We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent

by Nesrine Malik

In the 1990s, PC quickly became defined as an incursion by ‘special interests’ because the establishment viewed itself as apolitical, natural and promoting universal values.

The most effective way to counter political correctness crisis myth is not succumbing to Frequency Scrambling, and recognising the scale and history of confection. The way to dispel the myth is by sticking with a forceful presentation of reality and avoiding hesitation when making the case for respect and social cohesion.

instead of university campuses full of privileged snowflakes, British universities have recorded a rise in racism. In the US, instead of a salving of the wounds of slavery, on the back of the free-for-all language of Trump, the non-PC president, there are white nationalist marches and an escalation of antisemitic violence.

‘The claim that free speech is under attack is often a mask for other political frustrations and fears.’ Will Davies

This is the myth of the free speech crisis. It is an extension of the political correctness myth but is a recent mutation more specifically linked to efforts or impulses to normalise hate speech or shut down legitimate responses to it. The purpose of the myth is not to secure freedom of speech, that is, the right to express one’s opinions without censorship, restraint or legal penalty. The purpose is to secure the licence to speak with impunity; not freedom of expression, but rather freedom from the consequences of that expression.

The freedom of speech crisis myth’s purpose is to guilt people into giving up their right of response to attack and to destigmatise racism and prejudice. It aims to blackmail good people into ceding space to bad ideas, even though they have a legitimate right to refuse. And it is a myth that demands in turn, its own silencing and undermining of individual freedom.

The Overton window, the range of ideas deemed to be acceptable by the public at any one time,

No one discussed the four figures who were banned, their neo-Nazi views, or the hate speech implications on community relations in the UK had they been allowed in or just the risk of violence.

This logic today demands silence from those who are defending themselves from abuse or hate speech. It is, according to the drector of the Institute of Race Relations, ‘the privileging of freedom of speech over freedom to life’.

there is a direct correlation between the rise in free speech panic and the rise in far-right or hard-right political energy, as evidenced by anti-immigration right-wing electoral successes in the US, the UK and across continental Europe.

Like all freedoms, it ends when it infringes upon the freedoms of others.

the first hint the free speech crisis is actually an absolute speech crisis is the issues it focuses on. On university campuses, it is overwhelmingly around race and gender. On social media, the free speech axe is wielded by trolls, Islamophobes and misogynists, leading to an abuse epidemic that platforms have failed to curb. This free speech crisis movement has managed to stigmatise reasonable protest, which has existed for years without being branded as ‘silencing’, in itself an assault on free expression.

Like the political correctness gone too far hysteria, free speech crisis concerns appeal to a certain type of liberal, one who is oblivious to how these moral panics are fabricated and manipulated by those with an agenda. This liberal is blinded by the eagerness to land generally on the right side of freedom and individual liberty.

This is the dirty secret about freedom of speech, rather than being an ideal, it is a litmus test of a society’s prejudices.

perhaps the good intention of balance on the part of some – many media platforms have detoxified radical and untruthful behaviour that was until recently confined to the darker corners of Reddit and Breitbart. And that radical and untruthful behaviour has a direct impact on how safe the world is for those smeared by these performances.

A world where all opinions and lies are presented to the public as a sort of take it or leave it buffet, is often described as ‘the marketplace of ideas’, a rationalisation for freedom of expression based on comparing ideas to products in a free market economy. The marketplace of ideas model of free speech holds that what is true factually, and what is good morally, will emerge after a competition of ideas in a free, unmoderated and transparent public discourse, a healthy debate where the truth will prevail. Bad ideas and ideologies will lose out and wither away as they are vanquished by superior ones. The problem with the marketplace of ideas theory (as with all ‘invisible hand’ type theories) is that it does not account for a world in which the market is skewed and not all ideas receive equal representation, because the market has monopolies and cartels.

He cites the example of support for the Iraq War as a failure of media judgement for which there was no censure.

In the UK Nigel Farage, the former head of the Eurosceptic right-wing populist United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), is an example of this lopsided marketplace of ideas. An elected member of the European parliament, Farage headed up a party that at its peak held only two seats in the British Parliament. Farage himself has run for a British parliamentary seat a total of seven times. He lost every single election. But when one looks at his media profile, it is vastly disproportionate to his modest success. By February 2018, the BBC’s most prestigious political debate programme Question Time had invited Nigel Farage on the show thirty-two times, making him the joint most invited guest in the history of the show.

This has never stopped him from claiming that he was silenced and shunned by the ‘establishment’.

