It’s funny. Obviously the columnist has not been silenced; there he is, making lots of noise, in places where lots of people can hear him. 

Like lots of good political cartoons, it makes a case quickly and pithily, and it is very hard to argue against. But I want to try. 

The argument, with or without the cartoon, crops up an awful lot. “I’VE BEEN SILENCED!!!! suzanne moore cries, from the front page of a national newspaper,” tweeted one journalist, in response to an interview with Moore in the Telegraph and her piece in these pages last month. “The author of a book on the supposed ‘transgender craze seducing our daughters’ claims she is being silenced. It is a very loud silence,” ran the subtitle of a recent piece in The New Republic, about the author Abigail Shrier.

Or: “I would pause, for at least a few seconds,” wrote a columnist in the Guardian last year, of the historian Niall Ferguson, “if I found myself arguing that my freedom of speech was in a state of extreme jeopardy in this, my column in a national newspaper.” Current Affairs, 2018: “Pretty loud for being so silenced.” Also from 2018, the New Statesman: “If the “Intellectual Dark Web” are being silenced, why must we keep hearing about them?” 

As it happens, Moore never claimed (as far as I know) that she was being silenced: she said that it was becoming harder to express certain views. But the general question remains: is it possible for these people and their opinions to be simultaneously “silenced” and also widely expressed?

Obviously, if we take the word “silenced” to mean “literally made silent; unable to put their words out into the world at all”, then none of the above has been silenced . Their words are out there.

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But if the only people who have permission to complain about being silenced are the ones who are literally silenced, then — by definition — we will never hear about it. I would say it is perfectly possible for people to try to silence you. They might even be successful at partially silencing you, or reducing your output, or making you nervous to say things – even if they aren’t able to shut you up entirely. And I would say that even if they aren’t successful in the specific case of the famous person involved, it can still have free speech implications for other people.

A word of warning: I’m going to draw an analogy now. I can imagine that people will read it and say “oh so you’re saying that people being rude on Twitter is the same as a death threat,” so I wanted to get out ahead of that: it is not what I am doing. Philosophical analogies are meant to draw out our intuitions and find out where they break down, not say “X is exactly like Y”. With that said, here’s the analogy.

In 1989, the novelist Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses was the subject of a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini. He spent several years in hiding, under police protection; a $3 million bounty was offered for his death (with an extra $600,000 being added in 2016). The Japanese translator of the book was murdered; the Italian translator was stabbed, and the Norwegian publisher was shot, although both, mercifully, survived.

Was Rushdie being silenced? Well, he wrote several times for national newspapers during his period in hiding. He appeared on television and Radio 4 to discuss it. He even turned up on stage during U2’s 1993 tour promoting their Zooropa album. “I’VE BEEN SILENCED!!!! salman rushdie cries, from the stage of wembley stadium.”

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To reiterate: I’m not saying that Suzanne Moore or the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ are equivalent in any sense to Rushdie, or that they have been subject to the same level of threat as a fatwa and $3 million bounty. The point is that, if you accept that Rushdie was in some sense being “silenced”, then you acknowledge that it is possible for people to be simultaneously highly visible, with a platform to say the things they want to say, while also having their free speech curtailed: that it is possible to shout, truthfully, that you are being silenced from the front page of a national newspaper.

Of course, you may not accept that Rushdie was being silenced. This would, in fact, be a fairly reasonable position. The stated aim of the fatwa was not to silence Rushdie, to get him to retract the book, or anything – it was to kill him. According to Khomeini’s office, media reports that the fatwa would be lifted if Rushdie apologised were false: “Even if Salman Rushdie repents and become the most pious man of all time, it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has got, his life and wealth, to send him to Hell.”

And this brings us to a second point. I’d say that there probably was a chilling effect on Rushdie himself, but you may disagree. But again: the point was not to silence Rushdie. It was to silence other people. In 2006, after the controversy about a Danish newspaper publishing cartoons showing images of Mohammed, the leader of Hezbollah expressed regret that the fatwa had been unsuccessful: “If there had been a Muslim to carry out Imam Khomeini’s fatwa against the renegade Salman Rushdie, this rabble who insult our Prophet Muhammad in Denmark, Norway and France would not have dared to do so.”

