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Showing posts with label Freedom of expression and inquiry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Freedom of expression and inquiry. Show all posts
UK Human Rights Blog ✏ Written by a Guest Contributor. Recommended by Christy Walsh.

In a significant ruling, the Court of Appeal has quashed the conviction of the appellant for an offence contrary to Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 based on an email written to local councillors in a political dispute. 

In R v Casserly [2024] EWCA Crim 25, The Court gave guidance on – and placed emphasis on the importance of – directing juries on the right to free speech under Article 10 ECHR. The appeal considered the interaction between s 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and Article 10.

Facts

In May 2022, the appellant, Thomas Casserly, was convicted after trial of a single count of:

sending an indecent or grossly offensive electronic communication with intent to cause distress or anxiety contrary to s 1(1)(b) of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. 

He was sentenced to a community order and a five-year restraining order, which restricted his freedom to contact the complainant.

The complainant, Victoria Dominguez-Perez, was a Town Councillor for Middlewich. She is profoundly deaf, visually impaired and has a muscle-wasting condition. She had a guide dog, hearing aids and sometimes used a wheelchair. These matters had been reported in a local online newspaper, the Daily Post.

Continue reading @ UKHRB. 

Freedom Of Expression And Offensive Political Emails 🠞 An Important Assertion Of A Fundamental Right

Maryam Namazie ✊ CEMB Resident Artist Victoria Gugenheim has given a keynote address on Art and Freedom of Expression and shown an exhibition entitled Terror, Trauma, Transformation featuring CEMB’s activist work at the World Humanist Congress in Copenhagen during 3-6 August.

8-August-2023


 ‘The Art of Resistance,’ a 30-minute documentary featuring Victoria and Maryam Namazie’s approach to freedom of expression and street activism has been premiered there. The film is now available for showing at festivals and events. See film’s trailer:


At the Congress, Victoria received a standing ovation for her poem and bodypainting action in tribute to Mahsa Jina Amini and Woman, Life, Freedom presented live on stage.

Maryam Namazie is an Iranian-born activist and Spokesperson of the
Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain and One Law for All.

Premiere Of Art Of Resistance

Maryam Namazie ✊ Some points and an apology following yesterday’s video – the flag is not sacred (in Persian):

Summary of the video in English:

This video is a follow up to yesterday’s video stating that the flag is not sacred. It was in response to a monarchist personality threatening Golshifteh Farahani for questioning the sun and lion in the former monarchist flag. In response I tore up the flag, saying a flag cannot be more important than human beings. In responses, there have been mass threats, anti-women and degrading abuse by those who are incapable of tolerating dissent. As a result of mass reporting, my TikTok account has been permanently banned and am waiting to again be suspended from Twitter as I was the last time the Hezbollah section of the monarchists went up in arms due to a topless protest.

In any case, this new video makes a few points. The main points are that:

1. You have the right to hold the monarchist flag sacred. It is about one’s freedom of conscience and expression. But you must also recognise that those who don’t hold the flag in any esteem have the right to criticise it and mock it. Freedom of conscience and expression are individual rights.

2. The whole point of my first video was not to say that you don’t have a right to love your flag – just don’t expect me to do so – and to criticise Mr Shahram Homayoun for threatening Farahani. Your flag is not be more sacred that human beings.

3. I have fought for many years against Islam and Islamic regime and for the right to apostasy and blasphemy. Do they think whilst we fight what is sacred in Islam and Islamic regime of Iran, we must accept that being replaced with another set of taboos like the lion and sun flag?

And the apology? It’s that I didn’t also tear up the UK flag or the communist flag, which I do.

The initial video opening this discussion, also in Persian.

Maryam Namazie is an Iranian-born activist and Spokesperson 
of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain and One Law for All.

Cutting A Flag Isn’t A Crime ✏ Incitement To Violence Is

Atheist Ireland ✒ Obviously there should have been a transparent procedure to select Ireland’s Special Envoy to the UN on Freedom of Expression. 


But a more important issue is what does the job consist of, and why was the position created?

A Government spokesman said that the Special Envoy would “focus on freedom of opinion and expression, to provide high-level engagement on a small number of established Irish human rights priorities.” But what exactly are these unidentified “Irish priorities”?

Are they Irish priorities that would strengthen freedom of expression, and we need a Special Envoy to ensure that the UN does not weaken it?

For example, are they related to helping the UN to put pressure on other countries to remove their blasphemy and apostasy laws following our recent example?

Or are they Irish priorities that would weaken freedom of expression, and we need a Special Envoy to ensure that the UN does not obstruct the State from doing that?

For example, are they related to supporting proposed new hate speech laws, which would weaken freedom of expression and could bring back blasphemy laws by another name?

Or are they related to supporting the Department of Education’s policy to teach children to respect the content of religious beliefs, which undermines freedom of conscience and expression?

Atheist Ireland has engaged with the UN for many years in relation to freedom of expression. We use UN recommendations and reports when we lobby to change the Irish Constitution, law, policy, and attitudes on freedom of expression.

We don’t believe that the UN needs help from Ireland in relation to freedom of expression. In our experience, the relationship is the other way around. We need transparency about exactly what unidentified “Irish priorities” the Special Envoy will be promoting.

⏩Atheist Ireland ➖ Promoting Atheism, Reason And An Ethical Secular State.

What Will Ireland’s Special Envoy To The UN On Freedom Of Expression Actually Do?

The below letter will be appearing in the Letters section of the October issue of Harper's Magazine’s The magazine welcomes all responses at letters@harpers.org

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

Elliot Ackerman
Saladin Ambar, Rutgers University
Martin Amis
Anne Applebaum
Marie Arana, author
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Mia Bay, historian
Louis Begley, writer
Roger Berkowitz, Bard College
Paul Berman, writer
Sheri Berman, Barnard College
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Neil Blair, agent
David W. Blight, Yale University
Jennifer Finney Boylan, author
David Bromwich
David Brooks, columnist
Ian Buruma, Bard College
Lea Carpenter
Noam Chomsky, MIT (emeritus)
Nicholas A. Christakis, Yale University
Roger Cohen, writer
Ambassador Frances D. Cook, ret.
Drucilla Cornell, Founder, uBuntu Project
Kamel Daoud
Meghan Daum, writer
Gerald Early, Washington University-St. Louis
Jeffrey Eugenides, writer
Dexter Filkins
Federico Finchelstein, The New School
Caitlin Flanagan
Richard T. Ford, Stanford Law School
Kmele Foster
David Frum, journalist
Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University
Atul Gawande, Harvard University
Todd Gitlin, Columbia University
Kim Ghattas
Malcolm Gladwell
Michelle Goldberg, columnist
Rebecca Goldstein, writer
Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
David Greenberg, Rutgers University
Linda Greenhouse
Rinne B. Groff, playwright
Sarah Haider, activist
Jonathan Haidt, NYU-Stern
Roya Hakakian, writer
Shadi Hamid, Brookings Institution
Jeet Heer, The Nation
Katie Herzog, podcast host
Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College
Adam Hochschild, author
Arlie Russell Hochschild, author
Eva Hoffman, writer
Coleman Hughes, writer/Manhattan Institute
Hussein Ibish, Arab Gulf States Institute
Michael Ignatieff
Zaid Jilani, journalist
Bill T. Jones, New York Live Arts
Wendy Kaminer, writer
Matthew Karp, Princeton University
Garry Kasparov, Renew Democracy Initiative
Daniel Kehlmann, writer
Randall Kennedy
Khaled Khalifa, writer
Parag Khanna, author
Laura Kipnis, Northwestern University
Frances Kissling, Center for Health, Ethics, Social Policy
Enrique Krauze, historian
Anthony Kronman, Yale University
Joy Ladin, Yeshiva University
Nicholas Lemann, Columbia University
Mark Lilla, Columbia University
Susie Linfield, New York University
Damon Linker, writer
Dahlia Lithwick, SlateSteven Lukes, New York University
John R. MacArthur, publisher, writer
Susan Madrak, writer
Phoebe Maltz Bovy, writer
Greil Marcus
Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center
Kati Marton, author
Debra Mashek, scholar
Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago
John McWhorter, Columbia University
Uday Mehta, City University of New York
Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton University
Yascha Mounk, Persuasion
Samuel Moyn, Yale UniversityMeera Nanda, writer and teacher
Cary Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Olivia Nuzzi, New York Magazine
Mark Oppenheimer, Yale University
Dael Orlandersmith, writer/performer
George Packer
Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University (emerita)
Greg Pardlo, Rutgers University – Camden
Orlando Patterson, Harvard University
Steven Pinker, Harvard University
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Katha Pollitt, writer
Claire Bond Potter, The New School
Taufiq Rahim
Zia Haider Rahman, writer
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin
Jonathan Rauch, Brookings Institution/The Atlantic
Neil Roberts, political theorist
Melvin Rogers, Brown University
Kat Rosenfield, writer
Loretta J. Ross, Smith College
J.K. Rowling
Salman Rushdie, New York University
Karim Sadjadpour, Carnegie Endowment
Daryl Michael Scott, Howard University
Diana Senechal, teacher and writer
Jennifer Senior, columnist
Judith Shulevitz, writer
Jesse Singal, journalist
Anne-Marie Slaughter
Andrew Solomon, writer
Deborah Solomon, critic and biographer
Allison Stanger, Middlebury College
Paul Starr, American Prospect/Princeton University
Wendell Steavenson, writer
Gloria Steinem, writer and activist
Nadine Strossen, New York Law School
Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., Harvard Law School
Kian Tajbakhsh, Columbia University
Zephyr Teachout, Fordham University
Cynthia Tucker, University of South Alabama
Adaner Usmani, Harvard University
Chloe Valdary
Helen Vendler, Harvard University
Judy B. Walzer
Michael Walzer
Eric K. Washington, historian
Caroline Weber, historian
Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers
Bari Weiss
Sean Wilentz, Princeton University
Garry Wills
Thomas Chatterton Williams, writer
Robert F. Worth, journalist and author
Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Matthew Yglesias
Emily Yoffe, journalist
Cathy Young, journalist
Fareed Zakaria

A Letter On Justice And Open Debate

Barry Gilheany ➤ Many commentators, not just from the Right, have expressed concern that what has traditionally been a fundamental marker of a free society and the Enlightenment project -  freedom of speech and/or expression, is under sustained attack from the Lord Chamberlains of the 21st century. 

The high priests of the wokerati who in pursuit of what are noble objectives, societal equality and the opening up of literary canons to previously silent voices, have assumed the power of arbitration of who should or not speak on university campuses and what can or cannot be said in wider society.

It is held by some that freedom of speech is under existential threat from the enforcers of political correctness and the “anti-offence” culture. In the world of higher education, some academics worry that university administrators are facilitating the growth of “snowflake” generations of young people by shielding them from the necessary intellectual challenges of exposure to and dealing with diversity in arguments and scholarship through the “protective” mechanisms of “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces”. They also worry that the “no-platforming” of controversial speakers by strident pressure groups on campus further weaken the intellectual and personal resilience of higher education attendees.

In this article, I seek to unpick the definitions of freedom of speech and political correctness and to determine whether there is a genuine free speech threat from the denizens of woke culture or whether this is a confected crisis; a smokescreen behind which the differentials of power persist.

Freedom of Speech: Legal Status

Freedom of Speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or of a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The term freedom of speech is sometimes used as a synonym but includes any act of seeking, receiving, and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used (Wikipedia: Freedom of Speech).

Freedom of expression is recognised as a human right under Article 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and recognised in international human rights law in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Article 19 of the UDHR states that “everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference” and:

everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; and this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice. 

The version of Article 19 in the ICCPR later amends this by stating that the exercise of these rights carries “special duties and responsibilities” and may “therefore be subject to certain restrictions” when necessary “[f]or respect or reputation of others” or [f]or the protection of national security or public order, or of public health or morals. (Wikipedia: p.1).

Freedom of speech or expression, is also recognised in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 13 of the American Convention on Human Rights and Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (Wikipedia: p.2).

