The ‘free speech’ debate is wrapped in confusion. Political commentators agonise over questions such as ‘ Does the UK really have free speech? Are we too strict? Not strict enough? How can the US be so self-contradictory? And how do we negotiate with the US in this incredibly difficult and sensitive territory?
Applications of free speech in Trumpworld are boldly self-contradictory – the administration relentlessly condemns European countries for restricting free speech, allegedly in a North Korean way, whilst simultaneously silencing their own dissenters, including their news media and beloved comedians.
We can’t credit Trump with a logical brain, but the hypocrisy is bare-faced. We feel equally bewildered on hearing Trumpworld expressing grief and rage at so-called ‘radical left attacks’ such as Charlie Kirk’s murder, whilst barely registering cases where the politics are reversed, like the recent murder by far-right extremist Vance Boelter of a Democrat lawmaker. No flags were flown at half-mast. Trump could barely recall it.
What’s behind this preposterous hypocrisy?
In the US first amendment free speech is regulated in areas such as obscenity, child pornography and certain employment and other legal contexts. But the amendment fully protects hate speech. It’s a slightly grey area since speech that incites imminent lawless action or “potential violence” isn’t protected.
However, most of what would qualify as hate speech in other western countries is “legally protected” in the US. In the domain of hate speech, speakers have an absolute right to express any opinion about other people or institutions, however dangerous. Here there are no red lines; anything goes.
This absolutist notion of hate speech binds it to other parts of the American psyche, including their prevailing culture of contempt for gun control. To be truly American, hate speech must be unrestricted and have the same unfettered, wild-west powers as the right to bear arms, whether or not it leads to harm.
By contrast, in the UK and elsewhere, hate speech is regulated, a restriction which embeds two reasonable assumptions:
– Hate speech is capable of causing psychological harm. Being told ‘you should be raped’ is a harmful speech act, whether rape happens or not.
– Even if we dispute the capacity of hate speech in itself to cause harm – the ‘it’s only words’ argument – it can trigger harmful physical actions. It’s why the court jailed Lucy Connolly for suggesting migrant hotels should be set alight, and why online attacks on MPs mean they need increased physical security. Jo Cox was murdered because ‘mere words’ led to a physical act.
Moral ladders and the free speech continuum
Regulated hate speech is vastly more complex and controversial than the absolute freedoms US haters enjoy because it is constrained by moral norms. What counts as morally acceptable occupies a response continuum and becomes relativised to who is speaking.
One end of the continuum contains speech which is unacceptable to almost everyone (for example, calling someone a paedophile, with no reason except to smear their reputation). A step further along we find, e.g. rape threats, unacceptable to most (though, sadly, both paedophilia and rape are privately endorsed by some, of course).
Further along is, for example, racially abusive speech. At this point consensus starts to crumble on what constitutes hate speech and should be penalised. Racists justify their verbal attacks using a muddled set of grounds: ‘it’s just words and so isn’t harmful’; ‘it’s an emotional expression of legitimate frustration’; ‘it’s true (and therefore should be said)’; ‘regardless of whether or not it’s true or harmful, punishing me is a violation of my right to free speech’.
This messy grab-bag of excuses is often deployed, tacitly or explicitly, jointly or in part, to justify the use of hate speech.
Disparate starting points
When we move to the domain of, for example, anti-trans or misogynist hate speech the picture becomes even cloudier, with some believing its wrongness isn’t up for debate at all, and others claiming that it absolutely is.
Here, one person’s hate speech is another’s reasonable debate topic. Thus some treat ‘trans person x isn’t a woman’ as a putative fact. For others, it’s a discussion subject, and, for others, an instance of hate speech that undermines x’s core sense of identity and encourages dangerous anti-trans behaviour. Different groups are at different points on the moral ladder and hence occupy different positions on what counts as acceptable.
The domain of acceptability in hate speech constantly changes cultural shape but is expanding alarmingly with the rightward shift in attitudes. ‘Ethnic minorities should leave the country’ is racist hate speech for some but now not for others. For advocates, such controversial statements can be tamed further with the handy prefix ‘I’m not racist but …’
For all these reasons, our UK democracy struggles with the cultural sensitivities around hate speech and with implementing workable, meaningful regulations. It’s this complexity that makes the ‘free speech’ debate ripe for exploitation by the far-right.