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Are people less willing to be critical of Islam or to depict Mohammed, in the wake of Rushdie’s fatwa, or the Charlie Hebdo killings, or the recent beheading of the French schoolteacher? Probably. Even if the specific target of an attempt to silence is not, in fact, silenced, other people might be. 

Again: I’m not saying that murder or the threat of murder is the same as being ostracised at work, or having people be rude to you on Twitter, or having people protest outside your talks, or whatever. What I am saying is that it is possible for people to, simultaneously, have a loud and prominent platform, and at the same time for people to be “silencing” them, or at least trying to. And, further, even if the attempted silencing doesn’t work on the individual in question, it could easily have a chilling effect on other people — especially those with less job security. We have been talking about famous people in the public eye, but we won’t hear about the less famous people who hold the same views and are now afraid to express them. The “I’M SILENCED!!! I cry from the front pages of a national newspaper” argument falls down in at least some cases.

So it is possible for a person — or at least their views — to be both loud and silenced. The question is, then (and I’ve avoided it so far): are they? Is Suzanne Moore, or Jordan Peterson, or anyone? Does what they have been subjected to amount to “silencing”, or are other people simply using their own freedom of speech to complain about or protest against them?

It’s worth noting that, although I’ve said that being rude on Twitter is not the same as a fatwa, there have been material threats to some of the people I mentioned above. Moore received messages from people saying “they were going to rape me, decapitate me, ejaculate inside my head, burn me”. Someone turned up at a Jordan Peterson meeting carrying a garrotte. UC Berkeley had to spend $600,000 on security when the IDW member Ben Shapiro made a speech there. I doubt any of them were in as much danger as Rushdie, but I can’t imagine it was pleasant.

But let’s leave that aside. If a prominent columnist has his or her column taken away (as the cartoon was about), or if there are protests outside talks, or if there is simply a storm of people being nasty about you on Twitter, can that be “silencing”, even if that person still has a prominent voice?

To some degree, this is a matter of definitions. Obviously, a lot of people on Twitter calling you nasty names is not as bad as having a fatwa on your head, but it will probably make you less willing to write about the same subject again (I have some limited experience of this). Whether that reaches the threshold of “silencing” is just a question of how you define the word.

I think in some cases it is less ambiguous, though. When an academic resigns over an email defending the right to wear potentially offensive Halloween costumes, or two others lose their jobs after arguing against a “day of absence” on campus for white people — again, it’s not as bad as credible death threats, but losing your job is quite a big deal. I could entirely understand that other academics would worry about making the same arguments, even if those ones in particular are still writing in the Wall Street Journal or whatever about their experience. I’d say there’s some silencing going on there, at least under my definition of the verb “to silence”. I certainly know some academics who tell me that there are things they believe but wouldn’t ever dare say in public. The same goes for some journalists.

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Which brings us to the final point. I think that it is possible to be both loud and silenced; and I think that in some cases, even those which fall short of the Rushdie standard of death threats and assassination attempts, it is reasonable to say that this has, in fact, happened.

The question, then, is whether that is a bad thing. The word “silenced” is one of those that most people think is automatically bad, but I don’t think that’s true: silencing Lord Haw Haw during the Second World War would have been absolutely fine by me. Silencing Osama bin Laden, in the sense of not publishing columns by him, or David Duke — also fine.

It might be fine by some means and not others, as well. Boycotts might silence people, but you might be OK with that, when you wouldn’t be with death threats to achieve the same aim.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that silencing Jordan Peterson or Suzanne Moore is equivalent to silencing David Duke. Lots of people strongly disagree with both of those authors, but they’re both within the body of mainstream opinion. Moore, for instance, seems to believe that trans people should be treated with respect and addressed with the pronouns of their choice, but that they remain their biological sex, and that there should be spaces reserved for biological females. That seems to be pretty much what the British public believe — or, at least, a majority of the public is in favour of using a trans person’s chosen pronouns, but is less likely to consider a trans person to be “really” of that gender (the poll didn’t ask about biological sex). Similarly, a majority is in favour of trans women using women’s toilets, but only in cases when that trans woman has physically transitioned.

