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Free speech is under attack, not only from radical activists but also from big corporations, government institutions, mainstream media, universities and even judges. Examples abound. Until May 2021, Facebook and Twitter, then dominated by left-wing workforces, removed all references to the theory that the worldwide covid epidemic—claiming more than twenty million lives—might be caused by a leak from a Wuhan laboratory in China. This theory is presently considered at least plausible. Before the 2020 presidential election, Facebook and Twitter also banned any mention of the contents of a laptop owned but abandoned by President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden; it had ended up with the New York Post. The laptop—which was authentic—contained some embarrassing or even incriminating material about its owner and possibly also about his father. Moreover, Twitter suspended the New York Post’s account for a while. Both Facebook and Twitter also indefinitely suspended Donald Trump’s accounts, although he has now regained his X (formerly Twitter) account. it is not a convincing defence that as private companies Facebook and Twitter can impose their own rules on their customers. On the contrary. They are public forums: common carriers that have to follow the principle of non-discrimination, just like the owner of a road who cannot prohibit female drivers from using it, or the hotelier who cannot deny service to African-Americans.
Censorship on the Increase
Yes, examples abound. In the United Kingdom, people are now arrested for posting memes on Facebook. They are even imprisoned for waving the British flag. Ireland is trying to ban ‘mean memes’. A left-wing Brazilian judge forced X (formerly Twitter) to flee the country. The Australian government is trying to censor posts on X. The European Union is trying to force the owner of X, Elon Musk, into self-censorship. In Venezuela, Maduro has blocked X. Of course, in the Axis of Evil, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, all access to independent social networking sites is banned.
It is well known that at North American universities you risk being peremptorily fired if you are accused of insensitivity about sex or race. Hurt feelings take precedence over hard facts. Moreover, you are simply not allowed to present certain kinds of findings (true or false), for example that the average IQ, Intelligence Quotient, of African-Americans might be lower than that of Whites (but nobody would probably say anything if you would find that the average IQ of Whites might be lower than that of Asian-Americans); or that climate change might be mainly caused by natural forces and that the man-made factor, while existent, has probably been wildly exaggerated; or that men and women are in many ways born different and may on average have different capabilities for different tasks; indeed, in some places you might not be able to talk at all about men and women as two distinct categories. (I hasten to add that I personally doubt that the measurement of IQ, let alone calculating averages, makes much sense. But academics should be free to explore the issue.)
Even worse than any visible restriction on academic research is the invisible censorship. A colleague of mine at the University of Iceland who reviews applications for science grants in another Nordic country told me that he is given a check list from the research fund in question: if the applications do not include some references to man-made global warming or the oppression of women by the ‘patriarchy’, then they have little chance of passing. Individuals with ‘wrong’ views are not hired by universities, and if they somehow slip in, they do not get grants, are not published, and do not get promotions. They hardly exist. They are ‘vaporized’, as George Orwell would have put it.
Some More Equal than Others
An intriguing list had been published in National Review of the two-tier justice system in the United Kingdom. I gather from it that there all men are equal before the law, but some more equal than others, to paraphrase Orwell again.
Judge Mark Bury sentenced three men to over two years in prison each for participating in a riot against immigration. But a few weeks earlier, the same judge had given no prison time to Simon Pritchett, who possessed several hundred indecent images of children. Instead, he told Pritchett to ‘get some fresh air and meet people’.
Judge Benedict Kelleher sentenced David Spring to 18 months in prison for threatening police and joining chants of ‘Who the f*** is Allah?’ The same month this judge sentenced Ozzie Cush to only 46 weeks in prison for assaulting a policeman at a protest. Cush had two prior criminal convictions.
Judge John Temperley sentenced Billy Thompson to twelve weeks in prison for posting a comment on Facebook that said “filthy ba*****s” with the emojis of an ethnic person and a gun. The judge detected ‘a racial element to the messaging and the posting of these emojis’ and stated that ‘this offense, I’m afraid, has to be viewed in the context of the current civil unrest’. Apparently, thoughtcrimes were not confined to Orwell’s dystopia. In 2022, Temperley gave no prison time to Christopher Emmens for five offences relating to 46 indecent images of children.
Judge Guy Kearl sentenced Jordan Parlour to 20 months in prison for having written on Facebook that ‘Every man and their dog should be smashing f*** out Britannia Hotel’ (a location for migrants). In 2011, the same judge sentenced a man to six months in prison for possessing over 8,000 indecent images of children.