Trump: ‘free speech’ king
It’s puzzling and alarming that the repression of free speech is happening “in a country whose own constitution explicitly protects [it]” Adam Bienkov. But the truth is that Trump’s regime doesn’t want free speech as such. They want two other things instead.
They want to claim an idealised notion of ‘free speech’ as part of their wholesale expropriation of the democratic narrative. Like ‘sovereignty and justice’, real free speech, they argue, truly belongs to America but is absent from European ‘faux democracies’. It’s ‘us (not them) who truly value this fundamental freedom’.
But crucially, Trump’s regime also wants to restrict the use of free speech, including the absolute right to express hatred, to supporters of their own far-right ideology.
Challengers are not, it turns out, entitled to this freedom. With true irony, far-right ideologues fall back on the regulatory notions they despise to silence dissenters. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s warning that the administration will “absolutely target anyone using hate speech” applies only to those, including Democrats, seeking to contest the administration’s own hate-driven racist, misogynist, anti-diversity, world view.
Making sense of the hypocrisy
Herein then lies some background for Trumpworld’s massively hypocritical use of ‘free speech’. They have weaponised their expropriated, idealised notion of absolute free speech as a mechanism for pumping out their own ideological far-right propaganda through the world’s communication arteries. This flow helps to undermine democracy and bolster the ‘superiority’ of their vision.
At the same time, they borrow the notion of regulated free speech to suppress dissent when challenged. This restriction enables Trumpworld to distribute the wide-ranging contempt it harbours without obstacles, in particular those presented by democratic free speech regulation. It “secures the licence to speak with impunity, [free from] the consequences of that expression”, Nesrine Malik. ‘We can attack you but you cannot reciprocate’.
Free speech privilege
This multi-purpose weaponization of free speech is clear in the Trump administration’s response to Lucy Connolly’s jail sentence. Their complaint that it constitutes an “infringement of Lucy’s freedom of expression” leans on the absolutist notion that there should be no restraints on what people can say. It also portrays the UK as a repressive regime whose ‘faux free speech regulations’ result in the imprisonment of ‘innocent people’. All of this endorses and amplifies Connolly’s dangerous message.
Similarly, Trump’s assertion during his UN speech that Sadiq Khan ‘wants to implement Sharia law’, looks, to the Muslim community and others, like hate speech, likely to accelerate dangerous anti-Muslim behaviour. But Trump was able to spread his anti-Muslim message by falling back on his presumed entitlement to peddle this rhetoric with absolute impunity.
Farage makes the one-way direction of this entitlement clear. He has a long history of arguably racist commentary in which he explicitly links immigrants with terrorism and expresses anti-Muslim views.
When Starmer recently called a Reform policy “racist”, Farage objected that it will “incite the radical left” and “directly threaten the safety of his campaigners”. Here Farage is effectively framing Starmer’s assessment as hate speech. Like Bondi, he is appealing to our regulated notions of free speech to silence critics of his presumed exclusive right to freely disseminate his own poisonous rhetoric.
Chiming in
Faragean hate rhetoric has leaked into our cultural bloodstream and secured legitimized spots on our moving ladder of moral norms.
When UK voices agree with Trump’s and Farage’s dog whistle attacks, they are availing themselves of the various mutually inconsistent excuses described earlier: to say ‘Khan wants Sharia law for London’ is, they argue, just to state an ‘innocent fact’. ‘Calling for migrant hotels to be set alight’ is ‘just words’ or ‘an expression of legitimate frustration’. Punishing Connolly and those who defend her ‘constitutes an attack on our civil liberties’.
Know your bully
Trumpworld condemning Europe’s ‘free speech failures’ is like cargo hauliers complaining about blocked shipping lanes. Regulated free speech aims to protect citizens against harm. But it poses an obstacle to the regressive, authoritarian world order Trump’s administration is rolling out. Their double standards seek to undermine constraints on the global free flow of their propaganda and on the temerity of anyone attempting to challenge them.
Our UK struggle with how to apply truly democratic, ethically regulated free speech is a good struggle – a necessary, negotiated part of the grown-up complexity and nuance of living with others in a genuine democracy. But we must keep clear sight of the precise ways in which authoritarian bullies are exploiting our principles of free speech for their own ends.
Comments? We want to hear them. Please write to editor@westenglandbylines.co.uk
