The War against Free Expression

The war against free expression proceeds. Yesterday, Twitter or X shut down operations in Brazil because a judge was threatening a local employee. The judge threatened to have the company’s local legal representative arrested if he did not take down content that the judge wanted taken down.

Compare this to Argentina, the home of a libertarian revolution, led by president Javier Milei. Yesterday, on Argentina’s National Children’s Day , Milei issued a proclamation against transmania:

It vows to protect kids against harmful and radical gender ideology. Children are our future!

But, the champion of repression must now be the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, an incipient tyrant who arrogates to himself and his police the decision of what is or is not acceptable content. Of course, that includes retweets. Think twice before your retweet lands you in jail in once-Great Britain.

I trust that you never imagined that a human rights lawyer like Starmer could end up leading the charge against free expression, but that only means that you overestimated human rights lawyers.

Julie Burchill offers a sane and sober analysis of the situation in The Sun. She remarks that: 

… the woke mantra of “words are literally violence” has been eagerly adopted by the British police.

The Labour government has found its ultimate enemy, the right wing:

As they’ve been pretty bad at solving actual violent crimes — in 2020 the Victims Commissioner warned of the imminent “decriminalization of rape” in the United Kingdom — it seems odd and a trifle unhinged that they’ve widened their brief so. 

Those who only recently called for the defunding of the police are supporting the furthering of police powers now that they will be used against the “Extreme Right.”

For those us who do not inhabit the British Isles, Burchill explains that it all means:

Members of the aforementioned right are, nine times out of ten, simply disaffected and powerless working-class white people. Extraordinary measures include two 12-year-olds becoming the youngest ever accused of “violent disorder” — will British courts revert to criminal trials of animals soon, as we did until the 18th century? — and the jailing of people, for years, for their behavior on social media.

Strangely enough, the new British lawfare resembles nothing other than blasphemy laws. If you live in Iran you cannot speak ill of a certain religion or of its prophet. Now, the same rule is being applied in England:

Perhaps the most chilling — yet encouraging, because of its cloth-eared, tone-deaf imbecility — unintentional self-tell by the powers that be came when it was reported that a man appeared in court on the charge of posting “anti-Muslim and anti-establishment rhetoric.”

What a glorious, hilarious giveaway. It no longer feels paranoid to believe that there is a desire that only licensed commentators should be allowed to give their opinions on “anti-establishment” beliefs (such as those that immigration should be controlled) in the next phase of social and actual policing — and eventually, not even then.

Now, the war against racist comments is supposed to stamp out racism. But, does it does what it is supposed to do:

In terms of stamping out racism, which is the ostensible intent, it’s bound to be counter-productive; you’ll get a short-term win by deterring a few people from saying racist things online, but that’s not going to magically stop them being racists.

It’s just going to turn them into angrier racists, who’ll be more likely to lash out at the people of color they meet in their everyday lives — at locations the police have not been informed of beforehand.

But it is all very selective. Which is the real problem. It is not designed to advance the cause of justice. It is designed to shut down certain opinions and to produce nationwide indoctrination. Dan Hannan writes in the Washington Examiner:

Since then, climate extremists and anti-Israel marchers have been tolerated in a way that, say, football hooligans would never be. In March, a woman slashed a portrait in Cambridge of Lord Balfour by the artist Philip Alexius de László, angry because the Balfour Declaration had paved the way for a Jewish homeland. Although she made a point of having her vandalism filmed, she has not been arrested or charged.

Hannan continues:

It was Starmer’s first big test, and he flunked it. He could have posed unequivocally as a defender of the king’s peace, making clear that any vandalism or disorder, regardless of the perpetrators’ motives, would be met by the full force of the law.

Instead, he kept harping on about the “far Right” and the need to “defend communities” and suggested a crackdown on social media.

In other words, he seemed to take sides. Instead of pushing disinterestedly for the restoration of order, he slotted events into the comfortable narrative of “Right-wingers Attack Innocent Minorities.” While some perpetrators fit that description, their motives ought to have been irrelevant. The point is that all acts of violence, intimidation, and vandalism should be treated equally, whether they are carried out by racist dunderheads or by pro-Hamas thugs.

One recalls that once-Great Britain has on occasion ignored the existence of grooming gangs, groups of Pakestanis who sex trafficked and gang raped school girls in Rotherham, for instance.

Now the home secretary, one Yvette Cooper, is reviewing the definition of misogyny. What do you want to bet that the new definition allows for grooming gangs? And, what do you want to bet that it does not include honor killings and wife beatings, that is, certain activities that would normally be considered misogyny, unless they are practiced by members of a certain religion.