The Social World

Tag: Free speech

  • Trump takes on the British disinformation complex

    Trump takes on the British disinformation complex

    President Trump is waging war on the great British disinformation complex. The White House is gearing up to revoke the visa of British citizen and chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Imran Ahmed, amid the Trump administration’s greater battle against the BBC.

    By “countering digital hate,” the CCDH means censoring speech it disagrees with. The British campaign group, which has an office in Washington, has pushed for the deplatforming of Trump officials from social media and for greater restrictions on speech online generally. The CCDH advocated that Twitter/X remove Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s account for spreading anti-vaccine “disinformation,” and a whistleblower revealed last year that an internal memo had listed “kill Musk’s Twitter” as one of CCDH’s priorities.

    The founder of the CCDH, Morgan McSweeney, left to work as chief of staff to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. McSweeney is considered one of the most, if not the most, influential figures on the British left. When the Labour government passed the UK Online Safety Act, which places restrictions on online speech, the CCDH claimed it was instrumental in passing the bill into law.

    The White House has raised concerns about the Online Safety Act – not only because it dangerously and undemocratically stifles dissent against a failing political class, but because it has emboldened the UK’s online regulator Ofcom to pressure US companies to conform with the Act. Last month, the online messageboard 4chan was fined £20,000 by Ofcom. American companies could be fined by the UK for allowing American citizens to exercise their right to free speech. Where are those people who in 2016 were so concerned about foreign interference in our democracy?

    The Trump administration has taken an interest in free speech in Britain as a cautionary tale of how the left’s obsession with policing “digital hate” and “misinformation” can lead to imprisonment for social media posts, as in the case of Lucy Connolly. The resignations over the weekend of two of the BBC’s highest executives, director-general Tim Davie and CEO Deborah Turness, are major victories in Trump’s war on Britain’s censorship complex.

    Davie and Turness both resigned after revelations about the BBC’s bias against the President. Britain’s national broadcaster was exposed by the Telegraph for doctoring a speech Trump gave on January 6, 2021. The edited clip, which aired in a TV program a week before the 2024 election, made it sound like he was urging supporters to storm the Capitol, rather than telling them to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

    The two snippets which were spliced into one – “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you” and “We fight. We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore” – occurred nearly an hour apart in the actual speech Trump gave. When BBC executives were presented with the now-leaked internal report, which voiced concerns about this program and other distortions in reporting, they ignored it.

    “On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country,” the President wrote on Truth Social of Davie and Turness. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s warning that the US could revoke visas for foreign nationals engaged in censorship indicates that the US is ready to wage diplomatic war to protect the First Amendment at home, and even export it abroad. Not satisfied with the ​heads of Davie and Turness, Trump has sent a letter to the BBC threatening legal action and demanding the UK’s national broadcaster pay $1 billion in damages. Telegraph sources tell Cockburn that “spirits are high” at the paper after their shoutout from the Donald.

    Karoline Leavitt called the doctored clip “purposefully dishonest” and evidence that the BBC are “total, 100% fake news.” In a nod to the Trump administration’s preference for smaller, scrappier “new media” – for example, the latest member of the Pentagon’s press corps, Laura Loomer – Leavitt gave her recommendation for Brits on how to avoid establishment brainwashing. She wrote on X that the BBC “is dying because they are anti-Trump Fake News. Everyone should watch @GBNEWS!” And read The Spectator, of course…

  • Lord Young goes to Washington

    Lord Young goes to Washington

    I’m writing this from Washington, DC, where I’ve spent the best part of a week talking to politicos and think-tankers about the state of free speech in the mother country. Don’t believe our Prime Minister when he says it’s in rude health, I’ve been telling them. It’s on life support and any pressure that can be brought to bear on His Majesty’s Government to protect it would be hugely appreciated. Once again, it’s time for the new world to come to the rescue of the old.

    Not that they need much convincing. The view of Britain among Washington’s political class isn’t informed by diplomatic cables or articles in the Economist, but by viral videos on X. The impression these give is of a country rapidly descending into lawlessness in which the police are too busy arresting people for hurty words to protect them from violent criminals. “What the hell’s going on over there?” is the constant refrain.

    When I tell them the footage they’ve seen is just the tip of the iceberg and the police are detaining more than 30 people a day for speech offenses – outdoing Russia – they’re anxious to help.

    But what can they do? I had hoped that the US-UK trade deal might provide Donald Trump’s administration with some leverage. Could a preamble be included in which both sides affirm their shared commitment to the long-standing guarantees of freedom of expression and association as set out in the First Amendment? That wouldn’t be legally enforceable, but would be politically significant and might make Keir Starmer think twice before further eroding free speech, lest he be accused of jeopardizing the deal.