The right to freedom of speech and expression is closely related to other rights, and may be limited when conflicting with other rights. The right to freedom of expression is also related to a fair trial and court proceedings which may limit access to the search for information, or determine the opportunity and means in which freedom of expression is manifested within court proceedings. As a general principle freedom of expression may not limit the right to privacy, as well as the honour and reputation of others. However greater latitude is given when criticism of public figures in involved. (Wikipedia: p.3)

To summarise then, based on the arguments of John Milton, freedom of speech is to be understood as a multi-dimensional right that incorporates not only the right to express, or disseminate, information and ideas, but three additional distinct elements:

1. the right to seek information and ideas;

2. the right to receive information and ideas;

3. the right to impart information and ideas. (Wikipedia: p.3).

Restrictions on Freedom of Speech

Freedom of speech in most jurisdictions is hedged in by variety of limitations often relating to other competing right and liberties, as in the case of libel, slander, pornography, obscenity, fighting words, and intellectual property. Some European countries controversially retain blasphemy laws. Others abound.[1]

Justifications for restriction on freedom of speech usually fall into two categories: the prevention of harm and the avoidance of offence. The harm principle is articulated most forcefully by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, in which he asserts that: “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”. (Note the absence of a reference to prevention of self-harm). Otherwise, he argues that “… there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.”

In 1985, Joel Feinberg introduced the “offence principle”. He wrote “It is always a good reason in support of a proposed criminal publication that it would probably be an effective way of preventing serious offence (as opposed to injury or harm) to persons other than the actor and that some forms of harm expression can be legitimately prohibited by law because they are very offensive. But, as offending someone, the penalties imposed should be higher for causing harm. Because of the extent to which people may take offence varies, Feinberg lists a number of factors to be taken into account when adjudging when offence has been caused, including: the extent, duration and social value of the speech, the ease with which it (offence) can be avoided, the motives of the speaker, the number of people offended, the intensity of the offence, and the general interest of the community at large (Wikipedia: pp.4-5).

Interpretations of the harm and offense principles can be very wide. Many European democracies who proudly proclaim their commitment to free speech nevertheless have laws criminalising Holocaust denial on their statute book.[2] Other countries make Armenian Genocide denial illegal. Harm and offence criteria are used to justify Russia’s LGBT propaganda law restricting speech (and action) in relation to LGTB issues and very likely lay behind the reluctance of some progressive public intellectuals and political figures to spring to the defence of artists and writers subjected to Islamist fatwas and terrorism such as Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the murdered staff of Charlie Hebdo magazine and the Danish cartoonist portrayer of the Prophet Mohammed. It certainly lies behind the extant blasphemy laws on the statute books of European nations.

The clearest defence of freedom of speech against the demands of “offended” religious authorities and faith communities is made by the late lamented contrarian Christopher Hitchens. The following quotations from The Hitch’s prolific literary output lays down succinctly the defining lines of free speech debates:

“… Civil society means that free expression trumps the emotions of anyone to whom free expression might be inconvenient.”[3] (Mann, Ed.: 2011)

“All major confrontations over the right to free thought, free speech, and free inquiry have taken the same form – of a religious attempt to assert the literal and limited mind over the ironic and inquiring one[4] (Mann, Ed p.241).

“In the responses of a liberal society to this direct affront [the Rushdie fatwa), there has been altogether too much about the offended susceptibilities of the religious and altogether too little about the absolute right of free expression and free inquiry. One can and must be ‘absolute’ about these. Unlike other absolutisms, they guarantee rather than abridge the rights of all – Khomeini included – to be heard and debated.[5].(Mann, Ed. p.251)

“So, who will now say that a lone novelist ‘brought it all on himself’ by ‘insulting Islam’.? The insult to Islam, as Rushdie and his supporters argued all along, was the assumption that the Muslim culture itself demanded blood sacrifice.”[6] (Mann, Ed, p.252)

As definitive as Hitchens’ quotes above, is the landmark opinion given by the US Supreme Court in Brandenburg v Ohio (1969) which in overruling Whitney v. California referred to the right even to speak openly of violent action and revolution in broad terms:

[Our][ decisions have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech do not allow a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or cause such action. (Wikipedia: p.5).

The opinion in Brandenburg discarded the previous test of “clear and present danger” and made the right to freedom of (political) speech’s protections in the US almost absolute. Hate speech is also protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, as decided in R.A.V. in City of St. Paul, (1992) in which the Supreme Court ruled that hate speech is permissible, except in the case of imminent violence (Wikipedia: p.5)

The Internet and Free Speech

International, national and regional standards recognise that freedom of speech, as one form of freedom of expression, applies to any medium, including the Internet. The Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 was the first major attempt by the US Congress to regulate pornographic material on the Internet. In 1997, in the landmark cyberlaw case of Reno v. ACLU, the US Supreme Court partially overturned the law. Judge Stewart R. Dalzell, who as one of the three federal judges had in June 1996 declared parts of the CDA unconstitutional, in his opinion stated the following:

The Internet is a far more speech-enhancing medium than print, the village green or the mails…. Speech on the Internet can be unfiltered, unpolished, and unconventional, even emotionally charged, sexually explicit, and vulgar – in a word, “indecent” in many communities. But we should expect such speech to occur in a medium in which citizens from all walks of life have a voice. …The Government can continue to protect children from pornography on the Internet through vigorous enforcement of existing laws criminalising obscenity and child pornography. In my view, our action today should only mean that Government’s permissible supervision of Internet contents stops at the traditional line of unprotected speech.

The penultimate sentence of Judge Dalzell’s opinion makes a brief statement that has alternatively enthused and bedevilled Internet users ever since and which poses the most fundamental dilemma for those excited by the emancipatory potential or those alarmed by its unregulated, Wild West possibilities – “The strength of the Internet is chaos.” (Wikipedia: p.6)

Free Speech on Campus

Since so much of heat generated in free speech controversies has originated within higher education institutions, it is worth looking at the evolution of law and practice in what is becoming an essentially contested arena.

Free speech at public universities and colleges at once raise the most obvious but equally the most paradoxical of constitutional principles in the US. Given the nature of scholastic inquiry, it is obvious that only an open, robust and critical environment will enable the quest for truth. But at the same time, universities are communities that need to balance the requirements of free speech with those of civility, respect and human dignity. They also belong to a larger social order with its own, often competing set of values (Hudson, 2018).

Historically a major driver of freedom of expression has been its relationship to academic freedom. This connection was fully validated in the landmark 1957 Supreme Court decision Sweezy v. New Hampshire. In this case the Attorney-General of New Hampshire, tasked by the State Legislature to determine if there were “subversive persons” working for the State, had asked Paul Sweezy, a visiting lecturer at the University of New Hampshire, questions as to whether he had delivered “leftist content” while lecturing and about his knowledge of the :Progressive Party in the state and its members. Sweezy refused to answer them on the grounds that the First Amendment protected his freedom to develop his academic pursuits. (Hudson: p.2).

The Supreme Court, in a plurality opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren, held in Sweezy’s favour and in the process decisively vindicated the notion of academic freedom.

The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident … Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding, otherwise our civilisation will stagnate and die. (Hudson: p.2).

However, while subscribing to the First Amendment’s view of truth as a concept discovered in the marketplace of ideas and distilled from a cacophony of diverse opinions, the US Courts have failed to define and delineate the precise extent and nature of academic freedom or to develop a real and robust constitutional doctrine to support it.

Speech Codes: Legal History

This lacuna is glaringly obvious in the specific area that has devilled academic freedom and freedom of speech on US campuses: speech codes. According to case law, speech on matters of public interest is constitutionally protected, while speech on internal institutional business is guaranteed appreciably less protection. The justices have accepted that a university has a legitimate need to maintain order on campus and must have the latitude to govern as it sees fit. Furthermore, the Supreme Court has explicitly pronounced that academic freedom does not protect acts of intimidation, actual threats or disruptive acts interfering with an educational programme. So, it was out of these constitutional settings that speech codes emerged as the mechanisms whereby universities sought to balance freedom of expression and internal order (Hudson: p.2).

Speech codes were introduced by universities to combat hate speech; that is utterances and actions aimed at groups and individuals identifiable by race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation including the wearing by white students on several campuses of blackface or fraternity or sorority parties. Supporters of such codes assumed that limiting hate speech and harassment on campuses would protect the emotional physical health of its intended victims and that it would enhance the learning process by enshrining the concept of rational discourse rather than hate-inspired invective and epithet (Hudson: p.3).

In constructing these codes, university administrators relied on the famous “fighting words” exception Supreme Court doctrine enunciated in the 1942 decision Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire in which the conviction of the defendant Walter Chaplinsky under a New Hampshire law against offensive and derisive speech and name calling in public was unanimously upheld. In writing this verdict, Justice Frank Murphy formulated a two-tier approach to the First Amendment in which certain “well-defined and narrowly limited” categories of speech, including “the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libellous” and insulting or “fighting” words, did not merit constitutional protection as they did not contribute to the expression of ideas nor did they contain any “social value” in searching for truth. (Hudson: p.3).

Some universities actioned the “fighting words” doctrine in order to prevent the discriminatory behaviour that flows from speech deemed to be offensive. Thus in 1990 the University of Texas developed a speech code that placed emphasis on the intent of the speaker to engage in harassment and on evidence that the attempt to do this had led to real harm. In 1989 the University of California invoked the fighting-words doctrine specifically. (Hudson: p.3)

These codes soon began to attract ridicule because of their interpretation and implementation. Perhaps the most famous example was the policy of the University of Connecticut to make “inappropriately directed laughter” and “conspicuous exclusion from conversations and/or classroom discussions” violations of its speech policy; a directive which was to be in validated by a federal court (Hudson: p.3).

As concerns around “political correctness” began to get traction in the US in the 1980s and 1990s, so the issue of what universities could and should restrict became the epicentre of the “PC” debate. The promulgation of speech codes were a response to the oft-justified pressures to eliminate discrimination and harassment from campus from groups who had their own causes to press but in the words of the former university president Sheldon Hackney, in such zero-sum, “drive-by-debate” the “real casualties” were “real answers”. While such heat, rather than light, generating ring-side entertainment “… only reinforces lines of division and does not build toward agreement.” (Hudson: p.4). Furthermore, in trying to curtail the views and voices of some, liberals and leftists appeared to be engaging in a type of ‘reverse McCarthyism’ process; a very uncomfortable place for those for whom freedom of expression should, one would expect a sine qua non.

Many speech codes were struck down on constitutional grounds. In 1989, a federal judge in Doe v. The University of Michigan threw out the university’s code due to its overt vagueness when it forbade language “that stigmatises or victimises an individual” He found that in the guidebook accompanying the code the provision that restricted speech that might prompt laughter at a joke about a student who stuttered in class such speech was protected off campus and therefore could not be banned on it. In the case of the University of Wisconsin code, a federal judge in the case of UWM Post v. Board of Regents, held that the fighting-words doctrine had little value as a guide, since the code declared the utterance of certain kinds of speech unacceptable even if they were unlikely to lead to a breach of the peace. And a seemingly fatal blow was inflicted on speech codes by a unanimous ruling by the; Supreme Court in 1992 in the case of R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul which though it dealt with a St. Paul, Minnesota ordinance which made it a crime to place “on public or private property a … burning cross or Nazi swastika, which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, colour, creed, religion or gender”, held the ordinance unconstitutional on the grounds that it sought to ban free speech on content (Hudson: pp.4-5).

Speech Codes: Free Speech Zones?

Despite the seemingly devastating body blow from the Supreme Court in R.A.V, v. City of St. Paul, speech codes did not die on US campuses. Some colleges and universities created free-speech zones for protestors and others wishing to exercise their free speech rights. However, despite these seemingly laudable attempts to protect free speech, some universities use the concept of zoning speech to relegating and dispersing speech that they wish to muffle; in other words, censor it. Related issues concern the shutting down or “no-platforming” of controversial speakers and the concepts of safe spaces, which can refer to university policies that shield students from uncomfortable or unwanted ideas, trigger warnings, which refer to professors telling students in class before discussing subjects that may be upsetting to individual students so “as to ensure an inclusive learning environment for students” and micro-aggressions , which refer to slights, petty insults, and comments that cause at least subtle harm to recipients. (Hudson: p.6).

