Dissenters be aware: the new lockdown brings more threats to free speech and dissent
‘How then can the woke guardians of taste seriously claim that Talk Radio is guilty of disinformation? The answer is surely that debate, contentious opinion and vigorous audit of government policy are now considered a crime in our culture.’
The new lockdown brings with it new more sinister threats to free expression. Already sceptics and critical thinkers are being singled out as dangerous for spreading ‘disinformation.’
Evidence for the threat we face is found in two worrying developments in recent days. Firstly, the brief nineteen-hour deletion of Talk Radio’s YouTube account. Talk Radio has been one of the only mainstream platforms to have given a fair hearing to sceptics of mass shutdowns in the last year. In all other instances, sceptics have been shouted at and subject to gotcha-style sneering or were outnumbered by consensus advocates to the point where their voices were drowned out. Talk Radio has been one of the only stations where dissenting voices felt assured that they were not being wheeled out as controlled opposition or as punching bags in some carping, Oxbridge gate-keeper’s ego trip.
The long-form weekly discussions between Mike Graham and both Peter Hitchens and Neil Oliver, have been particularly enlightening and rewarding for anyone determined to retain possession of their critical faculties. Kevin O’Sullivan’s articulate and enraged puncturing of government propaganda has been a powerful addition to the public discourse, as has been the independent and measured voice of comedian Mark Dolan. And who can forget the forensic and unrelenting acuity of Julia Hartley-Brewer?
Each one of these journalists has gone out of his or her way to host speakers with opposing views to their own. None of them has resorted to monolithic propagandising which is so much in evidence in mainstream media outlets like the BBC and Sky News. Not one of them has behaved like Piers Morgan, using their privileged position on a national platform to bark panic, hysteria and one-sided versions of the facts into people’s living rooms every morning.
How then can the woke guardians of taste seriously claim that Talk Radio is guilty of disinformation? The answer is surely that debate, contentious opinion and vigorous audit of government policy are now considered a crime in our culture. Anything short of broad uniformity of opinion and conformity of thinking is now considered dangerous. One slight deviation from the consensus and in the eyes of the tech elites you have ‘blood on your hands’ or are guilty of ‘spreading fake news.’ Behind the public health pieties, then, is a form of conceited, psychic totalitarianism.
The second worrying instance of creeping despotism is the death threat issued to journalist Toby Young. Sent to one of his public emails, the message said that it was surprising he had not had his throat slit while he was living in New York. It also said that because of Young’s views on lockdown, he should consider the email a final warning on his life. The email was so different from the usual cowardly outburst found on social media that the police told Young to take this message very seriously.
Anyone who cares about free expression and the free press cannot fail to be reminded of the events at Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris in 2015. A whole editorial room was executed in cold blood during their morning meeting because the magazine had had the temerity to publish satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. That shocking event underscored to the world that the upper limit of what one can say in public life was now controlled by thugs, fascists and totalitarians. Most depressing of all was the complicity of top intellectuals and journalists who slavishly implied that Charlie Hebdo writers and illustrators had made racist content and had therefore ‘thrown oil on the fire.’ Such rhetoric is not a far cry from terms such as ‘dangerous’ and ‘disinformation’ that are used to describe lockdown sceptics like Toby Young, by mainstream commentators. And the subtext of threat and intimidation is the same.
None of these moves against dissenters yet constitutes the physical jackboot being put on free expression. Toby Young is showing no signs of shutting up and will probably be just fine. Talk Radio’s YouTube account was reinstated after nineteen hours. However, these instances are shots across the bow. They are extreme examples of a creeping culture of fear-enforced conformity, an environment of psychological bullying which uses paranoia, emotional blackmail and gaslighting to exact consent for the cancellation of public life and our constitution.
The sign of a robust position on any subject is its capacity to confront and absorb criticism. The fact that the Government’s cultural guerrillas are now being sent out to smear the likes of Peter Hitchens and that independent minds like Toby Young are being threatened or bullied for thinking critically about the virus only demonstrates the desperation and insecurity many of the pro-lockdown elites feel about their own position.
Things are about to heat up for those of us on the dissenting side, but the tougher things become in the short term, the more reassured we should be about the long-term prospects of truth and transparency. They only attack us because they know we are right.