Judge Tan Ikram in 2022 sentenced James Watts to 20 weeks in prison for sending memes mocking George Floyd to a private group chat. Recently, the same judge gave no punishment to three women charged and convicted under the Terrorism Act for attending a pro-Palestinian protest while wearing jackets with images of Hamas-inspired paragliders.
Judge Rupert Lowe sentenced Ryan Ferguson to nine months in prison for racial slurs which he shouted at a football player. The same judge gave no prison time to Nicholas Chapman, a doctor who repeatedly put his semen in coffee and gave it to a woman.
Judge Tom Bayliss sentenced Samuel Melia to two years in prison for printing and distributing stickers with phrases like ‘It’s OK to be white’ and ‘Reject white guilt’ and ‘They seek conquest, not asylum’. The judge told Melia that he was ‘quite sure that your mindset is that of a racist and a white supremacist’. This was yet another thoughtcrime. In 2017, however, the same judge gave no punishment to a man who possessed child and bestiality pornography, stating: ‘I don’t pretend for one moment to know what possesses someone like you to get sexual pleasure from watching children as young as three, or six or seven being raped because that is what you are watching.’ Then, he felt unable to read the mind of the defendant.
The Low and the High
In the Spectator, Douglas Murray aptly commented that it was ‘impossible not to notice that it is indeed “the plebs” who have been marched to court sharpish during the unexpected speeding up of our justice system in the wake of this month’s riots’.
Yet another extraordinary example from the United Kingdom is that the Minister of Education, Bridget Phillipson, has shelved a bill that was aimed at imposing an obligation on universities actively to promote free speech on campus. The reason is that some British universities have campuses in China that would be adversely affected by this. A spokesman for the Free Speech Union comments: ‘It’s becoming increasingly clear that the reason universities lobbied the Government to quash the Freedom of Speech Act is because they’re worried it will jeopardise their cosy relationship with various authoritarian regimes, particularly the People’s Republic of China.’
Free to Disagree, even to Err
Tragically, this is taking place in the country of John Stuart Mill and George Orwell, with her strong tradition of freedom. It is therefore timely to recall one of the main arguments for free speech: that is also free speech for your competitor, rival or even enemy, the dissenter and the underdog, the fantasist, the bigot, the rogue and the knave. In the Essay on Liberty Mill wrote: ‘The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.’ Again, Orwell famously exclaimed: ‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people things they do not want to hear.’
Freedom for Loki as well as for Thor
It should be noted that before Mill and Orwell this argument was presented by two remarkable and unjustly neglected Nordic thinkers. In 1765, the Finno-Swedish pastor Anders Chydenius was elected to the Swedish Diet. He immediately began a campaign for the abolition of censorship and the freedom of the press. He argued that ‘the free use of pens’ had to be encouraged. Ideas had to be put to a test. ‘If the statement is preposterous, there will soon be those who will refute it. If it is founded on truth, it will remain invincible, and no fortress can be commended more highly than the one that has withstood the severest sieges. If the case is equivocal, the truth has to be ascertained by published exchanges,’ he said in a memorial to a Diet committee. Indeed, it was useful to expose error: ‘The falsehood shames its originator but benefits the nation, in that the truth is established and is able to grow firmer root.’ It was largely because of Chydenius’ efforts that the Diet agreed in 1766 to abolish censorship and introduce a law on the freedom of the press, the first of its kind in the world.
In 1832, the Danish pastor and poet Nikolaj F. S. Grundtvig published a long poem about the Nordic heritage with this couplet, famous in the Nordic countries, but little known elsewhere:
Freedom our watchword must be in the North!
Freedom for Loki as well as for Thor.
Loki and Thor were both among the old heathen gods of the North, Aesir, with the difference that Loki was a rogue and Thor a hero. Grundtvig was emphasising the need for free speech, also for those who hold unpopular opinions or belong to despised minorities. Many of the people now being punished for their utterances in the United Kingdom may be unpleasant. They may belong to the party of Loki rather than the party of Thor. But they should not be denied their freedom of expression, unless they are perpetrating or clearly responsible for violence. An Icelandic wit, Professor Arni Palsson, once remarked that the drunkards should not be allowed to bring alcohol into disrepute. The same can be said about free speech. Those who abuse it—as did many of the people mentioned here—should not be allowed to bring free speech into disrepute. The only cure for freedom is more freedom.