This package is referred to as “New Censorship” by Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gilman in their book Free Speech on Campus.[7] Paved with the best intentions of providing an inclusive learning environment and culture, there are plenty of examples of the dystopia of censorship and intolerance that this process has led to. In 2015, a student theatre group at Mount Holyoke, after seeking student feedback, cancelled their annual production of Eve Ensler’s pathbreaking play, The Vagina Monologues, because transgender women do not have vaginas, and the play therefore “offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman.” In response, Ensler pointed out that “inclusion doesn’t come from refusing to acknowledge our distinctive experiences, and trying to erase them, in an attempt to pretend they do not exist. Inclusion comes from listening to our differences and honouring the right of everyone to talk about their reality, free from oppression and bigotry and silencing.”[8] She also added that she had previously made available an optional monologue based on interviews she’d conducted with transgender women (Lipstadt, 2019)

In 2017 the University of California at Berkeley was the scene of a riot by students with Antifa help from the outside due to invitations to speak on campus by the prominent Alt-Right spokespeople Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos which eventually led to the cancellation of the event ostensibly on safety grounds. As Berkeley professor Robert Reich observed, “How can students understand the vapidity of Coulter’s arguments without being allowed to hear her make them, and question her about them?”[9] (Lipstadt: p.186)

As disturbing has been the response of some faculty members to free-speech controversies. In 2017, Wellesley faculty who are part of the college’s Commission on Race, Ethnicity and Race expressed concern in relation to the appearance by a professor with controversial views on sexual violence on campus, over “the impact of speakers’ presentations on Wellesley students who often feel the injury most acutely and invest time and energy in rebutting the speakers’ arguments.[10] (Lipstadt: p.186).

In another incident, a biology professor objected to a change to the “Day of Absence” held by his college, Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington held every April, whereby students and faculty staff of colour did not come to campus in order to represent what an all-white society would look like, which invited white students, staff and faculty to leave campus for the day, on the grounds that “… On a college campus, one’s right to speak – or to be – must never be based on skin colour.”[11]. Weinstein was then surrounded and verbally assaulted by students outside his classroom in a subsequent student protest. He and his wife later resigned their faculty positions and left the area after being told by the university administration that the campus police could not guarantee his physical safety from threats of violence he later received (Lipstadt: p.187).

However, some university administrations have acted robustly to defend freedom of speech on campus. Pride of place goes to the University of Chicago whose president Robert J. Zimmer and provost Eric D. Isaacs in 2014 tasked a faculty committee on freedom of expression with drafting a statement “articulating the University’s overarching commitment to free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation.” The committee cited the observation of a past president of the university, Hanna Holborn Gray: 

Education should not be intended to make people comfortable; it is meant to make them think. Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom[12]. 

Addressing the omnipresence of “trigger warnings”, Jay Ellison, Dean of Students at the College at the University of Chicago, wrote in his welcoming letter to the class of 2020, “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”[13].

A manifesto for proper freedom of expression; for proper academic freedom and for a properly inclusive learning environment and culture on campus.

Political Correctness and Speech Codes

Conflicts over curricula content and freedom of expression at higher education institutes have been a major terrain over disputes over political correctness. Political correctness (commonly abbreviated to PC) is a term used to describe language, policies, or measures designed to avoid offence or disadvantage to members of social groups regarded as marginalised, disadvantaged or otherwise stigmatised; particularly those defined by sex or race, (Wikipedia: Political Correctness). PC refers to things you cannot say in public without attracting fearsome moral opprobrium such as justification of the Holocaust and of the institution of slavery (Fukuyama: p.118).

The term PC was originally used to describe the strict adherence to ideological orthodoxies within politics. In debates between American Communists and Socialists in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the phrase was deployed by the latter against the dogmatic rigidity of the former; adherence to a party line regardless of moral and humanitarian substance.[14] According to the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, this original use of the term PC may have morphed into its modern usage by radical students on American campuses in their take-downs of the party line of every far-left sect from the BS (Before the Sixties) era with blatant examples of sexist or racist behaviour of their fellow students being called out in the satirical tone of voice of the Red Guards or Cultural Revolution Commissar: “Not very ‘politically correct’. Comrade!”[15]

This previously obscure far-left term became a common epithet in conservative social and political challenges to progressive teaching methods and curriculum changes in US secondary schools and universities. Policies, behaviour and speech codes that the speaker or author saw as the imposition of a liberal orthodoxy, were excoriated as “politically correct”. In May 1991, at a commencement ceremony for a graduating class of the University of Michigan, then President George H.W. Bush in his speech opined that “The notion of political correctness … declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits”.[16]

Throughout the 1990s, the term PC became part of standard lexicon for US conservatives; a signifier for conservative anxieties about the left in political and cultural debates beyond academia. Two articles on the topic in late 1990 in Forbes and Newsweek both used the term “thought police” but it was Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex On Campus[17] which really acted as a lightning rod for conservative discontents. Similar hostile vocabulary was used by D’Souza for policies designed to promote inclusivity in academia around victimisation, supporting multiculturalism through affirmative action, sanctions against anti-minority hate speech, and revision of curricula. These trends were, of course, part of a response to the identity politics of feminism, gay rights, ethnic minority and other new social movements. That response received financial backing from conservative foundations and think tanks such as the John M. Olin Foundation, which funded several books such as D’Souza’s. (Wikipedia: p.3)

Liberal commentators argue that the use of the term PC by the Right is done to divert attention from the substantive issues of social inequality affecting the racial and gender groups that it does not consider part of mainstream society. The Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee said in 2001[18] that the phrase is an empty, right-wing smear, designed only to elevate its user and, in 2010, “was born as a coded cover for all who still want to say Paki, spastic, or queer[19]. Another British journalist, Will Hutton wrote in 2001 that the “sharpest”, most incisive “thinkers on the American Right” were quick to realise “that by declaring war on the cultural manifestations of liberalism – by levelling the charge of “political correctness” against its exponents – they could discredit the whole political project.”[20] Paul Krugman writes that:

the big threat to our discourse is right-wing political correctness, which – unlike the liberal version – has lots of power and money behind it. And the goal is very much the kind of thing Orwell tried to convey with his notion of “Newspeak”: to make it impossible to talk, and; possibly even think, about ideas that challenge the established order.[21]

In relationship to higher education specifically, Glenn Loury wrote in 1994[22] that to raise the subject of “political correctness” when power and authority within the academic world is subjected to contestation by parties on either side of that issue is to attract examination of one’s arguments by would-be “friends” or “enemies”. Instead of more objective, dispassionate assessment of one’s scholastic writing and credentials, partisans of left and right will judge which “side” a writer is on.

Conclusion

In a speech given by Salman Rushdie, one of the most high-profile victims of clerically inspired no-platforming and silencing, in 2015 he, in talking about his personal experience, reflected that “these are not good days for liberty … Freedom seems everywhere in retreat.”[23]. But he was referring to the North American university campus, which he described as becoming an “insult-free zone”. He condemned the fact that threats to freedom of expression in America were coming from “within the walls of the academy” and that it was “young people” who were “most willing to sacrifice, or limit this fundamental right.” He laid down his credo for freedom of speech or expression thus:

To equate social good manners, the way we interact with each other, with the liberty to say what one thinks, even if people don’t like it, is to make a false comparison … Ideas are not people. Being rude about an idea is not the same thing as being rude about your aunt … What you don’t have is the right to use your alleged offended-ness as a reason to stop other people from speaking. (Lipstadt: pp.184-85)

These are statements on freedom of expression that I endorse and I share Deborah Lippstadt’s worry that certain students on certain American (and UK) campuses seem to have taken notions of political correctness, as well as ideas about “inclusivity”, “exclusivity”, and “safe space”, to the point where they trump freedom of speech.” (Lipstadt: p.185). What the real debates about political correctness and the related conflicts around identity politics are about are more likely about language and whether changing language actually solves political and social problems according to Geoffrey Hughes. Critics of what should be more accurately called “linguistic correctness “view it more as a means of flaunting the moral purity, the wokeness of those who practice it and of imposing censorship and moral shaming rather than solving problems. 

Political or linguistic correctness also tends to be pushed by a militant minority who then become de facto agenda setters in the eyes of their followers and opponents rather than representing an organic form of language change. There have undoubtedly been localised free speech crises particularly when identities lash such as those been between some transgender activists and feminists which has led to critics of trans ideology and practice such as Germaine Greer being no-platformed and the emergence of Black Lives Matter as a potentially transformative movement in the wake of the police homicide of George Floyd will bring new demands for the revision of academic and literary canons and cultural artefacts such as public statues of slave traders. But if political correctness can come to be seen as merely a means of ensuring courtesy and respect rather than a template for suppression of legitimate debate and inquiry then it need not conflict with freedom of expression.

Bibliography

Hudson, David L, 2018. Free Speech on Public College Campuses. Freedom Forum Institute.

Fukuyama, Francis (2019) Identity. Contemporary Identity: Politics and the Struggle for Recognition. London: Profile Books.

Hitchens, Christopher, 2011 She’s No Fundamentalist. Slate, 5th March 2007 in Hitchens, Christopher (2011) Arguably London: Atlantic Books

Lipstadt, Deborah (2019) Antisemitism. Here and Now. London: Scribe Publications

Mann, Windsor (2011, Ed.) The Quotable Hitchens. From Alcohol to Zionism. The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens. Cambridge MA: De Capo Press

Wikipedia Freedom of Speech pp.1-18.

Wikipedia Political Correctness pp. 1-145.

[1] Sedition, incitement, classified information, trade secrets, food labelling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security and perjury amongst others.

[2] These include Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Switzerland and Romania.

[3] Christopher Hitchens “Cartoon Debate,” Slate, 2/04/06.

[4] Christopher Hitchens (2007) God Is Not Great. New York: Twelve, p.258.

[5] Christopher Hitchens, Siding with Rushdie. London Review of Books, 26 October 1989.

[6] Christopher Hitchens Monotheist Notes from All Over Nation, 19 October 1998.

[7] Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gilman (2017) Free Speech on Campus. Can free speech coexist with an inclusive campus environment. Yale University Press.

[8] Eve Ensler, “I Never Defined a Woman as a Person with a Vagina,” Time Magazine, 19th January 2015.

[9] Robert Reich “Coulter Should Be Allowed to Speak,” Newsweek, 25th April 2017.

[10] “Wellesley Statement from CERE Faculty Re: Laura Kipnis Freedom Project Visit and Aftermath,” FIRE -Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, 20th March 2017.

[11] Bret Weinstein, “The Campus Mob Came for Me – and You, Professor Could Be Next.” Wall Street Journal, 30th May 2017.

[12] The Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago, Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression, University of Chicago, January 2015, https://freeexpression,uchicago.edu/page/report-committee-freedom-expression.

[13] Jay Ellison to Class of 2020, University of Chicago, n.d., www.intellectualtakeout.org/sites/ito/files/acceptance_letter.jpg; Bret Stephens, “America’s Best College President,” New York Times, 17th October 2017.

[14] Kohl. Herbert (1992) Uncommon Differences: On Political Correctness. Core Curriculum in Education the Lion and the Unicorn. 16(1) pp.1-16.

[15] Hall, Stuart (1994) Some Politically Incorrect Pathways Through Political Correctness in S. Dunant (ed.) The War of the Words: The Political Correctness Debate pp.164-84.

[16] U.S. President George H.W. Bush at the University of Michigan (4th May 1991). Remarks at the University of Michigan Commencement Ceremony in Ann Arbor 4th May 1991 George Bush Presidential Library.

[17] D’Souza, Dinesh (1991) Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus New York: Free Press.

[18] Polly Toynbee 'Religion Must Be Removed from All Functions of State'. Guardian 12 December 2001.

[19] Polly Toynbee, 'This Bold Equality Push is Just What We Needed.' Guardian 28th April 2009.

[20] Will Hutton, 'Words Really Are Important, Mr Blunkett.' Observer 16th December 2001.