    However, the people I met in the State Department said the President is anxious to get the trade agreement over the line and unlikely to countenance anything that would delay it. The sense I got from meetings with members of the administration, which probably won’t come as a surprise, is that Trump is very much in charge and no one wants to do anything to irritate him. Indeed, they were careful to refer to the “Department of War” and the “Secretary of War,” even to me, although occasionally they stumbled and said: “The Department of Defense… I mean War.” A Washington Post editor I had lunch with confirmed this was an important loyalty test, with WaPo journalists getting into bad odor with the President because the newspaper insists on continuing to use “Defense Department.”

    Trump’s iron grip was often contrasted with the chaos of the previous administration, with Joe Biden portrayed as a drooling idiot. I met with staffers at the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee, which has just published a report accusing a group of senior Democrats in the last administration – the “Politburo” – of covering up the President’s cognitive decline and effectively ruling in his place, signing off executive orders – and pardons – using an autopen. The Committee’s view is that all the clemency actions taken by the Biden administration were illegitimate.

    Does this mean Anthony Fauci, pardoned by Biden in one of his final acts before leaving the White House, can now be prosecuted? I asked an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services over dinner and he laughed but declined to answer. Incidentally, I was reliably informed that Health Secretary RFK Jr is the second most popular member of the administration after Trump. The reception he gets from the MAGA faithful is rapturous, apparently.

    Another possibility I discussed with officials was withholding visas from UK citizens who work for censorship bodies such as Ofcom, which is currently trying to take enforcement action against US tech companies that refuse to comply with Britain’s new “Online Safety Act.” But after kicking around that idea we concluded it would probably be politically unhelpful. If Dame Melanie Dawes, the CEO of Ofcom, was refused a travel visa, she’d spin it as Trump doing the bidding of his buddy Elon Musk when all she’s trying to do is keep children “safe.” A better alternative, we thought, would be for the White House to offer political asylum on human rights grounds to British thought criminals. That would be a piece of epic trolling, given that our PM is Mr Human Rights. If any Christian street preachers are facing prosecution for misgendering some pro-abortion activists, do get in touch.

    Even that might not fly. The overall impression I got is that, for reasons no one was quite able to explain, the President still thinks of Sir Keir as a useful ally. So our best hope of harnessing the might of the US to protect free speech in the UK is if Starmer is replaced by someone more antagonistic to Trump. It surely won’t be long.

  • Macron has declared war on free speech

    Macron has declared war on free speech

    Emmanuel Macron says Europeans should stop relying on social media for their news and turn back to traditional public media. Speaking in Paris on Wednesday, he said people were “completely wrong” to use social networks for information and should instead depend on journalists and established outlets. Social platforms, he argued, are driven by a ‘process of maximum excitement” designed to “maximize advertising revenue,” a system he said is “destroying the foundations of democratic debate.”

    He accused X of being “dominated by far-right content” and added that the platform was no longer neutral because its owner had “decided to take part in the democratic struggle and in the international reactionary movement.” TikTok, he warned, was no less dangerous. Macron called for “a much stronger agenda of protection and regulation in Europe” to rein in what he views as the excesses of social networks.

    Macron is urging Europe to “take back control of our democratic and informational life.” This is not the first time that he has spoken in such terms. France and its allies, he warned, have been “naïve” in allowing their public debate to be shaped by foreign-owned platforms and algorithms that no longer respect neutrality. To counter what he calls “a crisis of information,” he wants a new “European agenda of protection and regulation.” It is, in effect, a plan to bring the digital sphere under far stricter political control.

    Macron’s comments are an attack on how an entire generation gets its news. Over 40 percent of people under 30 and nearly half of 18- to 30-year-olds now rely on social media for news. He appears to believe they should return to the days of reading and watching state-controlled media. The suggestion is astonishing. It’s frightening to even have to write this but democracy depends on access to competing points of view, not on state-managed television and subsidized newspapers. Macron cannot seriously believe that it would be good for democracy if Europeans were driven back to getting their news from government-aligned networks.

    Macron also blamed foreign interference, accusing Russia of being “the biggest buyer of fake accounts’ aiming to destabilize European democracies. “We’re facing interference on steroids,” he said. Macron has previously cited alleged manipulation of online content during recent elections in Eastern Europe, which he called “terrifying.” Yet observers found little evidence of large-scale manipulation in those cases. What really unsettled Paris and Brussels was often the result of those elections and the rejection of EU-backed candidates. His warnings about fake accounts look less like a defense of democracy than an argument for tightening state control over speech.

    The logical consequence of what Macron is proposing is that to abolish “fake accounts” you must abolish anonymity itself. If Macron is serious about ending fake accounts, and he keeps repeating that he is, the only way to do that is through digital identity. His plan leads inevitably to a system where anyone who wants to post or comment online must first prove who they are.

    The architecture for full control of social networks in the Europe already exists. The EU’s eIDAS regulation requires every member state to issue digital identities. There is France Identité, Germany has eID, Italy its SPID. Originally designed for banking, healthcare and tax, these IDs could easily be integrated into online services. Macron’s vision would plug them directly into the Digital Services Act. The result would be an internet where every post is traceable to a verified name. It’s a short step from fighting “fake accounts” to outlawing anonymous speech altogether.

