Free speech for me but not for thee

Facing an authoritarian bombast in the White House, the Left has suddenly rediscovered the value of free speech. After years of supporting clampdowns through the preposterous phenomenon of ‘hate speech’, now left-wing activists are having their wings clipped for allegedly hateful protests and social media posts.

Whereas the Right has been accustomed to censorship and ostracising by polite society for many decades, the Left has not tended to feel the need to apologise for its existence. Consequently, its adherents have been slower to emerge from the trenches of the political divide, and to roam in ‘no man’s land’.

From their moral high horse, they have been unwilling to learn that the Left versus Right paradigm is a device of the establishment to maintain power by the old tactic of divide and rule. Left-wingers have enjoyed privileges from virtue-signalling their ideology, while subjecting opponents to ‘cancel culture’. Now that the boot is on the other foot, they squeal.

Most people are not as principled as they like to think of themselves. Instead, they are self-centred and partisan. MAGA devotees have demonstrated that their only consistency is in following their leader, while doing 180-degree turns on freedom, rights and peace to support police violence, McCarthyite witch-hunts and brazen bullying of other countries. They have shifted from opposing digital identity to promoting it as a means of making America great again.

So this is a problem on both sides, but a recently published book by Indian-born Princeton historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala shows the difficulty of the intelligentsia in making sense of what should be a fundamental tenet of modern civic democracy. What is Free Speech: the History of a Dangerous Idea praises European laws and policies while casting the First Amendment as a licence for persecution of minorities.

Such protection in the USA, according to Dabhoiwala, was set ‘more than two hundred years ago by violent rebel settlers deeply distrustful of government power and obsessed with individual liberty for propertied white men’. In the EU, by contrast, every state criminalises ‘hate’, while British policing has excelled in arresting citizens for expressing opinions online (as well as visiting homes to record ‘non-crime hate incidents’).

Dabhoiwala believes that the First Amendment has failed as ‘an antidote to misinformation and falsehood’. But who, pray tell, is the overarching arbiter of truth, and shouldn’t people be permitted to say what they think, regardless of logic or veracity? He prefers the European approach because it compromises liberty with social goals.

Freedom of speech is the clearest indicator of our status as human beings: are we here to serve authority in a structured society, or are we unique individuals with agency? For Dabhoiwala, the greater good trumps personal liberty. He would have had no qualms about critical thinkers being arrested for peaceful protest against the Covid-19 lockdown. But his utilitarianism is naïve in the second term of Donald Trump, who is quashing free speech in alarming ways (particularly when the boss in Tel Aviv is offended).

Dabhoiwala’s judge of acceptable discourse is the state, which he regards as paternalistic necessity. Adults are like kids: give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. He should be more concerned with the liberties taken by governments in punishing dissidents, whether against Israeli genocide in Gaza or legitimate protest against housing of illegal immigrants in luxury hotels.

Uncritical faith in the state is being severely tested for those in favour of officially regulated speech parameters, when it becomes clear that US federal authorities (and not merely a vengeful president) are imposing a regime that puts Leftists in prison or shoots them in summary execution.

With incredibly short memory for a historian, Dabhoiwala thinks that free speech is only a tool wielded by the majority against the minority, failing to acknowledge the emancipatory potential of speaking truth to power. He has forgotten the 1960s, when freedom of speech was a rallying cry of the Left.

‘The rights of any speaker must always be balanced against their responsibilities to the public’ is Dabhoiwala’s version of the ‘free speech but…’ contradiction. Similarly, the censorial head of Elon Musk’s X declared that we can have ‘freedom of speech but not freedom of reach’, which results in truth-tellers being suppressed rather than banned (but with the same impact). Another common phrase is the somewhat threatening ‘you can have free speech, but not freedom from the consequences of speech’.

History tells us that authoritarian silencing of critics is ultimately counterproductive. Reviewing Dabhoiwala’s book in Foreign Affairs, Jacob Mchangama remarked:

Speech can lead to real harm. Extremist rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and lies amplified by social media have deepened the United States’ polarization. But if the United States had European-style restrictions backed by deferential courts, the Trump administration would have the legal right to follow through on far more of its threats to persecute enemies.

The unprincipled Left had this coming. It stood by, or cheered on, as riot police attacked harmless anti-lockdown protestors, and as magistrates issued mindboggling sentences to people who had expressed understandable anger about the killing of three young girls in Southport in 2024 (many simply for ‘tweets’).

The Left was quite happy with hundreds of Trump supporters at Capitol Hill on 6^th January 2021 being thrown into jail for years, often without trial, because a terrible insurrection needed drastic action to save American democracy or something like that.

Free speech should be a cherished asset of society. People with a selective view of such liberty deserve no sympathy when they are targets of censorial tyranny. That is now happening to the Left, but in a cycle of retribution soon the MAGA fanatics’ America will be a steel grate again.

Niall McCrae is a social commentator and an officer iof the Workers of England trade union. He was previously a senior lecturer in mental health at King’s College London. His books include The Moon and Madness (2012), Echoes from the Corridors (with Peter Nolan, 2016), Moralitis: a Cultural Virus (with Robert Oulds, 2020) and Green in Tooth and Claw: the Misanthropic Mission of Climate Alarm (2024).  He writes regularly for The Light newspaper.

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