[21] Paul Krugman The New Political Correctness New York Times 26th May 2012.

[22] Loury, G.C. (1st October 1994) 'Self-Censorship in Public Discourse: A Theory of Political Correctness and Related Phenomena.' Rationality and Society. 6(4): pp,428-61.

[23] Kimber Williams, “Rushdie Urges Students to Defend Free Speech,” Emory News Agency, 16th February 2015, http: //news.emory.edu/stories/2015/02/er_salman_rushdie_lecture/campus.html.

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter seeking the Promised Land of the Premiership!

Freedom Of Speech And Political Correctness ➤ Liberal Incompatibilities?

A Rolling Stone piece where it is argued that the use of the racism label to suppress free inquiry has led to a situation where each passing day sees more scenes that recall something closer to cult religion than politics.

A flurry of newsroom revolts has transformed the American press

Sometimes it seems life can’t get any worse in this country. Already in terror of a pandemic, Americans have lately been bombarded with images of grotesque state-sponsored violence, from the murder of George Floyd to countless scenes of police clubbing and brutalizing protesters.

Our president, Donald Trump, is a clown who makes a great reality-show villain but is uniquely toolless as the leader of a superpower nation. Watching him try to think through two society-imperiling crises is like waiting for a gerbil to solve Fermat’s theorem. Calls to “dominate” marchers and ad-libbed speculations about Floyd’s “great day” looking down from heaven at Trump’s crisis management and new unemployment numbers (“only” 21 million out of work!) were pure gasoline at a tinderbox moment. The man seems determined to talk us into civil war.

But police violence, and Trump’s daily assaults on the presidential competence standard, are only part of the disaster. On the other side of the political aisle, among self-described liberals, we’re watching an intellectual revolution. It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.

Continue reading @ Rolling Stone. 

The American Press Is Destroying Itself

Barry Gilheany with an essay on the problems posed by an absolutist adherence to fee speech.

Freedom of speech and expression is a fundamental principle of faith; an animating philosophical or ideological precept for many liberals or, more precisely and presciently, libertarians. Opposition to censorship is the mission statement of this weblog and contrarian outlets such as Spiked Outline are replete with stories of the suppression of free speech, particularly in academe, at the best of PC/Woke thought police.

I wish to argue that the myth of free speech rest upon a belief in the neutrality of the marketplace of ideas operating along the principles of free and fair competition which in the long run guarantees a perfect equilibrium of viewpoints and opinions. But just as the hidden hand of the Smithsonian market of goods and services masks the emergence of powerful oligopolies and interest groups who will drive smaller economic actors out of business through muscle and sharp practice, so the logic of perfect competition in the marketplace of ideas conceals the suppression of minority viewpoints and legitimates hate speech by dominant political, cultural and racial actors.

Freedom of speech is not a neutral, fixed concept, uncoloured by societal prejudice argues Nesrine Malik. It has become bogged down in false equivalence and extending the sanctity of fact to opinion, thanks in part to a media more interesting in generating more heat than light from the discourse of free speech. Central to this process is a nexus of curators, publishers and editors for whom controversy is a product to be aggressively marketed (Malik) as opposed to ensuring the promotion of genuine freedom and equality of expression as a public good.

The truth is that, even to its most adamantine founding philosophers and missionaries, free speech always comes decisive caveats, or “braking mechanisms” which reflect the dominant cultural biases (Malik: p.11). John Milton advocated the destruction of blasphemous or libellous works: “Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and most effective remedy, that mans [sic] prevention can use.” Contemporary vetoes on free speech or their “braking mechanisms still do not include the prevention of hate speech towards those at the bottom end of the social hierarchy, because their protection is not central to popular culture argues Malik (Malik: p.11).

For in this era of free and unmediated speech in which anyone with access to the internet can blog, tweet and comment with little vetting; it has been women, minorities and LGBTQ who have reaped the consequences of the exponential spread of online expression over the last decade or so.

A 2017 Pew Research Centre survey revealed that a “wide cross-section” of Americans experience online abuse, but that the majority was directed towards minorities, with a quarter of African Americans reported being attacked online due to their race or ethnicity and ten per cent of Hispanics and 3% of whites reporting the same. In the UK, an Amnesty International analysis of abusive tweets sent to 177 women British MPs found that the twenty of them from BAME backgrounds received almost half the total of these tweets. (Malik: p.9).

While most of this abuse goes unpunished, it seems to have become received wisdom that free speech is under siege from zealous no-platformers on university campuses and social media mobs determined to take offence at and punish the slightest infraction of minority sensibilities; the most innocuous slip of the tongue or joke. The cause of this systemic assault on the Enlightenment values of freedom of expression and individual liberty is a behemoth of liberal/PC totalitarianism purporting to be acting on behalf of or in the interests of “the weak, easily wounded and coddled.” (Malik: pp.10-11).

One of the most siren voices warning of the colonisation of UK universities by the forces of PC/woke/liberal tyranny is the libertarian website Spiked Online (familiar to many from this parish). Between 2015 and 2018, it published “Free Speech Rankings” of universities, which purported to show how rife censorship is on campuses. But its rankings were disproved by Carl Thompson of the University of Surrey who, writing in Times Higher Education, found that “about 85% to 90% of Spiked’s evidence each year amounts merely to human resources policy and codes of conduct, of a sort now standard in most large organisations and often required by law.” But this did not stop the Spiked research being widely quoted. (Malik).

Other siren voices on the PC “crisis” simply make up stories in a manner that would please the director of any Russian troll factory. In 2017, students wrote an open letter to the Faculty of English at Cambridge University requesting the addition of non-white authors to the curriculum. Four months later, the Daily Telegraph published a black female student’s picture on its front page with the headline “Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors”; this despite the sum total of zero complaints from faculty members of fellow students. Not only had Cambridge Faculty of English not removed any white authors from its curriculum, the open letter had made no such demand in the first place nor was the featured student the sole signatory. The next day, the Telegraph printed a retraction on page two (Malik).

The reality is probably very difficult on campus from the policing of behaviour, behaviour and knowledge dissemination by the PC enforcers who demand that white authors be replaced on reading lists by those of colour; that trigger warnings be issued ahead of classes on classic literature; that safe spaces be set up for disadvantaged minorities and that jazz hands replace hand clapping at student events which so exercises the imagination of Brendan O’Neill and other high priests of “free speech”. Such localised and incidental phenomena undoubtedly have occurred but does this really mean the extinction of free speech on campuses; the creation of a generation of snowflakes by the forces of woke totalitarianism? For hard data on the real crisis of racism on campus over the last two years or so gives the lie to their confected narrative of suppression of free speech.

In 2018, it was reported that the number of racist incidents in universities across the UK had surged by more than 60% in the previous two years. A similar spike in the number of religiously motivated hate crimes at universities was revealed in a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by the Independent newspaper with anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim incidents reported at 26 UK universities. The UK Equality and Human Rights Commission has launched an official inquiry into what seems to be a virulent outbreak of racism on campus. A Warwick University student discovered racial slurs written on bananas he had stored in a shared kitchen. In 2018, two 18-year-old men were arrested after a Nottingham Trent University student posted video footage of racist chants, including “we hate the blacks” outside her bedroom door in her student hall of residence. Such incidents only come to public notice when they are distributed on social media; in the words of the Black, Minority Ethnic ( BME) student officer for University College London in the Guardian in 2018: “We would hear about a case [every day] in the media if everything that happened went online” (Malik).

Just do the arithmetic concerning the spike in the aforementioned race and religious hate incidents reported in the two years before 2018 and one is led to a seminal event in recent UK history that took place two years before 2018 – the Brexit vote in the EU referendum of 2016; which the failure of the UK parliament to implement justifies “riots in the streets” in the words of Brendan O’Neill. I may have missed something but I am not aware of any legal action by somebody acting on behalf of the “liberal” or “woke” elite to hold Mr O’Neill to account for his inflammatory comment; is verbal abuse of Remain public figures as “traitors” and “collaborators” and accompanying threats to life and limb not sufficiently robust exercise of “freedom of speech” in the eyes of the bould Brendan? Is he capable of drawing any boundaries to the expression of this inviolable right regardless of the consequences? Probably not. But it is fairly safe to assume that the upsurge in race and xenophobic hate incidents and sentiment in British society since the referendum is reflected in what has been happening on British campuses. This impression is confirmed by a Guardian FOI request in July 2019 which found not only widespread evidence discrimination in higher education but institutional reluctance by higher education authorities to acknowledge and tackle the problem of racism in British universities. In October 2019, senior staff at Goldsmith, University of London, the supposed capital of campus wokeness, admitted its record of addressing racism was “unacceptable” after a report found that BME students felt victimised and unsafe (Malik).

This manufactured crisis over free speech on universities is one front in the contemporary backlash against the advances of minority groups; in the culture war against the left. The purpose of free speech crisis myth is to guilt trip people into giving up their right of response to attacks and to legitimate racism and prejudice. Its logic, rather than a pursuit of a prized Enlightenment value, has become a race to the bottom. It is, according to the director of the Institute of Race Relations, “the privileging of freedom of speech over freedom to life” (Malik: p.10)

But this supposed free speech crisis was never about free speech at all. Behind the myth is the rising anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiment in the Western world. The progenitors of the free speech crisis really wanted to deploy this sacrosanct right against minorities, women, immigrants and Muslims. They cloak this animus in the language of anti-establishment or anti-elite conspiracism. Similar to the triggers of the political correctness clamour, there is a symbiosis between free speech panic and populist far right energy as evidenced by the Brexit vote in the UK; the election of Donald Trump as US President and the electoral successes of nativist across Europe such as Marine Le Pen in France, Salvini in Italy, Orban in Hungary and the Alternative Deutschland in Germany. As the space for these views widened, so the original concept of free speech became entangled in a misunderstanding of free speech as absolute with no differentiation between fact and opinion (Malik: p.10) and false equivalence between differing points of view and narratives; most critically on matters of science such as climate change and childhood vaccination.

Writing in the wake of the election of Donald Trump as US President in November 2016 and to subsequent electoral successes for far-right nationalist populist parties in Europe throughout 2017, the media analyst Martin Moore conceptualises the “freextremist model” to describe the ideological underpinnings and modus operandi of the movements responsible for such stunning successes of the contemporary far right or Alt-Right. He describes how the ‘deliberate transgression and destruction of democratic norms in the digital sphere” has been driven forward in the US by the fusion between the brand of ideological conservatism propounded by Steve Bannon’s Breitbart news website and the tactics of the videogame and ‘Manosphere” subcultures which rested on the inviolability of the dual concept of online freedom and sovereignty. He points out that since in no circumstances is it legitimate to harm others in the pursuit of freedom – except in wartime – then “freextremists” justify their behaviour because they are in virtual combat with those with differing values and who seek to restrict their freedom – the enemy in this case they see as the hegemonic, politically correct and pro-gender equality left (Moore, 2019).

Some explanation of how this alliance came to be is in order. First some historical background of the online warriors that Steve Bannon and Trump so successfully weaponised is necessary. The story begins with a tech guru surprisingly unknown outside Silicon Valley – Stewart Brand. Surprising because Brand on three occasions in three decades was central to three events which fused the disparate trends in tech culture – in the later 1960s with his Whole Earth Catalog, a three days hackers conference in San Francisco in November 1984 and the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link and in the 1990s with Wired magazine in collaboration with Kevin Kelly with whom he had organised the Hackers conference. He embodied the “Californian Ideology” as defined by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in 1995 – the marriage of the freewheeling alternative generation with tech innovation and free-market entrepreneurialism (Moore: pp. 6-7).

