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by
Andrew Doyle
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October 18, 2023 - January 1, 2024
The principle of free speech has become difficult to defend because so many have accepted the false premise that defending the speech rights of unpleasant people amounts to an endorsement of their words.
If hatred is a matter of perception and not intent, and even the context of dramatic representation is considered irrelevant, how can we possibly safeguard against the abuse of state power?
Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.
So while we must exercise a degree of caution when it comes to drawing comparisons between the antics of ‘woke’ activists and the horrors that Solzhenitsyn describes, we would be remiss not to note that their instincts are nonetheless authoritarian in nature. They may not support the violent suppression of their opponents, but they do generally countenance the removal of ‘problematic’ monuments, or the censorship of outdated books, or campaigns to expand ‘hate speech’ laws. Additionally, they display the tendency to reduce moral and political questions to the simplistic binary of ‘good’ and
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The Gulag Archipelago works as a cautionary tale against the inchmeal drift into authoritarianism. For instance, we have seen how ‘hate speech’ laws and police guidance often disregard the significance of intention in favour of a perception-led assessment. Solzhenitsyn warns against precisely this development. Chapter 10 of Part 3 of The Gulag Archipelago relates a number of examples of Soviet citizens who were incarcerated for many years simply because their intentions were deemed inconsequential to the perceived transgression. A villager who used his belt to carry a heavy bust of Stalin was
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‘The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies.’ This is a line from Solzhenitsyn’s acceptance speech at the Swedish Academy upon winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The complacency of the Trump administration meant that he left office in 2021 with big tech still enjoying the protections afforded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which was introduced in 1996 so that companies could moderate user posts without being legally defined as publishers. This was especially important when it came to online comment sections, where it would be unjust to hold news outlets culpable for illegal or libellous content uploaded by users. While this provision was therefore necessary, the act could easily have been amended so that its protections only
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Rowan Atkinson, who argued that ‘the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended’.
It should surprise nobody that controversial figures have an interest in defending freedom of speech given that uncontroversial speech is never under threat. The principle cannot be said to be invalidated simply because those we dislike endorse it. In surrendering our ideals out of fear of guilt by association, we subordinate our own moral agency to those we fundamentally oppose. A former friend of mine once told me that defending Meechan’s right to free speech was out of the question because Tommy Robinson got there first. I asked him why, if he so despised Robinson, would he grant him the
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one would have thought that they might have considered Occam’s Razor in their deductions. Which scenario is more likely? That Meechan was playing a joke on his girlfriend which some found offensive, or that he was attempting to radicalise people to the far right through the medium of pugs?
It is a truism that people are often educated out of extreme religious beliefs. With good education comes the ability to think critically, which is the death knell for ideologies that are built on tenuous foundations. The religion of Critical Social Justice has spread at an unprecedented rate, partly because it makes claims to authority in the kind of impenetrable language that discourages the sort of criticism and scrutiny that would see it collapse upon itself. Some would argue that this is one of the reasons why the Catholic Church resisted translating the Bible into the vernacular for so
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This tactic of deliberately restricting knowledge produces epistemic closure, and is a hallmark of all cults. The elitist lexicon of Critical Social Justice not only provides an effective barrier against criticism and a means to sound informed while saying very little, but also signals membership and discourages engagement from those outside the bubble.
In addition to calls for censorship, language can be manipulated through what is known as ‘concept creep’, by which words lose any meaning through endless misapplication. The most disturbing example has been the expanded meaning of terms such as ‘far right’, ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’, which has needlessly raised the temperature of current political debates.
there is evidence to suggest that the far right is growing, and while we ought to take this very seriously, we should not allow the truth to be distorted through lazy hyperbole.
when Peter Walker, political correspondent for the Guardian, claims that the meaning of ‘alt-right’ is ‘subjective’, he is either being disingenuous or naïve. According to Walker, it ‘can be associated with a sort of highly robust, fairly confrontational libertarian right-leaning politics with a dash of support for Trump’, but his use of the modal verb is telling. That a phrase with such potentially libellous connotations can be defined in multiple ways should surely give journalists pause for thought. Unless, of course, their intention is to imply a correlation with white supremacy, safe in
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As it turns out, there is a consensus among cognitive behavioural therapists that trigger warnings are counter-productive when it comes to trauma recovery. As Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explain in The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), ‘avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it’. They quote Richard McNally, the director of clinical training at the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, who writes: ‘Trigger warnings are counter-therapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains PTSD’.
the body in charge of elementary and secondary schools in southwestern Ontario recently authorised the ritualistic burning of books for ‘educational purposes’. In what they described as a ‘flame purification’ ceremony, almost five thousand books were removed from shelves and were destroyed or recycled if they were judged to contain outdated racial stereotypes. Some of those that were burned had their ashes used as fertiliser to plant a tree. An uplifting, progressive and environmentally conscious gesture, if one ignores the overtones of Fahrenheit 451.
the Anti-Defamation League has changed the definition of ‘racism’ on its website from ‘the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another’ to ‘the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people’. In this, they are following the diktats of critical race theorists who believe that ‘racism’ is an equation – prejudice plus power – rather than prejudice or hatred towards individuals on the basis of their race, which is how the vast majority of people understand the term.
Philip K. Dick, who said that ‘the basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words’.
Spinoza warned that an individual’s ‘indefeasible natural right’ to be ‘the master of his own thoughts’ was threatened wherever he might ‘be compelled to speak only according to the dictates of the supreme power’.
For some reason, gendered and genderless pronouns have become the most visible means by which the new puritans have attempted to dictate the language choices of others. The strategy has had some degree of success because it has been portrayed as an expression of courtesy, a way to be inclusive to those whose gender may not be immediately apparent. At the same time, it establishes a precedent for a socially acceptable form of compelled speech, the future consequences of which could well represent a serious threat to individual liberties.
According to this view, ‘if saying two plus two equals four predominately serves white, Western male interests, that statement itself is political and politically problematic and should therefore be treated with suspicion, maybe dismantled, decolonized, or banned’. Reality is not, and has never been, the point.
transgender identity and disability). We often hear of how hate crimes are on the rise, but this is largely due to this relatively recent policy of ‘perception’ as the defining factor. Even the Home Office concedes that rising hate crime statistics have been caused by this broadening of definitions and changes in how such incidents are recorded. This is also why politicians so often reiterate the view that the transgender community are one of the most abused and marginalised groups in society, in spite of overwhelming evidence that this is not the case. The narrative of a widely demonised
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The word comes from the movie Gaslight (1940), in which a husband convinces his wife that she is going insane by, among other things, dimming the lights and then denying that the house is getting darker when she complains.
Anecdotes, by their nature, limit the scope of inquiry to the individual, one necessarily unreliable and clouded by personal bias, which makes them a tenuous basis from which to draw broader conclusions.
‘lived experience’ has become an essential tool when it comes to denying those facts that threaten the newly dominant intersectional narrative. It is related to the concept of ‘positionality’, by which knowledge is understood to have been constructed according to one’s position on the matrices of oppression or privilege. That is to say, there are multiple epistemologies – or ‘ways of knowing’ – which is why the very notion of objective truth is mistrusted.
‘standpoint epistemology’ which goes beyond questioning the motivations and methodology of researchers according to group identity but confers an advantage on those who have ‘lived experience’ of marginalisation. As philosophy professor José Medina writes, ‘there is a cognitive asymmetry between the standpoint of the oppressed and the standpoint of the privileged that gives an advantage to the former over the latter’.
Bari Weiss powerfully expressed this point in her resignation letter from the New York Times, writing that ‘a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else’.
Some activists even try to maintain both positions at once, claiming that sex is a social construct but that trans people are born in the wrong body.
The allure of qualifying for victim status has made it voguish to ‘identify’ oneself into an oppressed class, with almost a third of American millennials now claiming membership of the LGBTQIA+ community. Just as the symbol of Christ’s crucifix encapsulates the triumph of the victim and has been exploited historically as a means to exert power over others, the rainbow Pride flag now serves a similar function.
The vast majority of gay women are sexually attracted to female bodies, not to those who identify as female. Yet this has not stopped Stonewall from redefining ‘homosexual’ as ‘someone who has a romantic and/or sexual orientation towards someone of the same gender’. This definition excludes most gay people, for whom gender identity is simply not relevant to their sexuality.
Transubstantiation may be a dogma of faith, but research suggests that a majority of Catholics believe it to be a merely symbolic ritual. There are parallels to be drawn here with the debate over gender identity ideology. For believers, a man can become a woman – or, in some cases, has always been a woman – by simply declaring it to be so, even without undertaking any cosmetic changes. The individual retains the ‘accidents’ of maleness – the anatomy, the XY chromosomes, the ability to produce spermatozoa – but the ‘substance’ is female.
The definition of ‘woman’ is thereby as fluid as can be imagined, because a ‘woman’ is simply one who identifies as a woman. The obvious next question – ‘what is a woman?’ – is often dismissed as transphobic, presumably because the answer inexorably directs us towards the reality of sexual dimorphism.
The perception that some of these treatments are tantamount to ‘fixing’ gay children to better align with heteronormative expectations is controversial, but understandable.
One thinks of Christopher Hitchens’s words: ‘I don’t have a body, I am a body’.
