Defund The Thought Police

A report from an off-the-record London meeting

Our friends at City Journal have just published an excellent overview of a recent meeting I organized in London of free speech investigators, journalists, and advocates from around the world. A new friend and colleague, Jacob Howland, the Provost and Dean of Intellectual Foundations at the University of Austin, authored the piece, and gave me permission to re-publish it. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did! — Michael

Shut Up, They Explained

A London conference pushes back on the Censorship Industrial Complex.

by Jacob Howland

Human cognition deals with chaos like a person sorts laundry: by putting things in bins. Lower animals do this in rudimentary ways. Lizards instinctively toggle between five responses to whatever appears in their perceptual field: fight, flee, eat, mate, or ignore. Human beings, too, make instinctive determinations. But while lizards can only hiss or bleat, man, as Aristotle says, possesses logos, whose meanings include word, speech, thought, reason, account, order, proportion, and ratio. Through language, and especially through politics—the unfettered public exchange of a broad range of opinions and arguments—human beings discern, articulate, and produce social orders that make possible not just life, but the good life.

Today, however, free speech and politics are under concerted assault in the liberal democracies of the West. The public-private consortia directing that campaign—what has been called the Censorship Industrial Complex—was the topic of a conference at the end of June in London.

The Westminster Free Speech Forum was organized by Michael Shellenberger, one of the authors of the Twitter Files and CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin. The gathering was private and off-the-record to ensure that participants would not be persecuted. (This was a serious concern: Brazil’s attorney general—Brazil’s—had accused Shellenberger of having committed a “probable” crime after he published the Twitter Files.) The conference brought together more than 50 journalists, publishers, academics, parliamentarians, philanthropists, and free-speech activists to discuss the problem of ever-expanding censorship in Western democracies. Experts from the United States, Germany, the U.K., Brazil, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and the Czech Republic reported on how governments are cracking down on free speech in their home countries and around the world.

Speakers documented the coordinated efforts of the UN, EU, World Health Organization, Organization of American States (OAS), and U.S. government to police opinions and facts that interfere with their political goals, and to punish those who promulgate them. They mapped the immense governmental bureaucracies that have implemented a “whole of society” approach to censorship, leveraging opaque networks of agencies and offices with a mind-numbing multitude of acronyms. They explored the concerted effort among foreign policy and intelligence communities, philanthropies, the news media, NGOs, and universities to stop supposed “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and “malinformation.” And they reflected on ways to counter the alarming growth of a culture of censorship among the young and those on the left, majorities of whom support regulating speech.

The war against free speech is being fought with treaties and official agreements with wording as broad as a shotgun’s blast. One of many examples is the OAS’s 2013 Inter-American Convention Against All Forms of Discrimination and Intolerance. Article 1 of the Convention includes in its definition of intolerance “disrespect, rejection, or contempt . . . [for the] opinions” of others, while Article 4 states that the “duties of the [35 signatory] states” include “ [to] prevent, eliminate, prohibit, and punish, in accordance with their constitutional norms . . . all acts and manifestations of discrimination and intolerance.” But what is “disrespect”? What constitutes “rejection” of an opinion? Is, say, discussion of the connection between Islam and violence punishable intolerance? There are no clear answers to these questions, because the censors never define their terms. The vagueness deliberately encourages self-censorship by communicating an implicit warning: caveat loquens, let the speaker beware.

As European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen explained, “Hate is hate.” In other words, “Hate is what we say it is.” In Europe and across the developed world, such sentiments quickly becomes censorious policies. Say the EU wishes to deem racism a national crisis. It calls for studies and selects and funds NGOs to produce them. The surveys ask anonymous respondents whether, for example, they’ve been subject to, or witnessed, racism. The results provide “independent” evidence of a social emergency, which the Censorship Industrial Complex leverages to justify speech restrictions. This phenomenon plays out wherever there is censorship. Using endless up-escalators of money and power, the CIC creates agenda-driven crises, which it uses to justify further crackdowns on free speech. This is the kind of self-perpetuating system that political scientists call SLICC, a “self-licking ice cream cone.”

Athenian democracy, as one Forum speaker observed, was characterized by isegoria, equality in the exercise of freedom, and parrhesia, frankness. The CIC rejects these core democratic values. Its notion that “legal but harmful” information must be censored presupposes that the citizens of liberal democracies cannot think for themselves.

As a result, the CIC infantilizes the public. Police Scotland’s creepy “Don’t Feed Hate” campaign, for example, features a furry Hate Monster with an angry expression, suggesting so-called hate speech is little more than the tantrum of an ill-bred child. “The Hate Monster,” Police Scotland’s website explains, “represents that feeling some people get when they are frustrated and angry and take it out on others, because they feel like they need to show they are better than them.” The website encourages citizens to report (anonymously, if they wish) any “hate crimes” they witness. It’s totalitarian Sesame Street for adults.

American citizens, too, apparently need commissars to babysit them. In 2021, Nina Jankowicz, who would later head the Department of Homeland Security’s now-disbanded Disinformation Governance Board, posted to TikTok a bizarre video of herself made up like Mary Poppins, singing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” whose lyrics she’d rewritten to explain “disinformation.” For a while, Jankowicz performed her shtick on a platform called Alethea (from the Greek aletheia, “truth”), which helpscompanies “detect and mitigate disinformation and misinformation.” She has also co-founded a nonprofit, the American Sunlight Project, which seeks to combat “false or misleading information” by ensuring that “that citizens have access to trustworthy sources.” This corporate branding exemplifies Orwellian doublespeak: darkness is sunlight, and falsehood is truth.

The most potent weapon against these would-be censors is the very one the CIC targets: free speech, which Frederick Douglass called “the dread of tyrants.” “Slavery cannot tolerate free speech,” Douglass proclaimed in 1860. “Five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the South.” In the same address, he shrewdly observed that the suppression of free speech limits educational possibilities, and so “violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.” It even harms the know-it-all censors, whose refusal to entertain substantial opposition to their own assumptions and arguments deprives them of a rare and fleeting opportunity to develop intellectual humility.

The good news is that the CIC’s dishonesty has been extensively exposed. Claims that the government, the intelligence community, and the media repeatedly dismissed as conspiracy theories—that Covid originated in a Chinese lab; that vaccines were ineffective in preventing its spread and carried significant risks of their own; that the infamous laptop really did belong to Hunter Biden; and that Joe Biden is suffering cognitive decline—have all, in rapid succession, turned out to be true. We can only hope that these revelations—and the vigilance of defenders of free speech, including those who participated in the Forum—will yet stymie our would-be censors.

Jacob Howland is Provost and Dean of Intellectual Foundations at UATX. His latest book is Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic.