Stop Demanding Free Speech
Dissident Resources Spent on Regime Causes - Shorts
It should be clear to us all by now that free speech is a myth, and an effective political one at that. Given that political disputes are unlikely to occur in a vacuum, there will always be some level of social enmity between the group that is demanding free speech and those that are deemed to be oppressors. These oppressors would logically following have within society some position of power, either directly held or in client ship to some larger power. We can view this dynamic in the High-Middle-Low model of De Jouvenel. The Low being the group demanding the right of free expression, the Middle being the oppressing group, and the High being the entity in power that oversees all the others.
For free expression to be granted to the Low it must be at the cost, not necessarily immediately, of the power granted to or the social standing of the Middle. The counter-culture movement of the 1960’s is a perfect exampled of this occurring. Free speech and free expression protests took place most notably at Berkley University which we now today know all too well. As outside political causes where given free reign to influence campus activities, the all encompassing student-activist experience that higher education is sold as today formed over the proceeding decades. Putting power in the hands of the Low saw themselves fit, with the blessings of the High, to oust the Middle. First in the form of university deans and administrators, and latterly to any group deemed encroaching on the Low’s free expression.
In the simplest sense, one group’s granted entitlement to free expression must always in time come at the cost of another group’s, or must diminish it’s social utility to near zero. So of course the result of a decades long campaign of free expression in Western academia has come at the expense of the ability to teach the Western cannon of literature and knowledge in a positive light.
This phenomena continues today beyond the West’s campus grounds. One see’s— online, on TV, on radio, etc—almost constant debate of free expression, free speech, cancelling and so on, the details of which I shan’t bore you with. Instead I wish to skip ahead to what I believe to be one of the few real results of such continuous debates. It is the remoulding of Western Man continually into the frame work of post-war pluralism. Imagine a Maoist struggle session except it’s beamed into your home 24/7, dripping in adoration for Churchill, Windrush, The Beatles, and the Late Queen Mum, oh and you pay for the privilege too.
Prospective media elites can be churned through weekly by the regime, as the High directly or more savvy Middle actors decry dissidents as speaking or acting in a manner which oppresses some Low group. By constantly reinforcing post war values, or the boomer truth regime to those who know, the public are kept intellectually stultified. Meanwhile journalists and TV presenters are bolstered and incentivised to denigrate any and all aspects of tradition and culture proper, whilst gatekeeping out those deemed beyond the pale. The Middle in the form of the neutral institution OFCOM has now taken to directly targeting presenters such as Mark Steyn. On the behalf of the Low public—a concentrated set of complaints on twitter over Steyn’s statements on vaccines. Steyn faces a £40,000 fine for his crimes.
Last week a report was released by Big Brother Watch, which exposed the actions of the UK government through its arms such as the 77th brigade and its various mis/dis-information units, a deeper overview of this report and Big Brother Watch will come in a later stream. For now I wish to focus on a smaller element of the report, when reading through one gets a sense that free expression in the eyes of those writing the report should primarily cover journalists, MP’s, and of course the members of Big Brother Watch. This would seem to suggest that the focus should be on already established figures, at the expense of the Low thousands who have already received legal and social repercussions for their expression. We can, and I believe we should, view this as the old radical Low of the 60’s ascending through the decades into the ranks of the Middle and wishing to conserve their position.
Furthermore we can see some of the examples not of who, but what sort of expressions we should believe it scandalous to have considered monitoring:
“Gracie Bradley, Liberty interim director between October 2020 and December 2021, taking issue with the Met Police’s appalling handling of the Sarah Everard Vigil on Clapham Common during the pandemic, arguing that they exacerbated the public health risk and even targeted her in the crowd.”
“Former Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption arguing that coercive lockdowns were a threat to the survival of liberal democracy.”
“One record comprised selective quotes from a live broadcast interview on BBC Radio Four’s Today programme by a highly respected senior public health academic. The whole interview was not included, meaning that the context of the comments was missing. The quotes related to factually correct statements made concerning biases, flaws and omissions in government claims about the effectiveness and efficiency of mass asymptomatic testing for coronavirus.”
“Tweets sharing journalist Ian Birrell’s column arguing that the Matt Hancock affair revealed the “rotten stench of corruption” at the heart of our government.”
“Labour peer and former Liberty director Baroness Shami Chakrabarti’s criticism of the government on a host of issues from vaccine passports [when she appeared in the media to promote Big Brother Watch’s anti-Covid pass pledge], the draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (then) bill and government attempts to ignore international law on torture.”
Women’s rights, liberal democracy, technical specificity and abstraction beyond reasonable comprehension, Heat magazine style reporting on sordid distractions, and a general defence of the institution called Liberty, or the National Council for Civil Liberties as it is formally known. Which has in its past defended and facilitated paedophilia through the Paedophile Information Exchange, which Chakarabarti herself stated in 2013 was the cause of an “infiltration”. No surprises then from the same group that demanded Oswald Mosley be re-imprisoned in 1943 after being held without trial. The NCCL was arguably one of the proto actors in the performance of cancelling as it attempted to petition to the government in the wake of Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech, through an emergency “Speak out on Race” meeting with PM at the time Harold Wilson.
So I ask, is it not time that we dispense with the myth of free speech, or at least the total belief in it. Set our sights on more effective causes and goals than becoming another part of the Low noise begging to be used in an effort to sink more unacceptable elements of the Middle. I would also suggest that we do not, when the carrot is waved at us, take the easy road out and let the regime squash wokism lest we want the stick of being squashed with them under the guise of a pragmatic, neutral and technocratic stand against extremism. And since we of course do not live in a political vacuum it should be of no surprise that the vagaries of the Online Safety Bill allow for such a stand.