RUTHFULLY YOURS

Free speech is under assault from all angles. States across the West are arresting purveyors of so-called hate speech, and cracking down on alleged mis- and disinformation. Even the US government, despite the First Amendment, has been caught leaning on social-media firms in order to outsource censorship to the private sector. Universities, once places of vigorous, robust debate and unfettered inquiry, have been transformed into ‘safe spaces’ where contrarian views are Not Platformed. We’re not only losing the right to free speech – many seem to have forgotten why it matters at all.

As legal expert Jonathan Turley explains in his new book, The Indispensable Right, free speech is fundamental to our humanity. Without the ability to articulate our beliefs, we become not only less free, but also less human. Jonathan was the latest guest on The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: How are crusades against speech, particularly those driven by the state, undermining free speech?

Jonathan Turley: The Biden administration has created three categories for censorship: disinformation, misinformation and malinformation. Of the three, malinformation is my favourite. It’s defined as the use of true facts in a misleading way. It isn’t hard to imagine how the government might abuse that definition.

Current proponents of censorship make arguments that I find very disingenuous. For example, they will raise an issue like child pornography, which is an act that is against the law. They have a habit of taking the most extreme forms of conduct and using it to justify sweeping and ambiguous forms of censorship. If you take a look at the UK, France, Germany and Canada, you begin to see what happens when you allow censorship to take hold. It develops an insatiable appetite.

My book poses the challenge to name a single censorship system that has succeeded in stopping an idea or movement. Censorship has a perfect failure record and my book tries to explain why. In my view, it is because freedom of speech is a human right. It’s something we’re hard-wired for. I even refer to medical studies that show how parts of our brain can shrink if we don’t express ourselves. We are so designed for free speech that we can have a physical response when we fail to use it.

O’Neill: Your book mentions laws from 1275 banning what we could recognise today as ‘misinformation’. How common are the themes of censorship throughout history?

Turley: Free speech hadn’t established deep roots in the UK before American independence. Many people are familiar with the Star Chamber. What they might not be familiar with is the fact that the Star Chamber was created because English courts had begun to question whether it was right to convict people of treason for telling bawdy jokes about the queen, or tales about the monarchy.

The response of the monarchy was to create a new crime, which was sedition. It was a form of treason-light, where they could prosecute people for making obnoxious remarks about the crown. That history really informed the framers of the US Constitution when they created the First Amendment. It was incredibly revolutionary, as it is now.

Many people are still uncomfortable with the idea of free speech. I have a colleague who is leading an effort in the US to amend the First Amendment because it is ‘aggressively individualistic’, apparently. The US has an anti-free-speech movement that began in higher education and has now metastasised among the media, government and large corporations.

We’re not going to be able to resolve this conflict unless we can be clear what free speech is, why it is indispensable and what is needed to defend it.

O’Neill: One popular argument for free speech is that it’s a useful tool. But you make a more profound point that free speech is the very essence of being human. Why did you think it was important to do that?

Turley: There are two different justifications for free speech. One is more of a positivist view, which is that it comes from the government. This view posits that governments allow for free speech because of the broader good it achieves in a democracy.

The other view, which I subscribe to, is that freedom of speech is a natural right. It belongs to us because we can’t be fully human without it.

We’re surrounded by evidence of this. It’s captured in the concept of the starving artist. Vincent van Gogh would spend the money he needed for food on canvases. Survival, or sustaining yourself, is one of the most basic human instincts. And here we have artists literally starving themselves so that they could project more of their visions into the society around them.

This is one reason to be cautiously optimistic about the future of free speech. The anti-free-speech movement isn’t working. This is despite the fact we’ve never seen anything like the coalition of media, academia, government and corporations that have united against free speech. Facebook has targeted young people with advertisements celebrating ‘content moderation’, a truly Orwellian term for censorship. That didn’t work.

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, Hillary Clinton went to Europe and urged them to use the EU Digital Services Act to censor Americans. Those in charge went back to government crackdowns. They went back to what I call ‘state rage’. But they weren’t able to convince enough people of the benefits of censorship.

Ultimately, free speech can’t be crushed so long as humans are still around.

Jonathan Turley was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here: