Freedom of speech

Alan Dershowitz: Let me start with a statement that many will disagree with. No country in history has ever really tested free speech: has seen whether the marketplace of ideas works or whether we can really have a society without censorship; where every idea is tested only on its merits, rather than for political benefit. This cannot be a right-left issue. Elon, you may be the first person who has really tried. Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln all compromised. You are trying, for the first time, a great experiment to see whether we can survive with a marketplace of ideas, without censorship, where all thoughts and all ideas are treated equally. For instance, where there are judgments on the basis of whether something is pro-right, pro-life, anti-Jewish, pro-Christian, anti-Christian. What we need is to create a circle in which things that are illegal, such as abusing children, are outside the circle, but anything else has to be inside the circle. So if something is permitted for one idea or “-ism,” it has to be permitted for the others. This is exactly what universities are failing to do. They are creating a line on which favored groups fall on one side and disfavored groups fall on the other side.

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”.