Free speech

“Freedom is under attack in your state,” exclaimed California Governor Gavin Newsom in a bizarre 30-second television ad that aired on Fox News in Florida markets over Fourth of July weekend. Unnamed “Republican leaders,” gasped a man who held his constituents under near-house arrest for two years, are “banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women and doctors. I urge all of you to join the fight, or join us in California, where we still believe in freedom.” Newsom’s anti-Florida canards cost his 2022 reelection campaign a reported $105,000. They addressed an audience that will vote neither for nor against him.

After giving up on the border crisis and Ukraine, Kamala Harris seems to have found an issue much more her speed: online name-calling. Last week, Harris announced the launch of the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse, which will be handled through President Biden’s Gender Policy Council. Exhausted yet? Interestingly enough, the task force will be co-chaired by the National Security Council. Members of the NSC include the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, the attorney general, Merrick Garland, the Health and Human Services secretary, Xavier Becerra, and the Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas.

The recent controversy over prominent legal commentator Ilya Shapiro's employment at Georgetown University Law Center ended last week. In a Wall Street Journal column on a Friday, Shapiro declared that his cancel culture nightmare was over, vindicated after a four-month investigation into a troublesome tweet. On Monday, the WSJ ran the rare immediate follow-up column, where Shapiro announced his decision to quit the university rather than subject himself to an inevitable future cancelation. Shapiro's experience was astounding in how much it reveals about the insanity of the woke left brigades, and how much their heckler's veto is empowered by the administrators at universities like Georgetown.

For the anti-free-speech left, the most dangerous man in America today is Greg Lukianoff. The president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for the past 16 years, the free-speech attorney has now decided to guide the organization, previously focused on free-speech battles within academia, into the broader territory of free-speech battles across the nation. FIRE has been rebranded as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and Lukianoff intends to take it into space once occupied by free-speech stalwarts like the ACLU. He has a massive new investment from supporters to the tune of $75 million.

If classic horror resides in the banality of evil, modern horror resides in the banality of predictability: yet another deranged man, driven by hate, kills, and the left seizes the opportunity to try and restrict speech, claiming not metal music, not violent porn, not Alex Jones, but social media spurred the shooter from basement to killing ground. This risks the loss of speech rights out of fear. As the bodies lay on the ground in Buffalo, New York governor Kathy Hochul blamed social media and called for speech restrictions in order to prevent another tragedy. Hochul claimed free speech had gone too far when it allowed someone to shout fire in a crowded theater for the shooter to hear.

In this week’s magazine I look at the threats posed by the so-called Online Safety Bill now making its way through the House of Commons. It gives sweeping censorship powers by creating a new category of speech that must be censored: 'legal but harmful'. The government will ask social media companies to do the censoring – and threaten them if they do not. The idea is for the UK to fine them up to 10 per cent of global revenue (ie: billions) if they publish 'harmful' content – but harmful is not really defined. So censorship potential is wide open. Nadine Dorries, the Culture Secretary, has suggested that the jokes of the comedian Jimmy Carr would be "harmful".