At the afore-mentioned hackers’ conference, hackers enthusiastically embraced what the author Steven Levy described as “The Hacker’s Ethic” with one ethic supreme above all – “All Information should be free.”. This dictum moulded the individual geeks into a wider collective. Information was to, in the words of Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture “to circulate openly through the community of hackers, simultaneously freeing them to act as individuals and binding them in a community of like minds” in the manner of “the mystical energy that was supposed to circulate through the communes of the back-to-the-land movement.” The distinction between ‘information’ as code and ‘free’ in its flow through the computing system and its cost was lost, leaving the belief that “all information should be free” to be the fundamental credo of netizens (Moore: pp.7-8)

With the expansion of the internet along the information superhighways of the 1990s; a network that to its devotees was a new world that would be governed by its inhabitants according to different rules from the old. This was the second commandment of the net – that the inhabitants of cyberspace should be sovereign in their own land. This belief was formally annunciated by another prominent denizen of cyberspace from this era – the former lyric writer for The Grateful Dead, John Henry Barlow, who had migrated to the online world through his involvement with the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or WELL. In 1990 Barlow and two others from the WELL formed the Electronic Frontier Foundation to protect civil liberties on cyberspace (after a raid by the US Secret Service on the offices of a small games book publisher and accessed its emails in search of a non-existent document. When in 1996, the US government attempted to introduce a law to outlaw the exchange of ‘obscene or indecent’ communications amongst those aged under eighteen, Barlow penned his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home Mind,” he portentously declared “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome amongst us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” (Moore: p.9)

With the internet gold rush in the Millennium era came a cast of virtual pioneers and prospectors of which the most important for this discussion was the 4-chan community formed in 2003 by Chris ‘moot’ Poole. To understand the future political impact of this site, it is important to know something about its architecture and operations.

4chan is an imageboard. To add something to this site requires the posting of an image (or video) bedside which comments can be added. The post can then attract respondents with a comment or another comment or image. There are no other ways to respond. There is no official archive. A post only rises again if someone responds, bumping it back up to the top. Most threads stay on the home page for only five seconds, and on the site for less than five minutes. Posts are anonymous – not backed by a moniker or pseudonym but properly anonymous. Posters prefer to be allocated a random alphanumeric ID for that particular thread, plus the default name given to each user – ‘Anonymous’. If they participate in a new thread, they will receive a new ID. For most of 4chan’s first decade there was one board called /b/, for random posts – “the beating heart of the website.” (Moore: pp.10-11).

4chan’s structure of anonymity was very well suited to the rapid transmissions of memes described by Richard Dawkins who invented the term in 1976 as information that spread through human culture in viral-like fashion, “as genes spread through the gene pool”. The term “memes” later evolved to describe images – often coming with text – that spread or went ‘viral’ online. Images posted to the site either, in the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” sense, evolved or died. Memes were judged purely on the basis of their content, not context (since there was none), or author ((since this was unknown). Those that were successful replicated. Unconstrained by real-life identities or by social norms, users could experiment at liberty. This structure, provided it was supplied by a large enough community, was bound to create viral content. And so, it did. The community, which had begun as twenty of Poole’s friends, had expanded to 9 million users by 2011. In 2010, MIT computer scientist Michael Bernstein and his colleagues, discovered, 4chan users were adding 400,000 posts per day. Four in ten of these received no reply at all, and the median lifespan of a thread was under four minutes. It was a veritable “meme factory” in the words of Poole. According to Whitney Phillips, who has studied online trolling since 2008, between 2003 – when 4chan was founded m- and 2011, every meme created on the internet (or at least amplified) emerged from 4chan’s /b/board or those around it. (Moore: p.11)

The need to shock to get noticed, the shedding of inhibitions enabled by anonymity, and the predominance of young males on the site rapidly facilitated a toxic and provocative culture on 4chan of deliberate offensiveness, taboo-breaking and aggression. The openness and anonymity of the site created the imperative of “getting noticed” and the only way of attracting attention was through offensive behaviour to women, LGTB people, Jews and people of colour. In this ‘lulz’ culture, users argued that language such as ‘fag’ and references to rape and killing were merely for effect and not to be taken seriously. They argued that those who did take it seriously did not know Poe’s law’ of the internet. This state “that it is difficult to distinguish extremism from satire of extremism in online discussions unless the author clearly indicates his/her intent.”. This distinction was clearly lost on the female recipients of vile misogynistic abuse heaped upon MPs and writers such as the classic scholar Mary Beard in the aftermath of the proposal to put a prominent women figure on the of the newly manufactured £20 note in the UK in 2013 or on the former Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger who received over four hundred abusive tweets in 2014 in a campaign organised by the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin who had set up the Daily Stormer a far-right site which like 4chan enabled users to post images anonymously after the white supremacist who had attacked her received a four-week prison sentence. Poe’s Law is the fallback position, no doubt, for many dubious defenders of the right to free speech.

The political attitudes of chan collective members and their progeny ranged from far-right neo-Nazis, ethno-nationalists and paleo-conservatives to techno-libertarians and national anarchists complemented by elements of the ‘Manosphere’ including men’s rights activists, pick-up artists, anti-feminists and ‘incels’ (for involuntary celibates). But so far their potential political capital had yet to be leveraged. Into this breach stepped the Alt-Right political entrepreneur Steve Bannon of the Breitbart news website. In 2014 Breitbart started to woo these communities towards participation in the 2016 US Presidential campaign. Both shared a commitment to destroying the political and media establishment. The ability of 4-chan and their successors to produce powerful social media viral output and to coordinate attacks on their enemies looked prize assets for an election campaign. Yet the prejudice and aggression (especially the far-right neo-Nazi extremists among them) intrinsic to these groups and their lack of interest in the democratic process made the idea of recruiting them and their methods to a democratic campaign preposterous. But it was only their two shared beliefs – freedom of information and online sovereignty- that Bannon’s Breitbart would utilise in the forthcoming Presidential election. (Moore: pp.20-21).

Bannon had originally been captivated by the power and political potential of these communities in 2007 when he had been brought in to help run an online business that sold virtual items to multi-player gamers – like those on World of Warcraft – for real money. The gamers hated companies like this and did all they could to force them out. Although the business bombed, the journalist and author Joshua Green commented that “Bannon was captivated by what he had discovered by trying to build the business … an underworld he hadn’t known existed that was populated by millions of intense young men” whose collective power could destroy business. (Moore: p.21).

It was the #Gamergate affair in 2014 that provided Breitbart its opportunity to capitalise on this massive human resource potential. Simply put, disparate online users from 4chan and the gaming community became convinced that videogame journalism was unethical, and then used this belief to justify savage and persistent online attacks – including multiple rape and death threats – against female journalists and game developers. Breitbart – and later Bannon and the Trump campaign- politicised this nasty, sordid episode by presenting the battle as a front in a much broader cultural war pitting channers as freedom fighters defending their territory against alien outsiders and the deadening PC hand of the establishment. In this way, it leveraged the only two coherent political credos uniting these subcultures – information freedom and sovereignty. In this culture war, Breitbart framed the left as anti-freedom (expressed as ‘political correctness’) and anti-sovereignty (by being pro-immigration, pro-minorities and pro-gender equality) (Moore: p.22)

Into this turbulence stepped Breitbart’s newly recruited provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, in September 2014 who sought to be the gamers’ champion by turning the narrative on its head. Instead of acknowledging the harassment, doxing and mobbing by the activist gamers, he depicted them as the victims of “an army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners, abetted by achingly politically correct American tech bloggers.’ He dismissed campaigners’ concern over online death threats to women as “death threat hysteria”. (Moore: pp.22-23).

After the launch of Breitbart Tech on 27 October 2015 and an exclusive interview with Donald Trump as the lead story on the main site, the alliance between Breitbart, the chans and the gamers was sealed in the defence of free speech fundamentalism and anonymity against any attempts by left and liberal progressives to take them away. This eclectic mix of lulzy malcontents were then to be mobilised in a culture war which was to climax in the Presidential election of November 2016. In this existential struggle, Breitbart warned apocalyptically that if they did not take up arms, they would be overrun by normies, noobs, social justice warriors and politically correct feminazis who would destroy their world and wipe out their freedoms. (Moore: pp.24-25).

The story of how Bannon, Breitbart and Trump triumphed in this culture has been and will continue to be told ad infinitum. But it is worth emphasising that it was in the name of free speech fundamentalism that the channers, Redditors and gamers hacked opinion polls, raided opposing communities, gamed social media, baited mainstream media, doxxed journalists, created false narratives and promoted outright lies and slander as in #Pizzagate. In debasing democracy through their unexpected victory, they created a model for others to copy – the Freextremist Model.

Free speech is not synonymous with freedom of artistic, intellectual or literary expression. Too many free speech defenders are silent on exactly whose right to free speech they are defending and on how it can directly violate the freedom to live one’s life from fear, harassment and racial, gendered, homophobic and disabilist abuse (not the freedom to be offended). The examples I have discussed in relation to racism on campus and the Trump campaign I hope will blow away the straw men that the Spiked Online of this world construct in pursuit of free speech fundamentalism.


Bibliography

(1) Nesrine Malik. How the myth of a ‘free speech crisis’ was created to normalise hate speech and silence minorities Guardian The Long Read Guardian 3rd September 2019 pp.9-11

(2) Nesrine Malik. There is a crisis on campuses – but it’s racism not free speech Guardian 14th October 2019

(3) Martin Moore. Democracy Hacked. How Technology is Destabilising Global Politics London: Oneworld 2019

Barry Gilheany with an essay on the problems posed by an absolutist adherence to fee speech. 

Freedom of speech and expression is a fundamental principle of faith; an animating philosophical or ideological precept for many liberals or, more precisely and presciently, libertarians. Opposition to censorship is the mission statement of this weblog and contrarian outlets such as Spiked Outline are replete with stories of the suppression of free speech, particularly in academe, at the best of PC/Woke thought police. 

I wish to argue that the myth of free speech rest upon a belief in the neutrality of the marketplace of ideas operating along the principles of free and fair competition which in the long run guarantees a perfect equilibrium of viewpoints and opinions. But just as the hidden hand of the Smithsonian market of goods and services masks the emergence of powerful oligopolies and interest groups who will drive smaller economic actors out of business through muscle and sharp practice, so the logic of perfect competition in the marketplace of ideas conceals the suppression of minority viewpoints and legitimates hate speech by dominant political, cultural and racial actors.

Freedom of speech is not a neutral, fixed concept, uncoloured by societal prejudice argues Nesrine Malik. It has become bogged down in false equivalence and extending the sanctity of fact to opinion, thanks in part to a media more interesting in generating more heat than light from the discourse of free speech. Central to this process is a nexus of curators, publishers and editors for whom controversy is a product to be aggressively marketed (Malik) as opposed to ensuring the promotion of genuine freedom and equality of expression as a public good.

The truth is that, even to its most adamantine founding philosophers and missionaries, free speech always comes decisive caveats, or “braking mechanisms” which reflect the dominant cultural biases (Malik: p.11). John Milton advocated the destruction of blasphemous or libellous works: “Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and most effective remedy, that mans [sic] prevention can use.” Contemporary vetoes on free speech or their “braking mechanisms still do not include the prevention of hate speech towards those at the bottom end of the social hierarchy, because their protection is not central to popular culture argues Malik (Malik: p.11).

For in this era of free and unmediated speech in which anyone with access to the internet can blog, tweet and comment with little vetting; it has been women, minorities and LGBTQ who have reaped the consequences of the exponential spread of online expression over the last decade or so.

A 2017 Pew Research Centre survey revealed that a “wide cross-section” of Americans experience online abuse, but that the majority was directed towards minorities, with a quarter of African Americans reported being attacked online due to their race or ethnicity and ten per cent of Hispanics and 3% of whites reporting the same. In the UK, an Amnesty International analysis of abusive tweets sent to 177 women British MPs found that the twenty of them from BAME backgrounds received almost half the total of these tweets. (Malik: p.9).

While most of this abuse goes unpunished, it seems to have become received wisdom that free speech is under siege from zealous no-platformers on university campuses and social media mobs determined to take offence at and punish the slightest infraction of minority sensibilities; the most innocuous slip of the tongue or joke. The cause of this systemic assault on the Enlightenment values of freedom of expression and individual liberty is a behemoth of liberal/PC totalitarianism purporting to be acting on behalf of or in the interests of “the weak, easily wounded and coddled.” (Malik: pp.10-11).

One of the most siren voices warning of the colonisation of UK universities by the forces of PC/woke/liberal tyranny is the libertarian website Spiked Online (familiar to many from this parish). Between 2015 and 2018, it published “Free Speech Rankings” of universities, which purported to show how rife censorship is on campuses. But its rankings were disproved by Carl Thompson of the University of Surrey who, writing in Times Higher Education, found that “about 85% to 90% of Spiked’s evidence each year amounts merely to human resources policy and codes of conduct, of a sort now standard in most large organisations and often required by law.” But this did not stop the Spiked research being widely quoted. (Malik).

Other siren voices on the PC “crisis” simply make up stories in a manner that would please the director of any Russian troll factory. In 2017, students wrote an open letter to the Faculty of English at Cambridge University requesting the addition of non-white authors to the curriculum. Four months later, the Daily Telegraph published a black female student’s picture on its front page with the headline “Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors”; this despite the sum total of zero complaints from faculty members of fellow students. Not only had Cambridge Faculty of English not removed any white authors from its curriculum, the open letter had made no such demand in the first place nor was the featured student the sole signatory. The next day, the Telegraph printed a retraction on page two (Malik).

The reality is probably very difficult on campus from the policing of behaviour, behaviour and knowledge dissemination by the PC enforcers who demand that white authors be replaced on reading lists by those of colour; that trigger warnings be issued ahead of classes on classic literature; that safe spaces be set up for disadvantaged minorities and that jazz hands replace hand clapping at student events which so exercises the imagination of Brendan O’Neill and other high priests of “free speech”. Such localised and incidental phenomena undoubtedly have occurred but does this really mean the extinction of free speech on campuses; the creation of a generation of snowflakes by the forces of woke totalitarianism? For hard data on the real crisis of racism on campus over the last two years or so gives the lie to their confected narrative of suppression of free speech.

In 2018, it was reported that the number of racist incidents in universities across the UK had surged by more than 60% in the previous two years. A similar spike in the number of religiously motivated hate crimes at universities was revealed in a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by the Independent newspaper with anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim incidents reported at 26 UK universities. The UK Equality and Human Rights Commission has launched an official inquiry into what seems to be a virulent outbreak of racism on campus. A Warwick University student discovered racial slurs written on bananas he had stored in a shared kitchen. In 2018, two 18-year-old men were arrested after a Nottingham Trent University student posted video footage of racist chants, including “we hate the blacks” outside her bedroom door in her student hall of residence. Such incidents only come to public notice when they are distributed on social media; in the words of the Black, Minority Ethnic ( BME) student officer for University College London in the Guardian in 2018: “We would hear about a case [every day] in the media if everything that happened went online” (Malik).

Just do the arithmetic concerning the spike in the aforementioned race and religious hate incidents reported in the two years before 2018 and one is led to a seminal event in recent UK history that took place two years before 2018 – the Brexit vote in the EU referendum of 2016; which the failure of the UK parliament to implement justifies “riots in the streets” in the words of Brendan O’Neill. I may have missed something but I am not aware of any legal action by somebody acting on behalf of the “liberal” or “woke” elite to hold Mr O’Neill to account for his inflammatory comment; is verbal abuse of Remain public figures as “traitors” and “collaborators” and accompanying threats to life and limb not sufficiently robust exercise of “freedom of speech” in the eyes of the bould Brendan? Is he capable of drawing any boundaries to the expression of this inviolable right regardless of the consequences? Probably not. But it is fairly safe to assume that the upsurge in race and xenophobic hate incidents and sentiment in British society since the referendum is reflected in what has been happening on British campuses. This impression is confirmed by a Guardian FOI request in July 2019 which found not only widespread evidence discrimination in higher education but institutional reluctance by higher education authorities to acknowledge and tackle the problem of racism in British universities. In October 2019, senior staff at Goldsmith, University of London, the supposed capital of campus wokeness, admitted its record of addressing racism was “unacceptable” after a report found that BME students felt victimised and unsafe (Malik).

This manufactured crisis over free speech on universities is one front in the contemporary backlash against the advances of minority groups; in the culture war against the left. The purpose of free speech crisis myth is to guilt trip people into giving up their right of response to attacks and to legitimate racism and prejudice. Its logic, rather than a pursuit of a prized Enlightenment value, has become a race to the bottom. It is, according to the director of the Institute of Race Relations, “the privileging of freedom of speech over freedom to life” (Malik: p.10)

But this supposed free speech crisis was never about free speech at all. Behind the myth is the rising anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiment in the Western world. The progenitors of the free speech crisis really wanted to deploy this sacrosanct right against minorities, women, immigrants and Muslims. They cloak this animus in the language of anti-establishment or anti-elite conspiracism. Similar to the triggers of the political correctness clamour, there is a symbiosis between free speech panic and populist far right energy as evidenced by the Brexit vote in the UK; the election of Donald Trump as US President and the electoral successes of nativist across Europe such as Marine Le Pen in France, Salvini in Italy, Orban in Hungary and the Alternative Deutschland in Germany. As the space for these views widened, so the original concept of free speech became entangled in a misunderstanding of free speech as absolute with no differentiation between fact and opinion (Malik: p.10) and false equivalence between differing points of view and narratives; most critically on matters of science such as climate change and childhood vaccination.

Writing in the wake of the election of Donald Trump as US President in November 2016 and to subsequent electoral successes for far-right nationalist populist parties in Europe throughout 2017, the media analyst Martin Moore conceptualises the “freextremist model” to describe the ideological underpinnings and modus operandi of the movements responsible for such stunning successes of the contemporary far right or Alt-Right. He describes how the ‘deliberate transgression and destruction of democratic norms in the digital sphere” has been driven forward in the US by the fusion between the brand of ideological conservatism propounded by Steve Bannon’s Breitbart news website and the tactics of the videogame and ‘Manosphere” subcultures which rested on the inviolability of the dual concept of online freedom and sovereignty. He points out that since in no circumstances is it legitimate to harm others in the pursuit of freedom – except in wartime – then “freextremists” justify their behaviour because they are in virtual combat with those with differing values and who seek to restrict their freedom – the enemy in this case they see as the hegemonic, politically correct and pro-gender equality left (Moore, 2019).

Some explanation of how this alliance came to be is in order. First some historical background of the online warriors that Steve Bannon and Trump so successfully weaponised is necessary. The story begins with a tech guru surprisingly unknown outside Silicon Valley – Stewart Brand. Surprising because Brand on three occasions in three decades was central to three events which fused the disparate trends in tech culture – in the later 1960s with his Whole Earth Catalog, a three days hackers conference in San Francisco in November 1984 and the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link and in the 1990s with Wired magazine in collaboration with Kevin Kelly with whom he had organised the Hackers conference. He embodied the “Californian Ideology” as defined by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in 1995 – the marriage of the freewheeling alternative generation with tech innovation and free-market entrepreneurialism (Moore: pp. 6-7).

At the afore-mentioned hackers’ conference, hackers enthusiastically embraced what the author Steven Levy described as “The Hacker’s Ethic” with one ethic supreme above all – “All Information should be free.”. This dictum moulded the individual geeks into a wider collective. Information was to, in the words of Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture “to circulate openly through the community of hackers, simultaneously freeing them to act as individuals and binding them in a community of like minds” in the manner of “the mystical energy that was supposed to circulate through the communes of the back-to-the-land movement.” The distinction between ‘information’ as code and ‘free’ in its flow through the computing system and its cost was lost, leaving the belief that “all information should be free” to be the fundamental credo of netizens (Moore: pp.7-8)

With the expansion of the internet along the information superhighways of the 1990s; a network that to its devotees was a new world that would be governed by its inhabitants according to different rules from the old. This was the second commandment of the net – that the inhabitants of cyberspace should be sovereign in their own land. This belief was formally annunciated by another prominent denizen of cyberspace from this era – the former lyric writer for The Grateful Dead, John Henry Barlow, who had migrated to the online world through his involvement with the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or WELL. In 1990 Barlow and two others from the WELL formed the Electronic Frontier Foundation to protect civil liberties on cyberspace (after a raid by the US Secret Service on the offices of a small games book publisher and accessed its emails in search of a non-existent document. When in 1996, the US government attempted to introduce a law to outlaw the exchange of ‘obscene or indecent’ communications amongst those aged under eighteen, Barlow penned his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home Mind,” he portentously declared “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome amongst us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” (Moore: p.9)

With the internet gold rush in the Millennium era came a cast of virtual pioneers and prospectors of which the most important for this discussion was the 4-chan community formed in 2003 by Chris ‘moot’ Poole. To understand the future political impact of this site, it is important to know something about its architecture and operations.

4chan is an imageboard. To add something to this site requires the posting of an image (or video) bedside which comments can be added. The post can then attract respondents with a comment or another comment or image. There are no other ways to respond. There is no official archive. A post only rises again if someone responds, bumping it back up to the top. Most threads stay on the home page for only five seconds, and on the site for less than five minutes. Posts are anonymous – not backed by a moniker or pseudonym but properly anonymous. Posters prefer to be allocated a random alphanumeric ID for that particular thread, plus the default name given to each user – ‘Anonymous’. If they participate in a new thread, they will receive a new ID. For most of 4chan’s first decade there was one board called /b/, for random posts – “the beating heart of the website.” (Moore: pp.10-11).

4chan’s structure of anonymity was very well suited to the rapid transmissions of memes described by Richard Dawkins who invented the term in 1976 as information that spread through human culture in viral-like fashion, “as genes spread through the gene pool”. The term “memes” later evolved to describe images – often coming with text – that spread or went ‘viral’ online. Images posted to the site either, in the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” sense, evolved or died. Memes were judged purely on the basis of their content, not context (since there was none), or author ((since this was unknown). Those that were successful replicated. Unconstrained by real-life identities or by social norms, users could experiment at liberty. This structure, provided it was supplied by a large enough community, was bound to create viral content. And so, it did. The community, which had begun as twenty of Poole’s friends, had expanded to 9 million users by 2011. In 2010, MIT computer scientist Michael Bernstein and his colleagues, discovered, 4chan users were adding 400,000 posts per day. Four in ten of these received no reply at all, and the median lifespan of a thread was under four minutes. It was a veritable “meme factory” in the words of Poole. According to Whitney Phillips, who has studied online trolling since 2008, between 2003 – when 4chan was founded m- and 2011, every meme created on the internet (or at least amplified) emerged from 4chan’s /b/board or those around it. (Moore: p.11)

The need to shock to get noticed, the shedding of inhibitions enabled by anonymity, and the predominance of young males on the site rapidly facilitated a toxic and provocative culture on 4chan of deliberate offensiveness, taboo-breaking and aggression. The openness and anonymity of the site created the imperative of “getting noticed” and the only way of attracting attention was through offensive behaviour to women, LGTB people, Jews and people of colour. In this ‘lulz’ culture, users argued that language such as ‘fag’ and references to rape and killing were merely for effect and not to be taken seriously. They argued that those who did take it seriously did not know Poe’s law’ of the internet. This state “that it is difficult to distinguish extremism from satire of extremism in online discussions unless the author clearly indicates his/her intent.”. This distinction was clearly lost on the female recipients of vile misogynistic abuse heaped upon MPs and writers such as the classic scholar Mary Beard in the aftermath of the proposal to put a prominent women figure on the of the newly manufactured £20 note in the UK in 2013 or on the former Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger who received over four hundred abusive tweets in 2014 in a campaign organised by the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin who had set up the Daily Stormer a far-right site which like 4chan enabled users to post images anonymously after the white supremacist who had attacked her received a four-week prison sentence. Poe’s Law is the fallback position, no doubt, for many dubious defenders of the right to free speech.