    For years, Macron has argued that the internet must be brought to heel. When he cannot legislate at home, he does it through Brussels. The EU’s Digital Services Act already gives regulators the power to police what they call “systemic risks” online, a term broad enough to cover disinformation, hate speech, or anything judged destabilizing to democracy. Under the Act, platforms can be fined up to 6 per cent of global turnover, a threat that forces them to police themselves long before Brussels intervenes. The result is over-compliance and the quiet erosion of free speech. Add the eIDAS digital-identity framework, and Macron suddenly has the tools to pursue his long-standing ambition of ending online anonymity.

    In France itself, Macron is running out of power. His government has no stable majority, his authority in parliament has evaporated, and his personal ratings have collapsed. A poll in Le Figaro magazine this week puts his confidence level at just 11 per cent, among the lowest scores ever for a president of the Fifth Republic. On the streets he’s booed. Online he’s mocked daily. But in Brussels, the machinery of regulation still answers to him. The Digital Services Act and eIDAS framework move forward regardless of French politics, enforced by bureaucrats rather than parliament. Macron may be paralyzed in Paris, but in Europe he can still act like a statesman. The danger is that he could still in the time that he has left in office shape the rules that define what Europeans can and cannot say.

    Macron insists he’s defending democracy from manipulation and hate. But that’s the excuse. His vision is of a Europe where free speech is tolerated only when it is traceable, and where platforms pre-emptively silence anything that might draw a regulator’s glare. He calls it a “resurgence of democracy.” It’s nothing of the kind. It’s the bureaucratization of thought, and the beginning of a continent where debate survives only on license. If Macron has his way, Europe’s public square will not just be regulated, it will be licensed.

  • Is conversion therapy free speech?

    Is conversion therapy free speech?

    Kaley Chiles is a Christian therapist who places the Bible at the center of her practice.

    To many of her patients, religious faith is often more important than Freud. They see Bible readings, prayer and a focus on spirituality along with traditional principles of psychotherapy as essential elements of any treatment plan. 

    While outside the mainstream of psychoanalytic practice, Chiles’s technique combining traditional psychotherapy with Biblical precepts for years had been deemed non-controversial, if confined to more conservative regions of the country. But that all began to change in 2019 when the state of Colorado enacted legislation banning so-called conversion therapy for minors, a technique that aims to help gays change their sexual orientation. 

    Fearing the law would interfere with her treatment of teenage clients wrestling with their sexuality, Chiles filed suit in federal court against Colorado alleging the statute violated her First Amendment free speech rights. She lost at the trial level and in the initial round of appeals, with jurists finding that Colorado’s ban fell well within its right to regulate medical practice and protect patient safety.  

    But it now appears the US Supreme Court is leaning toward upholding Chiles’s right to advise young clients that changing their sexual orientation is a viable and realistic option, despite widespread medical and scientific agreement that such techniques rarely, if ever, work. 

    In oral arguments on October 7, the state’s conservative majority peppered both sides with questions suggesting they were leaning in Chiles’s favor. A decision upholding Chiles’s appeal would follow a string of Supreme Court rulings in recent years favoring religious conservatives while creating new hurdles for gays and transgenders. 

    Without First Amendment protections, “states can transform counselors into mouthpieces for the government,” argued James Campbell, a lawyer for Chiles, at the Supreme Court hearing. 

    The case poses novel Constitutional questions that center on ability of medical professionals to communicate with patients about treatments they believe are effective but that have been outlawed by state regulators.  

    On a deeper level, though, Chiles’s lawsuit and the legal battle surrounding it are simply the latest fight in the nation’s long running conflict over cultural values, ranging from gay and transgender rights to abortions and race relations. 

    In June, the court’s 6-3 conservative majority ruled in favor upheld a Tennessee ban on the use of puberty blockers and hormones for the treatment of young patients suffering from so-called gender dysphoria and seeking to change their gender identity. In another ruling this year, the court also upheld, on a temporary basis at least, the Trump administration’s ban on LGBTQ persons serving in the military while the litigation continues 

    And in a 2018 decision that may well have a bearing on Chiles’s appeal, the court found in favor of religious conservatives by striking down a California law requiring anti-abortion groups to provide information on state funded abortion and contraception when counseling their clients. The court found that the law infringed on anti-abortion groups’ free speech rights.   

    Reflecting the heated politics underlying the Chiles case, dozens of interest groups from both sides of the ideological spectrum have filed amicus briefs with the court. Medical societies of various stripes have been particularly scornful of Chiles’s case. One brief filed by the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association and other organizations representing health care professionals maintained that conversion therapy rarely if ever works. It argued at the same time that the practice causes great harm to patients by further confusing them about their identity and disrupting family relations while raising the risk of suicide. 

    Conversion therapy embraces a wide range of techniques, some bordering on barbaric, including aversion therapies using electroshock treatment and nausea inducing drugs. Some 30 states have banned it. 

    Chiles and her lawyers say she would employ none of those practices and that she engages only in talk therapy. But in court filings and in interviews, they stop short of describing exactly what Chiles would tell clients seeking to change their sexual orientation, only that she might advise them on how not to act out unwanted sexual impulses.  

    “When she engages in those conversations, she’s encouraging them to achieve their goals,” Campbell said during oral arguments. “She’s discussing concepts of identity and behavior and attractions and how they fit together.”

    This is an ongoing active dialogue where she’s helping them explore their goals, and that absolutely has to be protected by the First Amendment.” 

    The state of Colorado of course sees it differently. 

    “No one has ever suggested that a doctor has the First Amendment right to offer the wrong advice,” countered Shannon Stevenson, Colorado solicitor general. “The law applies only to treatments, that is, only when a licensed professional is delivering clinical care to an individual patient. In that setting, providers have a duty to act in their patients’ best interests.” 

    During the October 7 oral arguments, the court’s conservative justices seemed supportive of Chiles’s free-speech claims. Justice Samuel Alito for one opined that because Colorado law bans discussion of conversion therapy but permits therapists to advise clients on transitioning from one gender to another, the law had clearly crossed a First Amendment red line. 

    “That looks like blatant viewpoint discrimination,” Alito declared. 

    Justice Amy Coney Barrett queried Campbell on whether clients who felt they had been harmed by conversion therapy might be able to file a malpractice claim. It was a loaded question in the sense that proponents of Colorado law argue conversion therapy is harmful and that a First Amendment protection for therapists would leave patients defenseless. 

    Bryant’s question implied that civil litigation against irresponsible therapists might serve as a brake against harmful practices. 

    Chiles’s legal team, Alliance Defending Freedom, a prominent Christian legal organization that has participated in over 70 Supreme Court cases, has packaged their client in a way that aims not only to persuade jurists but also the public at large. That is hugely important in the world of civil litigation. Having a sympathetic client is often just as pivotal as a powerful claim or even a particularly effective legal team. All the legal firepower in the world won’t help if juries and judges are put off by the claimant. 

    On its website, Chiles, who is based in Colorado Springs, is depicted in a video hiking in the Rockies near Denver while she talks on an audio track about her clients and how Colorado’s conversion therapy ban had frustrated their efforts to regain emotional health. 

    “They say that emotions are like children. It’s not OK to let them drive the car and it is not OK to stuff them in the trunk,” she says in the video. “I counsel my clients on… how to make their lives more fulfilling, satisfying and more in line with who God created them to be. What I am struggling with right now is that the state of Colorado has decided to impose their own values, not only on me but more importantly on my minor clients.” 

    It’s a well-articulated rationale by a seemingly credible plaintiff. It’s just not altogether clear, from the science at least, that her clients would benefit.

  • Kimmel makes the case for free speech

    After a few days in politically-induced time out that felt like a decade, Jimmy Kimmel made a triumphant return to late night TV on Tuesday. “I’m not sure who had a weirder 48 hours,” he said. “Me, or the CEO of Tylenol.” Given that Tylenol is a brand name and has no actual CEO, let’s say Kimmel, who Disney/ABC pulled off the air last week under political pressure from station ownership and the chairman of the FCC after he made a bad-taste joke about Charlie Kirk’s assassin. 

    Kimmel suddenly became the most famous man in America not named Donald Trump, and his audience met his return with a roaring standing ovation, chanting “Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!” He quickly delivered a tearful apology to the friends, family, and devotees of Charlie Kirk and an equally tearful praise of Erika Kirk’s astonishing forgiveness of her husband’s assassin. Kimmel said he believes in the teachings of Jesus, and that Erika Kirk’s words “touched me deeply.”

    But the majority of Kimmel’s opening monologue was a full-throated defense of himself, and of freedom of speech. He joked that he’d received a job offer from Germany. “This country has become so authoritarian that the Germans are offering me a job,” he said. 

    He thanked Republicans like Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, and Rand Paul who stood up for him. “People who I never would have imagined… said something very beautiful on my behalf… I don’t agree with many of those people on most subjects. Some of the things they say even make me want to throw up. It takes courage for them to speak out against this administration, and they did. And they deserve credit for it.”

    Specifically, he singled out Ted Cruz, who really went to bat for Kimmel in the last week. “I don’t think I’ve ever said this before but Ted Cruz is right,” Kimmel said. “If Ted Cruz can’t speak freely then he can’t cast spells on the Smurfs.”

    Above all else, Kimmel, quite correctly, made one thing clear: “Our government cannot be allowed to control what we can and cannot say on television… This show is not important. What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this.”

    Meanwhile, the Donald was attacking on Truth Social. “I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back,” said the President of the United States about a late-night comedian. “The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his “talent” was never there. Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE.”

    Kimmel had not yet seen this post. Even as Trump was ranting about him after an eventful day at the UN, Kimmel started taking digs at Trump, showing a clip where Trump said Kimmel had “no ratings.” 

