Not so Keen on free speech

Of the many aphorisms about free speech, surely the best known is that attributed to Voltaire: that although he might disapprove of what you say, he would defend to the death your right to say it. It is, of course, excellent — as far as it goes. Often, however, those who seek to silence other people’s speech object not to what they say, but how and where.

Consider Kellie-Jay Keen, aka Posie Parker, a women’s rights activist who holds rallies under the rubric Let Women Speak. She advertises a place and time, turns up with stewards in hi-viz jackets, and hands the mic to any woman with something to say. Some talk about men who identify as women using women’s toilets and changing rooms at workplaces and gyms, or muscling into women-only support groups for everything from addiction to the menopause.

One frequent speaker served a prison sentence locked up with a trans-identified man; another, a disabled woman, fears asking for a female carer only for a man who identifies as a woman to turn up. An increasingly common theme is schools colluding with gender-distressed children’s delusion that they can change sex.

In a sane world, what these women say wouldn’t attract criticism; indeed, it wouldn’t even need to be said. But often they are drowned out by transactivists shrieking threats and slogans of the sort Robert Jay Lifton, in his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, called thought-terminating clichés: “brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases [that] become the start and finish of any ideological analysis”. “Trans women are women”. “Trans rights are human rights”. “Kill all terfs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists]”.

Keen recently returned to the UK from a tour of Australia and New Zealand, which was aborted after a police no-show at a planned rally in Auckland. She was hemmed in and jostled, pelted with eggs and tomato soup and sprayed with liquid. Protesters picked up the metal barriers that were supposed to keep them back and brandished them as weapons.

Keen barely kept her footing as she was hustled away by private event stewards. Afterwards she tweeted: “I genuinely thought if I fell to the floor I would never get up again, my children would lose their mother and my husband would lose his wife.”

If anyone is supposed to be Voltaireishly assiduous in defending the lawful exercise of free speech, it’s the police. That they failed to do so in Auckland — and at some Let Women Speak rallies in the UK — can be blamed on the way Keen is smeared and dehumanised by the authorities.

Before her tour of Australia and New Zealand, she was vilified by politicians and in the press. Her “evil ideology is to scapegoat minorities”, said the premier of the Australian state of Victoria. “That woman and her views are abhorrent,” said New Zealand’s deputy prime minister. New Zealand Greens claimed she had a “longstanding track record of hateful speech and the incitement of violence”.

Describing Keen like this marks her as outside civilised society: an acceptable target for threats and violence. It outsources the dirty work of shutting her up to the bovver boys. Commentators, politicians and campaigners can say “I support free speech, but … ”, while maintaining (im)plausible deniability.

Trans lobby groups who tried to get a court order blocking Keen from New Zealand came up with a classic of the genre: “We are not opposing freedom of speech, we are opposing the measurable threat to public order and the safety of transgender people.”

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/may-2023/not-so-keen-on-free-speech/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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