The political attitudes of chan collective members and their progeny ranged from far-right neo-Nazis, ethno-nationalists and paleo-conservatives to techno-libertarians and national anarchists complemented by elements of the ‘Manosphere’ including men’s rights activists, pick-up artists, anti-feminists and ‘incels’ (for involuntary celibates). But so far their potential political capital had yet to be leveraged. Into this breach stepped the Alt-Right political entrepreneur Steve Bannon of the Breitbart news website. In 2014 Breitbart started to woo these communities towards participation in the 2016 US Presidential campaign. Both shared a commitment to destroying the political and media establishment. The ability of 4-chan and their successors to produce powerful social media viral output and to coordinate attacks on their enemies looked prize assets for an election campaign. Yet the prejudice and aggression (especially the far-right neo-Nazi extremists among them) intrinsic to these groups and their lack of interest in the democratic process made the idea of recruiting them and their methods to a democratic campaign preposterous. But it was only their two shared beliefs – freedom of information and online sovereignty- that Bannon’s Breitbart would utilise in the forthcoming Presidential election. (Moore: pp.20-21).

Bannon had originally been captivated by the power and political potential of these communities in 2007 when he had been brought in to help run an online business that sold virtual items to multi-player gamers – like those on World of Warcraft – for real money. The gamers hated companies like this and did all they could to force them out. Although the business bombed, the journalist and author Joshua Green commented that “Bannon was captivated by what he had discovered by trying to build the business … an underworld he hadn’t known existed that was populated by millions of intense young men” whose collective power could destroy business. (Moore: p.21).

It was the #Gamergate affair in 2014 that provided Breitbart its opportunity to capitalise on this massive human resource potential. Simply put, disparate online users from 4chan and the gaming community became convinced that videogame journalism was unethical, and then used this belief to justify savage and persistent online attacks – including multiple rape and death threats – against female journalists and game developers. Breitbart – and later Bannon and the Trump campaign- politicised this nasty, sordid episode by presenting the battle as a front in a much broader cultural war pitting channers as freedom fighters defending their territory against alien outsiders and the deadening PC hand of the establishment. In this way, it leveraged the only two coherent political credos uniting these subcultures – information freedom and sovereignty. In this culture war, Breitbart framed the left as anti-freedom (expressed as ‘political correctness’) and anti-sovereignty (by being pro-immigration, pro-minorities and pro-gender equality) (Moore: p.22)

Into this turbulence stepped Breitbart’s newly recruited provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, in September 2014 who sought to be the gamers’ champion by turning the narrative on its head. Instead of acknowledging the harassment, doxing and mobbing by the activist gamers, he depicted them as the victims of “an army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners, abetted by achingly politically correct American tech bloggers.’ He dismissed campaigners’ concern over online death threats to women as “death threat hysteria”. (Moore: pp.22-23).

After the launch of Breitbart Tech on 27 October 2015 and an exclusive interview with Donald Trump as the lead story on the main site, the alliance between Breitbart, the chans and the gamers was sealed in the defence of free speech fundamentalism and anonymity against any attempts by left and liberal progressives to take them away. This eclectic mix of lulzy malcontents were then to be mobilised in a culture war which was to climax in the Presidential election of November 2016. In this existential struggle, Breitbart warned apocalyptically that if they did not take up arms, they would be overrun by normies, noobs, social justice warriors and politically correct feminazis who would destroy their world and wipe out their freedoms. (Moore: pp.24-25).

The story of how Bannon, Breitbart and Trump triumphed in this culture has been and will continue to be told ad infinitum. But it is worth emphasising that it was in the name of free speech fundamentalism that the channers, Redditors and gamers hacked opinion polls, raided opposing communities, gamed social media, baited mainstream media, doxxed journalists, created false narratives and promoted outright lies and slander as in #Pizzagate. In debasing democracy through their unexpected victory, they created a model for others to copy – the Freextremist Model.

Free speech is not synonymous with freedom of artistic, intellectual or literary expression. Too many free speech defenders are silent on exactly whose right to free speech they are defending and on how it can directly violate the freedom to live one’s life from fear, harassment and racial, gendered, homophobic and disabilist abuse (not the freedom to be offended). The examples I have discussed in relation to racism on campus and the Trump campaign I hope will blow away the straw men that the Spiked Online of this world construct in pursuit of free speech fundamentalism.


Bibliography

(1) Nesrine Malik. How the myth of a ‘free speech crisis’ was created to normalise hate speech and silence minorities Guardian The Long Read Guardian 3rd September 2019 pp.9-11

(2) Nesrine Malik. There is a crisis on campuses – but it’s racism not free speech Guardian 14th October 2019

(3) Martin Moore. Democracy Hacked. How Technology is Destabilising Global Politics London: Oneworld 2019
Barry Gilheany with an essay on the problems posed by an absolutist adherence to fee speech. 

Freedom of speech and expression is a fundamental principle of faith; an animating philosophical or ideological precept for many liberals or, more precisely and presciently, libertarians. Opposition to censorship is the mission statement of this weblog and contrarian outlets such as Spiked Outline are replete with stories of the suppression of free speech, particularly in academe, at the best of PC/Woke thought police. 

I wish to argue that the myth of free speech rest upon a belief in the neutrality of the marketplace of ideas operating along the principles of free and fair competition which in the long run guarantees a perfect equilibrium of viewpoints and opinions. But just as the hidden hand of the Smithsonian market of goods and services masks the emergence of powerful oligopolies and interest groups who will drive smaller economic actors out of business through muscle and sharp practice, so the logic of perfect competition in the marketplace of ideas conceals the suppression of minority viewpoints and legitimates hate speech by dominant political, cultural and racial actors.

Freedom of speech is not a neutral, fixed concept, uncoloured by societal prejudice argues Nesrine Malik. It has become bogged down in false equivalence and extending the sanctity of fact to opinion, thanks in part to a media more interesting in generating more heat than light from the discourse of free speech. Central to this process is a nexus of curators, publishers and editors for whom controversy is a product to be aggressively marketed (Malik) as opposed to ensuring the promotion of genuine freedom and equality of expression as a public good.

The truth is that, even to its most adamantine founding philosophers and missionaries, free speech always comes decisive caveats, or “braking mechanisms” which reflect the dominant cultural biases (Malik: p.11). John Milton advocated the destruction of blasphemous or libellous works: “Those which otherwise come forth, if they be found mischievous and libellous, the fire and the executioner will be the timeliest and most effective remedy, that mans [sic] prevention can use.” Contemporary vetoes on free speech or their “braking mechanisms still do not include the prevention of hate speech towards those at the bottom end of the social hierarchy, because their protection is not central to popular culture argues Malik (Malik: p.11).

For in this era of free and unmediated speech in which anyone with access to the internet can blog, tweet and comment with little vetting; it has been women, minorities and LGBTQ who have reaped the consequences of the exponential spread of online expression over the last decade or so.

A 2017 Pew Research Centre survey revealed that a “wide cross-section” of Americans experience online abuse, but that the majority was directed towards minorities, with a quarter of African Americans reported being attacked online due to their race or ethnicity and ten per cent of Hispanics and 3% of whites reporting the same. In the UK, an Amnesty International analysis of abusive tweets sent to 177 women British MPs found that the twenty of them from BAME backgrounds received almost half the total of these tweets. (Malik: p.9).

While most of this abuse goes unpunished, it seems to have become received wisdom that free speech is under siege from zealous no-platformers on university campuses and social media mobs determined to take offence at and punish the slightest infraction of minority sensibilities; the most innocuous slip of the tongue or joke. The cause of this systemic assault on the Enlightenment values of freedom of expression and individual liberty is a behemoth of liberal/PC totalitarianism purporting to be acting on behalf of or in the interests of “the weak, easily wounded and coddled.” (Malik: pp.10-11).

One of the most siren voices warning of the colonisation of UK universities by the forces of PC/woke/liberal tyranny is the libertarian website Spiked Online (familiar to many from this parish). Between 2015 and 2018, it published “Free Speech Rankings” of universities, which purported to show how rife censorship is on campuses. But its rankings were disproved by Carl Thompson of the University of Surrey who, writing in Times Higher Education, found that “about 85% to 90% of Spiked’s evidence each year amounts merely to human resources policy and codes of conduct, of a sort now standard in most large organisations and often required by law.” But this did not stop the Spiked research being widely quoted. (Malik).

Other siren voices on the PC “crisis” simply make up stories in a manner that would please the director of any Russian troll factory. In 2017, students wrote an open letter to the Faculty of English at Cambridge University requesting the addition of non-white authors to the curriculum. Four months later, the Daily Telegraph published a black female student’s picture on its front page with the headline “Student forces Cambridge to drop white authors”; this despite the sum total of zero complaints from faculty members of fellow students. Not only had Cambridge Faculty of English not removed any white authors from its curriculum, the open letter had made no such demand in the first place nor was the featured student the sole signatory. The next day, the Telegraph printed a retraction on page two (Malik).

The reality is probably very difficult on campus from the policing of behaviour, behaviour and knowledge dissemination by the PC enforcers who demand that white authors be replaced on reading lists by those of colour; that trigger warnings be issued ahead of classes on classic literature; that safe spaces be set up for disadvantaged minorities and that jazz hands replace hand clapping at student events which so exercises the imagination of Brendan O’Neill and other high priests of “free speech”. Such localised and incidental phenomena undoubtedly have occurred but does this really mean the extinction of free speech on campuses; the creation of a generation of snowflakes by the forces of woke totalitarianism? For hard data on the real crisis of racism on campus over the last two years or so gives the lie to their confected narrative of suppression of free speech.

In 2018, it was reported that the number of racist incidents in universities across the UK had surged by more than 60% in the previous two years. A similar spike in the number of religiously motivated hate crimes at universities was revealed in a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by the Independent newspaper with anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim incidents reported at 26 UK universities. The UK Equality and Human Rights Commission has launched an official inquiry into what seems to be a virulent outbreak of racism on campus. A Warwick University student discovered racial slurs written on bananas he had stored in a shared kitchen. In 2018, two 18-year-old men were arrested after a Nottingham Trent University student posted video footage of racist chants, including “we hate the blacks” outside her bedroom door in her student hall of residence. Such incidents only come to public notice when they are distributed on social media; in the words of the Black, Minority Ethnic ( BME) student officer for University College London in the Guardian in 2018: “We would hear about a case [every day] in the media if everything that happened went online” (Malik).

Just do the arithmetic concerning the spike in the aforementioned race and religious hate incidents reported in the two years before 2018 and one is led to a seminal event in recent UK history that took place two years before 2018 – the Brexit vote in the EU referendum of 2016; which the failure of the UK parliament to implement justifies “riots in the streets” in the words of Brendan O’Neill. I may have missed something but I am not aware of any legal action by somebody acting on behalf of the “liberal” or “woke” elite to hold Mr O’Neill to account for his inflammatory comment; is verbal abuse of Remain public figures as “traitors” and “collaborators” and accompanying threats to life and limb not sufficiently robust exercise of “freedom of speech” in the eyes of the bould Brendan? Is he capable of drawing any boundaries to the expression of this inviolable right regardless of the consequences? Probably not. But it is fairly safe to assume that the upsurge in race and xenophobic hate incidents and sentiment in British society since the referendum is reflected in what has been happening on British campuses. This impression is confirmed by a Guardian FOI request in July 2019 which found not only widespread evidence discrimination in higher education but institutional reluctance by higher education authorities to acknowledge and tackle the problem of racism in British universities. In October 2019, senior staff at Goldsmith, University of London, the supposed capital of campus wokeness, admitted its record of addressing racism was “unacceptable” after a report found that BME students felt victimised and unsafe (Malik).

This manufactured crisis over free speech on universities is one front in the contemporary backlash against the advances of minority groups; in the culture war against the left. The purpose of free speech crisis myth is to guilt trip people into giving up their right of response to attacks and to legitimate racism and prejudice. Its logic, rather than a pursuit of a prized Enlightenment value, has become a race to the bottom. It is, according to the director of the Institute of Race Relations, “the privileging of freedom of speech over freedom to life” (Malik: p.10)

But this supposed free speech crisis was never about free speech at all. Behind the myth is the rising anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiment in the Western world. The progenitors of the free speech crisis really wanted to deploy this sacrosanct right against minorities, women, immigrants and Muslims. They cloak this animus in the language of anti-establishment or anti-elite conspiracism. Similar to the triggers of the political correctness clamour, there is a symbiosis between free speech panic and populist far right energy as evidenced by the Brexit vote in the UK; the election of Donald Trump as US President and the electoral successes of nativist across Europe such as Marine Le Pen in France, Salvini in Italy, Orban in Hungary and the Alternative Deutschland in Germany. As the space for these views widened, so the original concept of free speech became entangled in a misunderstanding of free speech as absolute with no differentiation between fact and opinion (Malik: p.10) and false equivalence between differing points of view and narratives; most critically on matters of science such as climate change and childhood vaccination.