Of course, it’s perfectly possible that the British public is wrong. If YouGov had been around in the 1810s, the results of a poll on whether or not slavery was OK would not have determined whether or not slavery actually was OK. And you might argue that people back then should have tried to “silence” Lord Nelson and others who argued in favour of slavery. But it would have been strange to do so on the basis that they were extremist outliers. And if you were to try to get people fired for those opinions, you’d end up with unemployment rates around 50%. It just doesn’t seem viable.

And on the second point, again, you might think it’s not OK to send death threats, but it’s fine to send emails to someone’s boss if they express views you disagree with. Where you draw the line is up to you. I’m fairly absolutist on this — if you disagree with someone’s view, in almost all circumstances, you should express disagreement, not attempt to make it harder for them to express those views. “Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.” But I am aware that I am on the more extreme end of that spectrum, and many people disagree; where you draw the line is up to you (and up to society at large, as we all debate these issues).

But being silenced is not a binary condition. Someone can be prominent, and famous, and regularly appear on the television — and they, or their views, or people like them, could still be being silenced. And you shouldn’t get your political philosophy from a cartoon.

Where once a person would have assaulted another person, verbally or otherwise, to win in the era of “oppression” the would-be victor must claim that they themselves are the ones who have been assaulted. Where once the loser would have wept, today the would-be winner must weep: very early, very fast and as insincerely as occasion necessitates.

This was the case with the attack on Suzanne Moore, whose stupendous account of her fall-out with the Guardian is a fine reminder of the laws of modern combat. The people who edged her out of her place of work did not do so firstly by calling her derogatory names; they did so by pretending — falsely — that she had used such names of them. They pretended that she had been “transphobic” against them. They lied about what she had written and they pretended that her words even made them feel endangered. In doing so Moore’s accusers got their victimhood in early.

As Moore narrates, the crunch point came when a trans employee at The Guardian announced her resignation, despite having already left weeks earlier, claiming that Moore had made them feel “unsafe”. It is a clever little trick, because of course there is nothing in any Suzanne Moore column that could make anyone at the paper feel unsafe. Unless the Guardian was a well-known hotspot for gangs of volatile thugs looking to beat up trans people, which seems unlikely. The suggestion is clearly insincere or deluded.

But the trick works, because so few adults want to call bullshit on the bully-words of our time. Not just because the bully-words are the words of the oppressed, but because they come cloaked in this language of impossible-to-disprove suffering. Who are you to say that the other person does not feel “unsafe”?  How can you prove they don’t?

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Suzanne Moore’s testament of what it feels like from the inside to deal with these latter-day Torquemadas would be familiar to many working in publishing, too.

On Monday of this week Penguin Random House announced that the bestselling psychologist Jordan Peterson has a new book scheduled for release in March. Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life follows up on the huge success of Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which sold more than 3 million copies after its release in 2018.

Just to put that in some much-needed context: when a book sells that many copies it essentially pays for almost all of the poorly-selling books that might clog up the publisher’s lists. It is the sort of book that a publishing house dreams of, one which pays the salaries of countless people as they shepherd through numerous publications which they hope might find an audience but alas don’t. For under-pressure editors, it is a lifeline.

And yet the reaction within Penguin did not appear to be uniformly positive. Indeed at a meeting organised by Penguin Random House in Canada there was quite a scene. At an “emotional” townhall at the publishers on Monday, several employees confronted the management about their decision to publish another book by Peterson, while dozens of others staff “filed anonymous complaints”.

The complainants within Random House were apparently consistent in their line of attack. One suggested that Peterson is “an icon of hate speech and transphobia” and “an icon of white supremacy”.  One “junior employee”, who claimed to be a member of “the LGBTQ community”, said “I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him”.

In the current economic climate it might be said that somebody of any community should be pleased — rather than proud — to work for anyone at all. Besides which, there is no right to be “proud” of the company you work for, let alone to agree with every editorial decision it makes. But by making somebody feel “un-proud” Penguin Random House has of course committed a crime against the person; they had made someone a victim.

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Some suffered even worse trauma, and according to one employee, “people were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives”.

Of course the compassionate response might be to suggest that anyone who cries at such an occasion should ordinarily be regarded as too mentally fragile to work anywhere, let alone at a place in which such life-affecting ideas are discussed.

