Opinion | Liberals Wage Jihad Against Free Speech in West

With the brightening political prospects of Left-‘liberals’ in the Anglosphere, free speech is increasingly coming under attack. The pretexts are typically duplicitous: checking ‘hate speech,’ misinformation, disinformation, ‘Islamophobia,’ ‘transphobia’, etc. The ulterior motives are muzzling freedom of expression and thought control. The toxic smog — a deadly mix of political correctness and cultural Marxism — may envelop public discourse in the US and the UK in the foreseeable future. It already has had a chilling effect on free speech in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz of the Democratic Party, who is the running mate for Vice-President Kamala Harris, has said on record, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”

This is against the consistent stand of the US Supreme Court. In 2016, it maintained that ‘hate speech’ is protected by the First Amendment, which shields freedom of expression: “Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate’.”

Other US courts have been shielding free speech from attacks. Last year, for instance, US District Judge Terry Doughty in Louisiana ordered several federal agencies and over a dozen top officials not to ask social media companies about taking down “content containing protected free speech.” Judge Doughty slammed the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration for carrying out “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” Referring to George Orwell’s classic 1984, he went on to say that the administration “seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’.”

Evidently, Harris has chosen a kindred spirit as her running mate.

The new Labour government in Britain under Prime Minister Keir Starmer is contemplating tough measures to control online speech and tightly regulate social media companies. This comes in the wake of recent rioting across the country, following widely-shared online posts that wrongly identified the killer of three young girls in a July 29 knife attack as a Muslim migrant.

It needs to be mentioned here that misinformation about the attacker was just the trigger of much deeper and widespread diseases Britain is afflicted with: a spurt in the numbers of illegal immigrants; growing radicalisation of and violence by Muslims, including grooming gangs; and the reluctance of the authorities to act against them for fear of being maligned as racist, Islamophobic, etc.

Canada, under another Left-leaning leader Justin Trudeau, introduced a new Bill early this year to gag online free speech in the name of combating online abuse with steep penalties for hate crimes, including life in prison for inciting genocide.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre rightly pointed out that the bill was part of “Justin Trudeau’s woke authoritarian agenda.” He said, “What does Justin Trudeau mean when he says the words ‘hate speech’? He means the speech he hates.”

Liberals in the other two English-speaking countries have already muzzled free speech down under. The Labour Party in New Zealand wanted to criminalise ‘hate speech’ against minority groups. Australia’s Labor government also wants to do the same.

The thread running through all the anti-free speech measures proposed or implemented by liberals is their ostensible concern for the safety of some group or the other. ‘Ostensible’ because the actual, ulterior motive is never stated; the real motive is the suppression, criminalisation, and calumniation of anything said and written that liberals don’t like. In a way, all of them are like Trudeau on that count: for them, hate speech is the speech they hate.

Liberals don’t want to listen to anyone saying anything that links jihad with Islamic scriptures, so they call any such endeavour as Islamophobic, which obviously ought to be outlawed. They don’t want anyone pointing out the problems caused by illegal immigrants in, say, the US — rising crime, the burden on the administration and thus on taxpayers, adverse effects on wages of the working class, and so on. Therefore, unsurprisingly, former US President Donald Trump and his supporters, who are against illegal immigrants, are accused of hate speech.

Hate speech should never be confused with hate crime. Merriam-Webster defines ‘hate crime’ as ‘any of various crimes (as assault or defacement of property) when motivated by hostility to the victim as a member of a group (as one based on colour, creed, gender, or sexual orientation).’ It must be emphasised here that hate itself is not a crime, even if it is directed towards a community; it translates into crime only when it incites a person to act against someone. As far as the expression of hate is concerned, its criminalisation invariably ends up eroding the sphere of individual liberty and concomitantly augmenting the powers of the State; champions of liberty in India know it too well.

Liberals in the West will do well to learn from the Indian experience, which has been pretty bad. But, having imbibed and internalised the toxic Left-wing ideas, they are unlikely to learn anything sensible from anywhere. Only conservatives like Trump can save liberty from liberals in the West.

Ravi Shanker Kapoor, a freelance journalist, is the author of ‘There Is No Such Thing As Hate Speech: A Case for Absolute Freedom of Expression’ (Bloomsbury, 2017). Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.