This is an era when there has never been more airtime given to extremist views, while constantly having to listen to the purveyors of those fringe views complain about their lack of platform.

Claiming to be silenced plays an important part in both sexing up views that have become dulled by mainstreaming, while at the same time conferring a sort of underdog legitimacy on to plain old bigotry. When there is no evidence that prejudice is bei...

That trick was to relaunch himself as a free speech martyr.

Rob Ford, professor of politics at the University of Manchester told the Observer newspaper that Robinson’s ‘true ingenuity’ in striking a chord with an international far-right movement was marrying his street vigilante credentials with the motif of a censoring establishment. ‘This is exactly the argument they like,’ said Ford, ‘because it means they can say, “we’re the truly brave liberals”. The degree to which it has gone viral as an argument shows this is a winner for the radical right. It strongly motivates their core electorate.’

The freedom of speech crisis myth brought Tommy Robinson back from the dead.

Both in the US and the UK, ‘no-platforming’ is regarded by both those on the right and the left as an epidemic. In 2015, the libertarian website Spiked published a Free Speech University Ranking. The only conclusion to be drawn from the data it harvested was that there was a plague of free speech suppression. This conclusion was a result of massaging the data. Times Higher Education (THE) called it ‘misleading, ill-informed and worryingly influential’. Upon closer analysis the THE found that: ‘about 85 per cent to 90 per cent of Spiked’s evidence each year amounts merely to human resources policies and codes of conduct, of a sort now standard in most large organisations and often required by law. Spiked offers no evidence that these policies have ever been applied in a fashion that repressed free speech, or that they have generated discontent among staff, students or the wider public.’ This did not stop the Spiked research from being widely quoted. The Telegraph newspaper republished the results without question, as well as running an op-ed entitled ‘The poshos pushing campus censorship’ which was written by the ‘neutral’ pen of Spiked assistant editor Tom Slater. ‘You’d have to have been living under a rock’ he writes, ‘not to know that British universities have in recent years turned into a cross between Stalinist Russia and a soft-play area.’ During a British parliamentary select committee looking into free speech issues in higher education, three of the four witnesses ...

In 2018, it emerged that Spiked received six-figure donations from the Charles Koch Foundation

‘There is no campus free speech crisis,’ Sachs concluded, ‘the right’s new moral panic is largely imaginary.’

So not only does the data show that there is no free speech crisis as such, it also illustrates that, as myths tend to do, there is a mobilisation against progressive causes that outstrips any activity on the allegedly censorious left.

The rise in intolerance of racist speech and the rise in the scale of racist provocations are intersecting and we are drawing the wrong conclusion – that there is a free speech crisis. In fact, it is a polarisation crisis. What is really on the cards with this misdiagnosis is a chilling effect and the quieting of voices that are protesting harmful speech. This objection is being delegitimised by dismissing it as a rejection of free speech, and deploying ‘what next’ fallacies. What next fallacy promoters claim that curbing free speech, even if it is harmful, is a ‘slippery slope’.

The logic of the ‘slippery slope’ is the technical tool that the freedom of speech crisis myth deploys to either end the argument or divert attention away from the inconvenient distinctions and nuances that conflate freedom of speech and right to platform with freedom from consequence. It goes something like this: if you enable censorship or the silencing of views you do not like that exposes the views you do like to censorship as well. You will be next. University of Amsterdam academic Magdalena Jozwiak summarises the slippery slope argument as: ‘Today this speech restriction, tomorrow the Inquisition.’

It is a compelling argument that has achieved almost canonical status. It just sounds like it makes sense. It seems neat and logical and the imagery, that of an evil nourished by our shortsightedness, is vivid. Its essence is in Martin Niemöller’s famous poem ‘First they came …’, which ends with the chilling line: ‘Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.’

To believe in defending views with which you disagree implies a moral robustness and intellectual largesse. But the slippery slope argument is based on two wrong assumptions. The first is false equivalence. The second is that...

Lines are drawn to limit drinking, sexual activity and voting by age, abortion by foetal growth stage, prison sentences by severity of crime. The entire existence of a functioning society is predicated on the business of drawing lines and distinctions between things where there are only shades of difference, often in extremely complicated and emotive areas. But somehow, according to the freedom of speech crisis logic, our ability to do so will collapse when trying to draw a line between the KKK and Black Lives Matter.

The slippery slope is also often presented as a ‘what if’ hypothetical, as opposed to pointing out something that has already happened (which would be helpful in validating the premise).

