Freedom of speech

It’s a country that gave the world George Orwell, but now, it’s a ‘Brand’ new world for free speech in once-great Britain, which these days specializes in doling out the unwelcome gift of Orwellianism.

Dame Caroline Dinenage, the chair of a British Parliamentary committee, has been writing to social media platforms Facebook, TikTok and Rumble, asking them if they plan to follow YouTube’s lead and demonetize the accused sex pest Russell Brand. On committee letterhead, Dame Caroline wrote to express the committee’s concern that Brand will not be able to make money on the platform and thereby “undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behavior.”

Freedom of speech has toppled tyrants and propelled humanity forward. We lose it at our peril.

Words hurt, they say. This is the ideological underpinning to so much censorship today – the idea that words wound, as a punch might wound. The imagery of violence is deployed in almost every call for censure in the 21st-century West. Speech has been reimagined as aggression, hence ‘microaggressions’. People speak of feeling ‘assaulted’ by speech. ‘Words, like sticks and stones, can assault; they can injure; they can exclude’ – that’s the thesis of Words That Wound, an influential tome published in 1993. Activists claim to feel ‘erased’ by controversial or disagreeable utterances. Trans campaigners speak darkly of ‘trans erasure’, as if words from the other side of the divide, the speech of gender-critical feminists, might contain that most awesome and nullifying power of genocide.

Well-reasoned criticism of the transgender movement would be subject to being quashed by the government.

Ireland’s far-left government is in the midst of passing some of the most extreme legislation on so-called hate speech that the Western world has ever seen. The Criminal Justice Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences bill would prosecute what even leftist politician Paul Murphy called “thought crimes.” Should the bill become law, which seems likely, the government will possess unprecedented power to quash or silence peaceful protests and demonstrations, prosecute the makers and sharers of memes, and effectively ban opinions it doesn’t like. Even prejudice against a “protected characteristic” will become a crime, as will merely possessing material deemed hateful, like a history book or meme.

Our leaders talk a good game about defending dissidents abroad, while cracking down on thoughtcrime at home.

Nigeria’s Supreme Court is poised to hear a hugely significant blasphemy case involving a Sufi Muslim musician. Yahaya Sharif-Aminu is accused of sending an allegedly ‘blasphemous’ self-composed song to a WhatsApp group. According to a local Sharia court, Yahaya ‘praised an imam [revered in Yahaya’s tradition of Islam] to the extent it elevated him above the Prophet Muhammad’. For this ‘unforgivable’ expression of belief, the court sentenced him to death in 2020, under Kano State’s draconian Sharia Penal Code. After an appeal, his conviction was eventually overturned. But he has now been ordered to face a retrial.

Elon Musk has condemned forthcoming hate speech laws in one EU country as being a “massive attack against freedom of speech”.

Tech billionaire and Twitter CEO Elon Musk said that impending hate speech laws in Ireland are a “massive attack against freedom of speech”.

Waris Dirie is a Somali-born author, model, actress and activist who was forced to undergo female genital mutilation (FGM) at age five and fled her home country at age 13 to escape an arranged marriage.

She is a powerful advocate against FGM, a religious-cultural practice that involves the partial or total removal of the external female genitals for non-medical reasons. After fleeing Somalia, Dirie went on to become a supermodel. Her autobiography, “Desert Flower,” is a remarkable story of courage that was made into a film in 2009.

While the forces of “woke” march resolutely across the world of sports, darkening our spirits as they thrust leftist mantras into our daily ration of athletic contests, some glimmers of hope, some slivers of free-speech sunshine, manage to break through the miasmic overcast once in a while.

And it’s no surprise that they’re coming from professional hockey. While the NFL, the NBA, and MLB have all made it their business to shove left-wing causes in our faces in the past few years, the NHL has retained its reputation as the least woke of the major American sports leagues.