    “Well,” Kimmel smirked triumphantly. “I do tonight. He tried to cancel me, and he instead forced millions of people to watch my show. That backfired bigly. He might have to release the Epstein Files to distract from this.“

    Kimmel pointed out that Sinclair and Nexstar, who own 20 percent of ABC affiliates, were currently keeping him off the air in Seattle, Portland, Washington, DC, and his wife’s hometown of St. Louis, “so I guess they’ll have to watch this on YouTube or whatever.”

    He said “I never thought I’d be in a situation like this,” but the one thing he learned from Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and other childhood heroes is that “silencing a comedian is un-American.”

    After a commercial break, Kimmel aired a meh skit where Robert DeNiro played an anonymous tough-guy mob boss type who was now running the FCC. Those jokes didn’t really land, but then Kimmel got in some good jabs about Trump’s weird visit to the UN, calling him “Ramblestiltskin.” He had special fun with Trump’s press conference yesterday where the President went on an all-time rant against Tylenol. “Follow the medical advice of Donald Trump,” Kimmel said, “and you too can look like a glazed ham with deep vein thrombosis.”

    Just like that, America was great again.

  • The Facebook police come calling

    The Facebook police come calling

    In the United States, despite an attorney general who appears unclear on the concept, we enjoy the freest speech laws of anywhere in the world. Not so in the UK, where police casually drop by to harass citizens about their Internet activity. They visited the wrong cottage this summer, as we see in a video released this week by the UK’s “Free Speech Union”. The Thames Valley Police paid a visit to the home of “an American cancer patient and Trump supporter,” who wasn’t having it.

    “You can come in,” she said, “but you’d better have a damn good reason for being here.”

    They did not.

    “I’ll have Elon Musk on you so quick your feet won’t touch,” she said, in a statement that may have carried more weight in June than it does today.

    The officer, who seemed to have no idea he’d bumbled into a Key and Peele sketch, sat on an orange blanket and said, “Something that we believe you’ve written on Facebook has upset someone.”

    “You’re here because somebody got upset?” she said. “Is it against the law? Am I being arrested?”

    “You’re not being arrested.”

    “Then what are you doing here?”

    The officer said he wanted her to make an apology to the person she’d offended.

    “I’m not apologizing to anybody,” she said. “I can tell you that.”

    Well then, said Officer Friendly, perhaps you can come in for an interview. This “allegation,” he said, has been reported to the police.

    “So what?” the woman said. “Are there no houses that have been burgled lately? No rapes? No murders?”

    “Yeah, that’s all going on as well.”

    “Well then why aren’t you out there investigating those?”

    “Because I’ve got to investigate everything that’s reported.”

    “You’re not investigating houses being burgled?”

    “No,” the officer said. “That’s not my job today.”

    His job was to be the thought police. That didn’t make our heroine very happy.

    “Do you know how many houses in this neighborhood have been broken into?” she said.

    “I don’t look after this neighborhood,” he said.

    “No, of course you don’t. Unless there’s a tweet. Then you do… you should not be doing this. I’m a cancer patient. You can see that because I’m bald.”

    We should point out that the video is from the woman’s point of view, so we don’t see that she’s bald.

    “Well, I didn’t know that before I came,” the officer said. “But it still doesn’t say anything. You still can’t break the law. If you don’t break the law, nothing happens.”

    Some laws are meant to be broken, she implied, and we agree. In fact, some laws shouldn’t be laws at all.

    “The public knows what you guys are doing,” she said. “We know what’s going on in this country.”

    Thank you, random Internet lady with cancer. All the people in my feed today – and there are hundreds of them – fulminating about the free-speech violation of Jimmy Kimmel, one of the wealthiest and most prominent voices on the American stage, should take a peek at this case, and hundreds like them, taking place in a country that truly doesn’t support free speech.

    As the Free Speech Union points out, the Thames Valley Police is guarding President Trump as he makes his UK rounds this week. Wouldn’t Trump like to know what the cops are up to on their regular rounds? As long as Donald Trump is visiting the British Isles, he should consider staging a bloodless coup to free UK citizens from the busybody free-speech police, who literally knock on doors and tell sick ladies to stop making mean tweets.

  • Does Pam Bondi know what free speech is?

    Does Pam Bondi know what free speech is?

    Good morning Britain. Donald Trump is flying to the United Kingdom today for his big state visit. Yet his Attorney General Pam Bondi seems to be going one step further. She appears to think that America, like Britain, ought to now be a country where you can go to jail for posting memes on Facebook. 

    Katie Miller, hosting Bondi on the Katie Miller Pod, said that Kirk’s murder last week was what happened when college campuses don’t take action against or expel students who harass conservative speakers. Using anti-Semitism as an example of left-wing campus “hate speech,” Bondi claimed in reply: “There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society.” 

    Does the Attorney General know that “hate speech” is protected under the Constitution? She continued: “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, and that’s across the aisle.”