The myth of the free speech crisis has been pushed by right-wing funding and activism, but it has also been indulged by those on the left who are prone to commitment to abstract ideals that are virtuous in essence, but sometimes unfit for application without modulation.

A moral right to express unpopular opinions is not a moral right to express those opinions in a way that silences the voices of others, or puts them in danger of violence.

In 2018, far-right terror convictions in the UK surpassed those of Islamic terror organisations for the first time. In the US, white-orchestrated terrorism has claimed more lives on US soil than any other identity-based terrorism since 9/11.

The danger of the myth is in the smearing of legitimate campaigns for dignity and equal treatment as obsessed with victimhood, and the empowering of ‘backlash’ political behaviour (such as whites across classes voting for Trump in the election).

What the damaging identity politics myth is based on is the perception that political motivations of the powerful are rational and untinged by anything as base as furthering an identity agenda.

There is evidence to suggest that feelings of economic anxiety are correlated to racial entitlement.

This is aggressive identity politics that is constantly legitimised by reaching for false economic analysis. The evidence, both from academic research papers and media polls, that prejudices about race, gender and immigration animated support for Trump, has been mounting since the election. Trump’s tenure has been characterised by even more racist and sexist dog whistling, without impacting his popularity among his base.

On the whole, the votes for Trump were not just conservative, they were regressive – in that they were strongly motivated by a need to freeze the status quo, or ideally return to a much more hierarchical time just before things get a bit too blurry

When surveys assessed ‘social dominance orientation’, a psychological measure of a person’s belief in hierarchy as necessary and inherent to a society, those who displayed a belief in the importance of this sort of vertical order were more likely to be Trump supporters.

In 2018, an author of one such study told the New York Times that ‘it used to be a pretty good deal to be a white, Christian male in America, but things have changed and I think they do feel threatened’. This is not only aggressive identity politics, in the sense that it is political activity along the lines of race, it is one that is based on paranoia. It is politics that does not even have the excuse or justification of grievance. It is an exercise in power maintenance or reclamation, rather than real injustices.

One New York journalist told me (in what became a heated discussion) that coal miners had not mentioned race once when he interviewed them. When he brought up race, they did not seem overly exercised by it. What was missing from his absolving of his subjects was the fact that they were not bothered or disturbed by the fact that nominee Trump had already made racist statements about Muslims, Mexicans and immigrants. This ambivalence towards his racism was interpreted as neutrality, rather than endorsement. This element was heavily discounted during the electoral race.

The phrases ‘legitimate concerns’, in the UK, and ‘economic anxiety’, in the US, are now memes, jokes, ironic comments to be appended to viral videos of hate crimes and racial and religious abuse targeting Muslims and ethnic minorities.

White aggressive identity politics is maintained by nailing this implausibility. Its political agenda is to glorify national and racial purity and sell a guarantee of social status based on that racial purity, without making it so obvious that it turns off everyone apart from the most extreme ethno-nationalists. It is the only way it can achieve mainstream traction, to maintain deniability about fundamentally racist agendas. The goal, the sweet spot of this identity politics, is to achieve a state where a white person can believe that they are good, while also believing that discriminatory policies against non-white people are either necessary or are simply being made up. This is a duality that exists at the heart of Anglo-American history.

Trump’s pact with his base is a promise of coronation based on identity. A pledge that he will restore the old ways, the old hierarchy of race, gender, nationality and sexuality. White elites are susceptible to wink logic because it gives them an easy way out, a disclaimer.

Wink logic broadly has two schools. The first innocently invokes patriotism, love for one’s country and the virtues of tradition. The language here paints a picture of an ideal snapshot in a country’s history. In the United States, it would be a suburban scene from the 1950s, an advertorial from before the civil rights movement encroached on the public peace, when blacks were commendably free and yet conveniently separate. It evokes a time of post-war reconstruction, growing affluence and consumerist plenty. The image is of a white man in a suit and a hat, carrying a briefcase, with a trench coat casually hanging over one arm. He is walking towards his Chevrolet, presumably to go to work, but is half turning towards his bungalow to wave goodbye to his wife and child. In the UK, it would be a black and white image from the Swinging Sixties, a few years after the end of wartime rationing and before the strikes, power cuts, pickets and inflation of the 1970s. Two young white women in mini dresses, sharp bobs and heavily made-up eyes walk on each side of a swaggering man in a fur coat. He is smoking a cigar and feigning shock at the camera as he walks down a cobbled London street.

White liberal elites have been forced to pay attention because for the first time in a long time, white identity politics has not worked in their favour by ushering in a Republican president with which they share no establishment interests, intellectual synergy or networks.