But it got worse, because whenever a certain number of people work out the rules of a game, and how far they are permitted to go, then some will stretch them to see how much more they can get away with. So one employee apparently claimed that publishing Peterson could negatively affect the employee’s “non-binary friend”, an especially ingenious line of argument.

The “non-binary” bully-tactic has been tried for some time, where people claim to be something they do not understand and cannot prove exists but insist gives them the right to tell everyone else what to think, say and do. But it might be regarded as something of overreach to claim that you only have to know a magical non-binary person in order for yourself to also be allowed to decide what is and is not publishable.

On and on the complaints went. One employee claimed that since June (that is, since the death of George Floyd) Penguin Random House “has been doing all these anti-racist and allyship things and them publishing Peterson’s book completely goes against this. It just makes all of their previous efforts seem completely performative.” There are many things to say in response to such a claim. One is that of course the publishing house’s previous efforts were performative. Why should a Canadian publishing house take any responsibility for the actions of a Minnesotan policeman?  Of course any and all such acts of “allyship” are completely insincere and meaningless.

Still the question lingers, which is why a book by Peterson should in some way go against what has happened since the death of George Floyd? The defamatory insinuation contains the nastiest little claim, that it is self-evident why a publisher should not publish a book by Jordan Peterson: because it is self-evident that such a book would be racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic and every other one of the other apostasising spell-words of the time.

As much as they may lament the fact, the job of a publisher is to make a profit, to publish books people actually want to buy, and were any of the complainants to be given a serious role in their company then soon they might not even have a job to feel un-proud of.

There is also a huge market at the moment for books that promote a particular progressive message, most of which are aimed at children and some of which make some fairly contentious claims; as far as anyone knows, there has never been any attempt to stop these books from being published, tedious as it is to see bookshop windows covered in them.

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Yet that tolerance cuts one-way, and of the 70 or so anonymous messages to the Penguin “diversity and inclusion committee” apparently only a couple were in favour of the decision to publish Peterson’s book. That level of intolerance and dull uniformity is striking, and suggests that these employees clearly fail to understand that feeling “hurt”, “un-proud” or having your friends feel potentially “negatively affected” are none of them reasons to refrain from publishing a book. Even if the book did not pay your salary.

What we see is a new generation of people who do not know how to think, act or behave. In some cases they genuinely haven’t grown out of the stage of development where it is appropriate to cry if you do not get your way. The answer to all this remains the same: which is that the adults must reassert themselves.

Anyone so badly affected by the potential publication of a book with which they are not in total agreement should be invited to resign from their jobs and their positions advertised the next day. The number of smarter young applicants available to replace them would — I would predict — be very large, and they would include a better class of free-thinker than the nasty little doctrinaires who have taken over the Guardian, Penguin, the New York Times and many other organs in recent years.

Both Moore and Peterson have smoked out the bullies, but it is time we saw through the principle intimidation tactic of our time, ripped away the pretence of victimhood and told the people who cry victim that we have little need of them.

Rusbridger should be uniquely qualified to map the modern news world, because he played a unique part in building it as Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian from 1995 to 2015. Like every editor in that period, he had to survive the internet, and the transformation it wrought in the economics and values of news. But unlike any of his peers, Rusbridger turned his editorship into a philosophy. His reign was defined not just by the big stories (phone hacking, Wikileaks, Snowden — all great examples of the sheer thrill of disclosure that drives a good editor), but by a credo: he believed in “open journalism”.

“Open journalism”, as he defined it in 2012, means “journalism which is fully knitted into the web of information that exists in the world today. It links to it; sifts and filters it; collaborates with it and generally uses the ability of anyone to publish and share material to give a better account of the world.” As The Guardian expanded its website, “open journalism” found expression in the voracious Comment is Free opinion section (once a raging stream of opinion that tried to capture the energy of oughts-era blogging, now just a URL pointing to a fairly traditional op-ed page); in liveblogging, which remains a strength of the paper; and in below-the-line comments that were not just tolerated but encouraged and celebrated.

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Some of it was silly (a page allowing readers to generate messages of praise for then-security columnist Glenn Greenwald was so embarrassingly sycophantic that it seems to have been quietly shuffled off the Guardian website). Some of it was admirable — Comment is Free gave professional inroads to a lot of writers who might otherwise have been left on the outside of political journalism, and as I was one of them, I can’t be too churlish about its faults.