    If this all gives you flashbacks to the days of social-justice warrior campus protests (“keep your hate speech off this campus!”) you’re not alone. Bondi didn’t elaborate on exactly what she meant by “targeting anyone with hate speech.” Did she mean people gloating over Kirk’s death, saying he deserved to die for his beliefs? That’s certainly hateful and disgusting, but is it illegal? Not in America.

    Bondi’s fudge, whether it was purely idiotic or a more sinister attempt to roll back speech rights, expresses an outlook totally at odds with Kirk’s: he didn’t believe in hate speech. The idea that words can be dangerous is antithetical to his belief in dialogue and open debate.

    And while the AG is going in on free speech, why not take on the free press as well? Trump announced that he’s brought a $15 billion defamation and libel lawsuit against the New York Times, singling out its endorsement of Kamala Harris as “the single largest illegal Campaign contribution, EVER.” You don’t have to like the New York Times – and Cockburn rarely does – to realize that a newspaper can endorse whoever it wants. This is a frivolous suit and one that demeans the office of the presidency. 

    It follows an active $10 billion lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal for its “bawdy Epstein birthday letter” story – a story that appears, for now at least to have been partially vindicated by subsequent developments, even if Team Trump continues to deny that the President ever drew the now infamous doodle in Epstein’s weird birthday book. 

    There’s also a defamation lawsuit against ABC (settled for $15 million) and an election interference lawsuit against CBS/Paramount (settled for $16 million). The Trump administration has understandable grievances against the many legacy media institutions which have for years smeared the Commander-in-Chief and peddled fraudulent tropes against him. But even if the White House thinks it’s constitutional to decide what these news outlets can and can’t publish, it isn’t. Trump voters may like the idea of “retribution” against the Fake News Complex, but almost nobody will have cast their vote for Donald Trump hoping he would clamp down on hate speech – something Kamala Harris would likely have done. Bondi ought to retract her statement immediately.

  • After Charlie Kirk, Trump should crack down on campus ‘safetyism’

    An assassin who wants to silence a debate in America’s colleges can’t do it just by killing Charlie Kirk. Although Kirk was an exceptionally effective campus speaker – maybe the most effective since William F. Buckley Jr. in his heyday – he was far from alone in voicing conservative ideas in academic settings where they are generally unwelcome and at times violently opposed. There are others who will pick up Kirk’s microphone. But Kirk’s murderer has allies who can do systematically what the gunman could only do once. His allies in silencing voices like Charlie Kirk’s are university administrators who respond to violence by imposing stifling security costs on the targets of violence and intimidation.

    America’s colleges and universities too often give militants a veto over campus speech. This was true long before Kirk’s murder. A few years ago students at a small Catholic college in Texas invited me to speak on their campus. I’m not exactly a well-known firebrand likely to draw an enraged mob anywhere. But this Texas Catholic college told the students they couldn’t host a conservative speaker without security insurance that they couldn’t afford. This wasn’t a response to any threat: it was a simple act of censorship by administrators too craven to ban a speaker forthrightly. They used safetyism as a convenient excuse.

    My experience was not unique – colleges and universities across the country have long discouraged or completely prevented conservatives from speaking by demanding heavy security expenditures and indemnities against left-wing violence. Instead of imposing the costs of violence on those who threaten violence, institutions of higher education in our country impose those costs on those who are threatened. They impose those prohibitive costs not only on high-profile targets like Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Riley Gaines and Andy Ngo, but also on speakers who aren’t targets at all. This is not a good-faith attempt to prevent violence; it’s a bad-faith strategy for stifling campus debate. Can you imagine a speaker invited to express views approved by a college administration being stuck with the bill for his or her security?

    Most left-wing violence on campuses is far from murderous – it more often takes the form of rowdy mobs shouting down or attempting to intimidate speakers. These mobs do not exist because the violent left is unstoppably powerful on the nation’s campuses; they exist because the administrators in charge of campuses are unwilling to enforce basic rules on unruly children. The intimidation is opportunistic. Cowardice, more than adolescent extremism, is the root of the problem. If administrators really do fear that any conservative speaker will be met with rioting and violence, they have obviously already failed in their duty to maintain a safe environment for their students – they failed by allowing lunatics to amass enough power they could silence their critics without even having to riot.

    Colleges and universities across the country have long discouraged or completely prevented conservatives from speaking by demanding heavy security expenditures and indemnities against left-wing violence

    Some administrators are timid; more are not so much frightened of violence as frightened of having to take a side between freedom and leftism – they pride themselves on their progressive attitudes, yet they can’t admit that the price of those attitudes is deference to censorious radicals. Left-wing bullying is carried out in the name of anti-bullying; it’s cruelty masquerading as compassion. Calls to censor Charlie Kirk were typically framed as if doing so was necessary to protect transsexuals, racial minorities and “democracy” itself. (The scare quotes are appropriate since actual democracy without free speech is well-nigh impossible.) Aggression against conservatives – who are a minority on almost all campuses – gets whitewashed as altruism. Left-liberal administrators who like to imagine themselves as broadly in favor of free speech get their principles put to the test when anyone farther to the left claims that Charlie Kirk or some other conservative is really a purveyor of “hate speech” and indeed that their speech is actually “violence.” With administrators who believe in “trigger warnings,” speech can be killed without an assassin’s having to pull the trigger.