Writing in the wake of the election of Donald Trump as US President in November 2016 and to subsequent electoral successes for far-right nationalist populist parties in Europe throughout 2017, the media analyst Martin Moore conceptualises the “freextremist model” to describe the ideological underpinnings and modus operandi of the movements responsible for such stunning successes of the contemporary far right or Alt-Right. He describes how the ‘deliberate transgression and destruction of democratic norms in the digital sphere” has been driven forward in the US by the fusion between the brand of ideological conservatism propounded by Steve Bannon’s Breitbart news website and the tactics of the videogame and ‘Manosphere” subcultures which rested on the inviolability of the dual concept of online freedom and sovereignty. He points out that since in no circumstances is it legitimate to harm others in the pursuit of freedom – except in wartime – then “freextremists” justify their behaviour because they are in virtual combat with those with differing values and who seek to restrict their freedom – the enemy in this case they see as the hegemonic, politically correct and pro-gender equality left (Moore, 2019).

Some explanation of how this alliance came to be is in order. First some historical background of the online warriors that Steve Bannon and Trump so successfully weaponised is necessary. The story begins with a tech guru surprisingly unknown outside Silicon Valley – Stewart Brand. Surprising because Brand on three occasions in three decades was central to three events which fused the disparate trends in tech culture – in the later 1960s with his Whole Earth Catalog, a three days hackers conference in San Francisco in November 1984 and the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link and in the 1990s with Wired magazine in collaboration with Kevin Kelly with whom he had organised the Hackers conference. He embodied the “Californian Ideology” as defined by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in 1995 – the marriage of the freewheeling alternative generation with tech innovation and free-market entrepreneurialism (Moore: pp. 6-7).

At the afore-mentioned hackers’ conference, hackers enthusiastically embraced what the author Steven Levy described as “The Hacker’s Ethic” with one ethic supreme above all – “All Information should be free.”. This dictum moulded the individual geeks into a wider collective. Information was to, in the words of Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture “to circulate openly through the community of hackers, simultaneously freeing them to act as individuals and binding them in a community of like minds” in the manner of “the mystical energy that was supposed to circulate through the communes of the back-to-the-land movement.” The distinction between ‘information’ as code and ‘free’ in its flow through the computing system and its cost was lost, leaving the belief that “all information should be free” to be the fundamental credo of netizens (Moore: pp.7-8)

With the expansion of the internet along the information superhighways of the 1990s; a network that to its devotees was a new world that would be governed by its inhabitants according to different rules from the old. This was the second commandment of the net – that the inhabitants of cyberspace should be sovereign in their own land. This belief was formally annunciated by another prominent denizen of cyberspace from this era – the former lyric writer for The Grateful Dead, John Henry Barlow, who had migrated to the online world through his involvement with the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or WELL. In 1990 Barlow and two others from the WELL formed the Electronic Frontier Foundation to protect civil liberties on cyberspace (after a raid by the US Secret Service on the offices of a small games book publisher and accessed its emails in search of a non-existent document. When in 1996, the US government attempted to introduce a law to outlaw the exchange of ‘obscene or indecent’ communications amongst those aged under eighteen, Barlow penned his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home Mind,” he portentously declared “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome amongst us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” (Moore: p.9)

With the internet gold rush in the Millennium era came a cast of virtual pioneers and prospectors of which the most important for this discussion was the 4-chan community formed in 2003 by Chris ‘moot’ Poole. To understand the future political impact of this site, it is important to know something about its architecture and operations.

4chan is an imageboard. To add something to this site requires the posting of an image (or video) bedside which comments can be added. The post can then attract respondents with a comment or another comment or image. There are no other ways to respond. There is no official archive. A post only rises again if someone responds, bumping it back up to the top. Most threads stay on the home page for only five seconds, and on the site for less than five minutes. Posts are anonymous – not backed by a moniker or pseudonym but properly anonymous. Posters prefer to be allocated a random alphanumeric ID for that particular thread, plus the default name given to each user – ‘Anonymous’. If they participate in a new thread, they will receive a new ID. For most of 4chan’s first decade there was one board called /b/, for random posts – “the beating heart of the website.” (Moore: pp.10-11).

4chan’s structure of anonymity was very well suited to the rapid transmissions of memes described by Richard Dawkins who invented the term in 1976 as information that spread through human culture in viral-like fashion, “as genes spread through the gene pool”. The term “memes” later evolved to describe images – often coming with text – that spread or went ‘viral’ online. Images posted to the site either, in the Darwinian “survival of the fittest” sense, evolved or died. Memes were judged purely on the basis of their content, not context (since there was none), or author ((since this was unknown). Those that were successful replicated. Unconstrained by real-life identities or by social norms, users could experiment at liberty. This structure, provided it was supplied by a large enough community, was bound to create viral content. And so, it did. The community, which had begun as twenty of Poole’s friends, had expanded to 9 million users by 2011. In 2010, MIT computer scientist Michael Bernstein and his colleagues, discovered, 4chan users were adding 400,000 posts per day. Four in ten of these received no reply at all, and the median lifespan of a thread was under four minutes. It was a veritable “meme factory” in the words of Poole. According to Whitney Phillips, who has studied online trolling since 2008, between 2003 – when 4chan was founded m- and 2011, every meme created on the internet (or at least amplified) emerged from 4chan’s /b/board or those around it. (Moore: p.11)

The need to shock to get noticed, the shedding of inhibitions enabled by anonymity, and the predominance of young males on the site rapidly facilitated a toxic and provocative culture on 4chan of deliberate offensiveness, taboo-breaking and aggression. The openness and anonymity of the site created the imperative of “getting noticed” and the only way of attracting attention was through offensive behaviour to women, LGTB people, Jews and people of colour. In this ‘lulz’ culture, users argued that language such as ‘fag’ and references to rape and killing were merely for effect and not to be taken seriously. They argued that those who did take it seriously did not know Poe’s law’ of the internet. This state “that it is difficult to distinguish extremism from satire of extremism in online discussions unless the author clearly indicates his/her intent.”. This distinction was clearly lost on the female recipients of vile misogynistic abuse heaped upon MPs and writers such as the classic scholar Mary Beard in the aftermath of the proposal to put a prominent women figure on the of the newly manufactured £20 note in the UK in 2013 or on the former Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger who received over four hundred abusive tweets in 2014 in a campaign organised by the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin who had set up the Daily Stormer a far-right site which like 4chan enabled users to post images anonymously after the white supremacist who had attacked her received a four-week prison sentence. Poe’s Law is the fallback position, no doubt, for many dubious defenders of the right to free speech.

The political attitudes of chan collective members and their progeny ranged from far-right neo-Nazis, ethno-nationalists and paleo-conservatives to techno-libertarians and national anarchists complemented by elements of the ‘Manosphere’ including men’s rights activists, pick-up artists, anti-feminists and ‘incels’ (for involuntary celibates). But so far their potential political capital had yet to be leveraged. Into this breach stepped the Alt-Right political entrepreneur Steve Bannon of the Breitbart news website. In 2014 Breitbart started to woo these communities towards participation in the 2016 US Presidential campaign. Both shared a commitment to destroying the political and media establishment. The ability of 4-chan and their successors to produce powerful social media viral output and to coordinate attacks on their enemies looked prize assets for an election campaign. Yet the prejudice and aggression (especially the far-right neo-Nazi extremists among them) intrinsic to these groups and their lack of interest in the democratic process made the idea of recruiting them and their methods to a democratic campaign preposterous. But it was only their two shared beliefs – freedom of information and online sovereignty- that Bannon’s Breitbart would utilise in the forthcoming Presidential election. (Moore: pp.20-21).

Bannon had originally been captivated by the power and political potential of these communities in 2007 when he had been brought in to help run an online business that sold virtual items to multi-player gamers – like those on World of Warcraft – for real money. The gamers hated companies like this and did all they could to force them out. Although the business bombed, the journalist and author Joshua Green commented that “Bannon was captivated by what he had discovered by trying to build the business … an underworld he hadn’t known existed that was populated by millions of intense young men” whose collective power could destroy business. (Moore: p.21).

It was the #Gamergate affair in 2014 that provided Breitbart its opportunity to capitalise on this massive human resource potential. Simply put, disparate online users from 4chan and the gaming community became convinced that videogame journalism was unethical, and then used this belief to justify savage and persistent online attacks – including multiple rape and death threats – against female journalists and game developers. Breitbart – and later Bannon and the Trump campaign- politicised this nasty, sordid episode by presenting the battle as a front in a much broader cultural war pitting channers as freedom fighters defending their territory against alien outsiders and the deadening PC hand of the establishment. In this way, it leveraged the only two coherent political credos uniting these subcultures – information freedom and sovereignty. In this culture war, Breitbart framed the left as anti-freedom (expressed as ‘political correctness’) and anti-sovereignty (by being pro-immigration, pro-minorities and pro-gender equality) (Moore: p.22)

Into this turbulence stepped Breitbart’s newly recruited provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, in September 2014 who sought to be the gamers’ champion by turning the narrative on its head. Instead of acknowledging the harassment, doxing and mobbing by the activist gamers, he depicted them as the victims of “an army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners, abetted by achingly politically correct American tech bloggers.’ He dismissed campaigners’ concern over online death threats to women as “death threat hysteria”. (Moore: pp.22-23).

After the launch of Breitbart Tech on 27 October 2015 and an exclusive interview with Donald Trump as the lead story on the main site, the alliance between Breitbart, the chans and the gamers was sealed in the defence of free speech fundamentalism and anonymity against any attempts by left and liberal progressives to take them away. This eclectic mix of lulzy malcontents were then to be mobilised in a culture war which was to climax in the Presidential election of November 2016. In this existential struggle, Breitbart warned apocalyptically that if they did not take up arms, they would be overrun by normies, noobs, social justice warriors and politically correct feminazis who would destroy their world and wipe out their freedoms. (Moore: pp.24-25).

The story of how Bannon, Breitbart and Trump triumphed in this culture has been and will continue to be told ad infinitum. But it is worth emphasising that it was in the name of free speech fundamentalism that the channers, Redditors and gamers hacked opinion polls, raided opposing communities, gamed social media, baited mainstream media, doxxed journalists, created false narratives and promoted outright lies and slander as in #Pizzagate. In debasing democracy through their unexpected victory, they created a model for others to copy – the Freextremist Model.

Free speech is not synonymous with freedom of artistic, intellectual or literary expression. Too many free speech defenders are silent on exactly whose right to free speech they are defending and on how it can directly violate the freedom to live one’s life from fear, harassment and racial, gendered, homophobic and disabilist abuse (not the freedom to be offended). The examples I have discussed in relation to racism on campus and the Trump campaign I hope will blow away the straw men that the Spiked Online of this world construct in pursuit of free speech fundamentalism.


Bibliography

(1) Nesrine Malik. How the myth of a ‘free speech crisis’ was created to normalise hate speech and silence minorities Guardian The Long Read Guardian 3rd September 2019 pp.9-11

(2) Nesrine Malik. There is a crisis on campuses – but it’s racism not free speech Guardian 14th October 2019

(3) Martin Moore. Democracy Hacked. How Technology is Destabilising Global Politics London: Oneworld 2019

➽ Barry Gilheany is the author of a PhD thesis Post-Eighth Abortion Politics in the Republic of Ireland from Essex University, Department of Government. He is also the author of The Discursive Construction of Abortion in Georgina Waylen & Vicky Randall (Eds) Gender, The State and Politics Routledge, 1998.

Free Speech ➤ Absolute Principle Or Licence To Hate

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