Some of it was probably damaging. A below-the-line breakdown from 2012 revealed that at least a fifth of the Guardian’s comments were made by 0.0037% of the actual audience. By any reckoning, that’s not a representative segment of the readership — yet comments took on outsize importance for editors, with writers expected to “jump on the thread” and defend their work. But it all helped to form what journalism would be in the era of the internet: though there’s been some movement away from comments, with readers and writers slugging it out on Twitter instead, it’s still the default for news sites (including this one) to offer instant right-of-reply. Rusbridger’s Guardian helped shape that default.

More significantly, it helped shape the expectation that news would be free. Paywalls are the opposite of open journalism, and the Guardian’s business model remains one of voluntary contributions. For Rusbridger, there’s a political imperative to this: democracies depend on having “informed citizens”, he writes. But there’s a counterargument that’s worth considering, even if it might seem a bit hypocritical to put it forward on a free-to-read site as UnHerd is for the time being (though there are plans to charge in the future). A public that is used to getting all its news for nothing has no reason to value journalism, no price to put on the truth. How does the naïve reader clock that a crank website like Exaro (now-defunct promotor of false sexual abuse claims) is worth less than heavyweight investigative journalism that is equally free to read?

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In theory, News and How to Use It should be the perfect primer for such audiences. But as Rusbridger notes in the introduction, “journalism has, it seems to me, always struggled to describe itself honestly, if at all” — and this book is not entirely an exception. Reading its A-to-Z entries, there’s little clue that the author is an architect of the media as much as an observer. In an entry on “Gatekeeping”, he discusses the “Steele dossier” — the lurid oppo research on Trump that was leaked in 2017. “The New York Times (and several others) didn’t publish. Buzzfeed did. Who was right?” I don’t know, but I feel like Rusbridger should share his opinion on the matter. Or, at least, tell us what he would have done if it had happened on his watch.

Too often, he trails off into indecisive platitudes or empty exclamations: “time will tell”, “change will come… slowly”; something on one page “couldn’t matter more”, while something on the next page “couldn’t be more urgent”. Perhaps, ungenerously, this vagueness is because Rusbridger no longer has the answers. His references on theory of journalism are noughties-heavy. He debunks the “filter bubble” criticism of social media (what could be more of a filter bubble, he asks, than an old-style printed paper), but doesn’t mention the growing understanding that seeking out material you disagree with can actually heighten polarisation. (There’s a reason one of my most reliable Comment is Free pitch genres was “Daily Mail does awful thing”.)

Clay Shirky and Jeff Jarvis — two early cheerleaders for the internet who influenced the development of “open journalism” — both feature, but there’s no reckoning with how the last decade has tested their optimism. Shirky’s thesis in his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody was that the internet would democratise expertise with the demise of gatekeeping; Jarvis argued for “digital first” journalism supplemented by a high-quality print product. But gatekeeping feels less disposable once you’ve felt the effects of Covid conspiracies and QAnon; and Rusbridger’s beautiful Berliner-format Guardian was one of the first targets of his replacement, Kath Viner. Faced with the urgent challenge of making The Guardian not just innovative but sustainable, she binned the expensive presses in favour of standard tabloid size.

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It’s inevitable that a book about journalism is vulnerable to be overtaken by events. Still, a reference to “Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore” is a particularly glaring casualty of deadlines. Last week, Moore quit the paper, where she has clearly been unhappy since at least March, when 338 of her colleagues across The Guardian and The Observer signed a letter denouncing “transphobic content” which clearly targeted her. Rusbridger mentions online abuse of Moore by the Right-winger James Delingpole; I’d be much more interested in reading what he has to say about her treatment by her peers, and the newsroom culture he left behind.

Rusbridger seems strangely insulated from the partisan strains on journalists: he still sees social media as a kind of ad-hoc ombudsman, resented only by those hacks who shrink from scrutiny (“No longer can the biters have immunity from being bitten back”). This will be bitterly hilarious to anyone who’s enjoyed the kind of “scrutiny” that comes in the form of death and rape threats. News and How to Use It is less a guidebook than a monument to a lost ideal. In the first decade of this century, Rusbridger was something like a prophet of news; his legacy, for good and bad, deserves a sharper eye than this book can bring to bear.