    If there is a legitimate reason to charge security or insurance fees, the university, whether it’s a state school or a private institution that receives any taxpayer dollars, must bear the cost. Colleges that are fully privately funded can do as they wish, but if an institution receives public money, it cannot allow only viewpoints that are aligned with the left to have representation. Charlie Kirk’s murder should spur the Trump administration to compel institutions of higher education to live up to their duty to the public and to their own students. And if hosting speakers whose lives may really be in danger seems costly, universities should cut the problem off at the source by making their campuses safe for civil discourse in the first place. The Trump administration has so far made Israel and anti-Semitism the focus of its attempts to change the culture of higher education, with policies that in some cases actually harm free speech. So far as any evidence suggests, Charlie Kirk wasn’t killed for talking about the Middle East. His assassination is about America’s freedom of political speech at home, in the very institutions that are meant to be most dedicated to free inquiry. Sly techniques of censorship, such as pricing conservative speech out of campus discourse, cannot be tolerated.

    There’s danger enough in the risk of further self-censorship on the part of conservatives. The left – in the form of both aggressive activists and pusillanimous administrators – doesn’t need to intimidate the right with violence when it can do so effectively by simply imposing costs, from the cost of providing security for a speaker to the costs to one’s career prospects of being known as a conservative or Trump voter. Make it more expensive to be a campus conservative, at every point along the line, and there’s no need for overt censorship. The economic incentives will do the ideological commissar’s work for him. The safetyists understand this, while conservatives who sometimes have a genuine concern for their own safety increasingly internalize the left’s mentality along with its threats. The left largely exists to make everyone feel vulnerable and victimized, in need of protection not just by metal detectors but by censorship and supervision. The more the right feels besieged and beleaguered, forced to pay for its own basic freedoms, the more it will willingly surrender to the left’s fearful way of thinking and living. Charlie Kirk didn’t die for that – he died, as he lived, to defy it.

  • America’s mask of civility slips again

    America’s mask of civility slips again

    The FBI has just released an image of a “person of interest” in the case of Charlie Kirk’s killing. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that investigators have found ammunition at the crime scene with pro-trans and “antifa” engravings. 

    But we still don’t know much, if anything, about the killer. Speculation as to motives, or snap judgments as to the historical significance of yesterday’s crime, are therefore futile.

    On the moronic inferno of X, however, the would-be Nostradamuses of the 21st-century right are weighing in with grave predictions about civil war or revolution or an imminent tide of vengeful justice against “the left.”

    Others are suggesting that Kirk, a Christian Zionist, may have been slain for having raised doubts about Israel’s war on Hamas recently. There are also people making gnomic connections between his death and Ukraine and the release of the Epstein files this week.

    From another side, a barrage of amateur historians has taken to issuing warnings that Trump’s wannabe Nazi administration will now use Kirk’s death as a sort of Reichstag Fire moment to silence dissent.

    And of course we see the usual gun experts insisting – as if only they could know – that whoever “made that shot” must have been a highly-trained sniper. A state-sanctioned hit job, then? The plot thickens – in the sense that the discourse only becomes more asinine.

    The truth is that nobody knows very much, and we should probably all keep away from our smartphones in the wake of such horrible news. (Not that I can lecture anyone: I’ve ghoulishly watched videos of the killing. I wish I hadn’t.)

    For now there seem three good points to make about this crime. First, all civilized people are appalled that Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old father, was killed for his opinions. The second is that America appears to be going through another of its periodic fits of political violence. The mask of civility in American life is slipping too often and too quickly (again, the internet doesn’t help).

    The third and perhaps more salient point is that Charlie died as a passionate believer in free speech. His murder ought never to intimidate others from speaking their mind.

    You can read some excellent – and, we hope, sensitive and non-hysterical – reaction pieces to Kirk’s murder on The Spectator’s website. I’d also encourage everyone to read Charlie’s diary for us about his visit to Britain earlier this year. He was a brave man. Rest in peace.

    In other news, Lord Mandelson has stood down as British ambassador in Washington, as more and more evidence spilled out about the extent of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein – which continued even after Epstein was jailed for sex crimes in 2008.

    In an interview with the journalist Harry Cole on Tuesday night, the “Prince of Darkness” called his Epstein association “an albatross around my neck.”

    Certainly, Westminster journalists have spent years whispering about Mandelson-Epstein stories being mysteriously blocked from publication. But the damn finally burst this week and now he joins Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, as the second British grandee to have wrecked his reputation by palling around with you-know-who.