For the most part, trans activists and gender-critical feminists share a belief in bodily autonomy and the right to identify however one pleases. The contention has arisen because many trans activists take the view that self-identification renders biology irrelevant, whereas for feminists the preservation of single-sex spaces – such as prisons, changing facilities and domestic violence refuge centres – means that biology cannot be so easily dismissed. In spite of what some activists believe, feminists do not wish to preserve single-sex spaces in order to exclude certain people, or to bolster a
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This form of ‘gaslighting’ is part of a policy known as ‘Annex B’. The NHS accommodates patients by gender identity, not biological sex, and if a female patient complains that there is a man on her ward, she is to be told that this is not true; there are no men present. As the official NHS guidelines make clear: ‘Views of family members may not accord with the trans person’s wishes, in which case, the trans person’s view takes priority’. One cannot help but be reminded of Orwell’s words in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their
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For trans activists, to be ‘male’ or ‘female’ is a matter of personal identity. For feminists, to be ‘male’ and ‘female’ is determined by the production of either small or large gametes (there are no intermediate varieties, even among intersex individuals). This is why the former believe that sex is ‘assigned’ at birth, while the latter understand that it is observed and recorded.
‘racism of the gaps’, which encapsulates this tendency to assume racism from the outset and take all analysis from there. As an article for the New York Times Magazine puts it, theorists ‘speak of race not as a physical fact but as a ghostly system of power relations that produces certain gestures, moods, emotions and states of being’. In his response to this piece, Andrew Sullivan was quick to identify the religiosity of the language. ‘It permeates everything everywhere,’ he writes. ‘Like the Holy Ghost?’
Firstly, Critical Race Theory ‘takes as a given that racism is not a series of isolated acts, but is endemic in American life, deeply ingrained legally, culturally, and even psychologically’. Secondly, that it ‘reinterprets civil-rights law in the light of its ineffectuality, showing that laws to remedy racial injustices are often undermined before they can fulfill their promise’. Thirdly, that it ‘portrays the traditional claims of the legal system to neutrality, objectivity, color blindness, and meritocracy as camouflages for the self-interest of dominant groups in American society’.
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Critical Race Theory makes a number of suppositions. The first is that race is the defining principle of the structure of Western societies, and that ‘whiteness’ is the dominant system of power.
For Kendi, terms such as ‘institutional racism’, ‘structural racism’ and ‘systemic racism’ are redundant because ‘racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic’.
When racial inequality is considered to be present in all conceivable situations, literally anything can be problematised by activists as racist; recent examples include breakfast cereals, the countryside, cycling, tipping, traffic lights, classical music, Western philosophy, interior design, orcs, punctuality and botany. Even the American sitcom The Golden Girls could not evade this kind of reinterpretation, with the television network Hulu removing an episode in which a black guest is startled to see Blanche and Rose wearing dark brown mud-masks. When
Any progress towards racial equality that has been made is not understood as evidence of the triumph of the liberal approach, but rather is explained away as ‘interest convergence’. Critical race theorists concede that black people have enjoyed remarkable success – the election of a black president of the United States being the most obvious example – but maintain that any such achievements have only taken place because they have been in the interests of whites.
Those of us who value evidence-led epistemology are left in a bind. Black people in poverty can be taken as proof of racial inequality, but black millionaires can be taken as proof of white supremacist ‘interest convergence’. This is how Robin DiAngelo is able to dismiss the institutional and political power of the likes of Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas, Marco Rubio and Barack Obama: ‘They support the status quo and do not challenge racism in any way significant enough to be threatening’. When perceived in this way, no outcome can conceivably exist that would cause the proponents of Critical
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critical race theorist Barbara Applebaum, who asserts that ‘all white people are racist or complicit by virtue of benefiting from privileges that are not something they can voluntarily renounce’. How could they be otherwise, the theory goes, given that they have been socialised in a world that is undergirded by racism at all levels? White fragility, then, is not simply a defensive reaction to unjust accusations, but is to be ‘conceptualized as the sociology of dominance: an outcome of white people’s socialization into white supremacy and a means to protect, maintain, and reproduce white
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According to the theory of psychological projection, those who are guilty of negative impulses can find consolation through the unconscious attribution of their own faults to others.
Whiteness rests upon a foundational premise: the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm. Whiteness is not acknowledged by white people, and the white reference point is assumed to be universal and is imposed on everyone. White people find it very difficult to think about whiteness as a specific state of being that could have an impact on one’s life and perceptions.
Whereas liberals have always been determined to promote equality of opportunity for all, irrespective of race, gender, sexuality or class, the new puritans believe in equality of outcome. They interpret all disparities as evidence of institutional discrimination, which means that the system must be reconfigured in accordance with their assumptions. As Ibram X. Kendi insists, the ‘only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination’.
because, once examined, their ideas quickly deteriorate. But Arthur Schopenhauer was almost certainly right when he wrote that ‘there is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five’.