judge is leading calls for greater censorship; in Canada, it is Justin Trudeau who has sought a crackdown on wrongspeech; and in the UK, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue is funded by the UK government and the US Department of Defense.

Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that these efforts all share an elitist, anti-populist strain. Many of the government agencies, contractors and NGOs that are advocating for greater censorship have ties to the military, intelligence and security organisations, spawning what I term the “Censorship Industrial Complex”. How this is manifested is relatively straightforward: fearing that a wave of populist political victories would undermine Nato, the EU and the Western Alliance, government intelligence, military and security officials engaged in disinformation campaigns, such as the one claiming Trump was a Russian asset and that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, while demanding censorship of populist and anti-war voices.

Together, these measures constitute nothing short of a world war on free speech. After all, the intention of the UN and the EU is to censor disfavoured speech at a global level, specifically by insisting that Twitter and Facebook obey their dictates or face massive fines and nationwide restrictions.

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So far, one of the greatest obstacles to these censorious ambitions is Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, who has publicly stated that he refuses to comply with EU rules. But Musk is also under enormous pressure from advertisers, many of whom stand with the censorship advocates and heads of state. Under pressure from the Turkish government, for instance, Musk was forced to censor disfavoured Turkish journalists or face Twitter being cut off in the country entirely.

Even if this were not the case, free speech has never been a gift that can be secured by one person. Rather, for it to survive, it is up to the citizens of the world to insist that governments stop demanding, directly or indirectly through the NGOs they fund, that social media platforms censor disfavoured views. And to the extent that content moderation by social media companies is inevitable, they must be transparent about what content they are restricting, how they are restricting it, and why.

Nor is any of this outside the realms of possibility. It was encouraging, for instance, to see the Department of Homeland Security shut down its “Disinformation Governance Board” three weeks after introducing it, following an online backlash. In Europe, too, resistance is growing to the Digital Services Act. And, on Twitter, we have seen rowdy and rousing opposition to the UN’s proposed “Code of Conduct for Information Integrity on Digital Platforms”, as well as new censorship proposals in Ireland, Brazil, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand.

Most of all, we need to change how we perceive ostensibly earnest calls for reducing “hate speech” and “misinformation”. We need to train our ears to hear such language as pretexts for government censorship. We need to remind our fellow citizens of the enormous progress we have made against hatred and discrimination over the decades and centuries. And, perhaps most of all, we should feel insulted, patronised and threatened by those elites who are trying to undermine that precious thing we have been fighting for since society was born: our right to express ourselves, however much it might offend them.