    Earlier this week, I wrote a magazine piece about how Epstein’s ghost will haunt Donald Trump’s visit to the United Kingdom next week. It’s now possible that Kirk’s murder will, in fact, overshadow the whole trip.

    Yet many liberty-loving Atlanticists have been hoping that Trump might berate Keir Starmer for clamping down on free speech in the United Kingdom. And that was an issue Kirk, who is already being hailed as a “free speech martyr,” cared about deeply.

    Might Trump now invoke Kirk’s name next week to challenge the British government for locking people up for their views? Let’s wait and see.

  • Charlie Kirk saw himself as holding back a revolution

    Charlie Kirk saw himself as holding back a revolution

    Charlie Kirk was, from an incredibly young age, the sort of person willing to try things that seemed impossible. Last night, in his remembrance of meeting Charlie for the first time, my Fox colleague Guy Benson realized that he was probably one of the first conservative speakers Kirk had invited to share ideas to students in Illinois – at the ripe age of around sixteen. In lieu of a typical trajectory for a person with political ambitions, Kirk took a different path, believing that through engagement, debate and organization, he could achieve a mission many political professionals thought was a fool’s errand: win young people over for conservative ideas

    In the midst of the Tea Party moment, when the American right was synonymous with boomer (and older) voters and Barack Obama was the coolest thing on campus, riding high with millennial voters, this concept was absurd. But Kirk believed it was possible. He invested all his effort in pursuing it, he built a team across the country to make it happen and, most incredibly of all, he actually pulled it off. He was the biggest difference maker in a movement that saw an influx of young activist voters that changed the course of the country. And for that, he was murdered.

    The truth about Charlie Kirk is that he believed in the power of engagement. He would consistently do what the American left refuses to do: walk into the places dominated by opinions from the other side, and take on all comers, welcoming their disagreement and arguing not in an attempt to demonize but in an attempt to evangelize. Despite the left’s active campaign to describe him as a white supremacist, a radical, a reactionary, comparing him to Nazis and the Klan, Kirk was one of the most forthright and emphatic voices against that extreme of the far right. His assassination is so jarring in part because he is such a mainstream figure. He was beloved by millions of young conservatives across America not because he was a frothing at the mouth provocateur, but because he was a clean-cut earnest patriotic inspiration, someone who showed them how to stand up for what they believe on campuses where the number of academics who share their traditional Republican views are practically nil. And along the way, Kirk showed you don’t have to lose your soul in the process – openly embracing faith and family as the most important things in life, calling his young followers to think beyond the political realm.

    Kirk exemplified a belief in the American values of civil debate. His free-speech battle truly was part of a happy war, one that actively seeks out those who disagree not to destroy them but to prove a point. The overwhelming number of people ensconced at networks or as late-night hosts would never be brave enough to do what Kirk did on an active regular basis: to put themselves in a position where they are surrounded, and attempt to win the debater, or more often the audience, to your side. And in their cowardice, they chose to lie regularly about him instead – even in death, as the same ghoulish leftists who regularly hope for Donald Trump’s death and cheered Luigi Mangione rejoiced publicly on social media, as if to say if they can’t get Donald or Elon, they’ll settle for Charlie.

    In the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, there was a brief moment where people of both parties seemed to hope that it would mark a change in direction for the course of the country – an end to the demonization of the other side, a tamping down on the tone of our virulent political debate. That was as fleeting as an election cycle. But now with Kirk’s bloody violent murder while doing exactly the same thing he encouraged so many young people to do – using free-speech rights to stand up for what they believe, publicly and without fear of debate with the other side – the lesson many on the right may take away is that there is no future for such engagement. 

    The consequences of such a move would break from Kirk’s mission, and serve to accept the message the American left, from its most powerful elites to its core electorate, has been sending loud and clear since 2016: that there is no place for Republican views in society, that they are Nazis and fascists and existential threats, people who should be hounded and punched, and whose deepest pain is your path to joy. And why shouldn’t they take that lesson? There is no purpose to debate when at the end, the other side just wants you dead all the more. Can we even share a country with these people who hate us so much?

    The reason not to take that path is because it’s the opposite of what Kirk himself believed and exemplified, as he told us over and over again. In a profile in Deseret published on the eve of his fall campus tour just last week, he vocalized his purpose as calling his fans and fellow young conservatives to something higher than just hating the other side:

    “My job every single day is actively trying to stop a revolution,” Kirk said. “This is where you have to try to point them toward ultimate purposes and toward getting back to the church, getting back to faith, getting married, having children. That is the type of conservatism that I represent, and I’m trying to paint a picture of virtue, of lifting people up, not just staying angry.”

    The worst thing the young American right could do now in this moment is turn Charlie Kirk’s martyrdom into a lesson fundamentally at odds with his mission. Really, after all this, could you blame them? The American left hated Charlie Kirk. They mocked his approach to debate. They smeared him for his conservative beliefs. But they and the country may be about to learn what comes next, and learn it hard.