Whatever happened to free speech

by David Bullard

Just over a year ago I was approached by the owner/editor of a lifestyle magazine based in KZN and asked whether I would write a regular column for the magazine and whether I might also consider a podcast. I wasn’t too keen on the podcast because the waffle market’s a bit oversupplied at the moment and, besides, I wasn’t too sure many people would want to hear me holding forth for fifteen minutes on any of the many ills affecting our country. I certainly wouldn’t.

However I was very happy to oblige with an article and sent one off. I got an immediate response from the editor which was short and sweet... “Hi David, Lovely piece. Thanks so much”. Naturally, I felt rather pleased with myself.

So I was rather surprised when six days later I received another e-mail from my new editor which read as follows:

“Hi David

Thank you again for the article submitted. As you probably realise, I hold your work in high regard and am very pleased that you agreed to write for us.
Sadly, I have had a rather strong reaction from our editorial committee that suggests that the subject is too hot to handle at present and has requested that we keep the piece on hold until such time as sensitivity has reduced somewhat. Our advertising sales team is also concerned at the effect the piece might have on advertising revenue under the current wave of heightened sensitivity”.

So what was this “too hot to handle” topic that the editorial committee and advertising sales team felt the need to censor?

Well you won’t be surprised to hear that what I had produced was a very light hearted article mocking the absurd sensitivities of the LGBTQIA+ alphabet soup ensemble of what is known as the ‘gay community’ and the equally absurd idea that there are almost a hundred genders to choose from and that people who really should be seeing a shrink can choose the pronouns ‘them/they’.

I quoted a piece from Brendan O’Neill from Spiked Online in which he explained that a new law in Canada makes it a criminal offence to ‘repress a person’s non-cisgender gender identity’ or to ‘repress... a person’s gender expression that does not conform to the sex assigned to the person at birth’. This means that if you are a father of a son aged ten who suddenly decides that he wants to go to school wearing a skirt and frilly knickers you would be ill advised to take him aside, have a quiet word and attempt to disabuse him of the idea. To do so could result in a jail sentence of five years.

I also mocked the idea that women with penises should be allowed to compete with women without penises in sport and that the NHS in the UK was apparently sending out notices to men who now identified as women reminding them to book check-ups for cervical cancer. The denouement of the article was the question ‘what single event of all these marked the end of civilisation?’ and I copped out with the answer that it was the introduction of dress down friday all those years ago that had done the damage.

To be honest I wasn’t really bothered that the article was not considered fit for publication although I was surprised that very junior staff could dictate to the owner/editor what went into his publication.

Apparently a lot of the staff were gay, knew lots of gender confused people or were thinking of transitioning to a different sex and they didn’t feel ‘safe’ with my antediluvian views. The article in its entirety was published a few weeks later on Politicsweb. I wasn’t arrested for hate speech and no members of the alphabet soup community chose to end their lives as a result as far as I know.

We live in a time that George Orwell could never have dreamed of. His novel 1984 is set in a dystopian future where the government (Big Brother) is all powerful and everyone has to watch what they say or think if they want to avoid ending up in the notorious Room 101.

We don’t live in a society that is anything like that and yet the level of control over what we are allowed to say and think is fast approaching even Orwellian excesses. Except that it hasn’t been decreed by a totalitarian government that things should be this way. It has been pushed by an increasingly left wing academia with the full support of much of the main stream media and the powerful owners of social media platforms. In fact, the very people one would have thought would have supported freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

In fact, most Western politicians seem just as bewildered by the new rules of engagement as the rest of us. When Sir Keir Starmer was asked on LBC Radio whether a woman can have a penis the poor fellow became very confused as he desperately searched for the politically correct answer. Labour MP Rosie Duffield expressed the view that only a biological woman can have a cervix and was labelled a ‘transphobe’ and barraged with hate mail and demands that she resign as a member of parliament. Her whimpering party leader also criticised her comment saying that trans people are “among the most marginalised and abused communities”. Unless you include Ukrainians that is.

J K Rowling is now well known to be transphobic because she still believes that there are only two biological sexes. This has led to her being labelled a TERF which is a gobbledygook term dreamed up by some batshit crazy academic and stands for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’. This has resulted in JKR being excluded from events related to her hugely successful Harry Potter books and even being publicly disowned by the puke-inducing virtue signallers she turned into stars with the Harry Potter movies.

JKR has made enough moolah to be able to give the middle finger to her critics but not everyone is as fortunate.

If you happen to be an academic at one of the top universities in the US or the UK and you invite the wrong person for a public debate then start looking for a job. By the wrong person I mean the sort of respected professional with the type of strong, well thought out views that might challenge the accepted wisdom on any number of issues. This could be what the lefties refer to as ‘problematic’ because traumatised students who haven’t been taught to think and debate may need to find a safe space and a kitten to cuddle. Pathetic isn’t it?

Similarly if you are a university lecturer and you happen to say something that could reasonably be construed as ‘problematic’ then you must expect a student uprising but, more worrying, absolutely no support from your academic peers who will be more concerned with self preservation than honesty and integrity. This is all unfolding even now at once great universities like Stanford Law School in the US. Universities now claim to have a ‘free speech code’ but all this does is allow them to choose who is permitted to express their views. If this is what is happening at top universities what hope is there for the future?

It’s not just academia that is affected though. The corporate world has also became anally retentive with staff being instructed to respect fellow staff member’s pronouns and disciplinary hearings becoming a daily occurrence to investigate whether someone who took offence at what someone else said should be given a few days off work to recover while the giver of offence is told to pack up and go. In a world now obsessed with ‘micro-aggressions’ it’s generally accepted by the HR department that the offended person is always in the right.

Publishers are even ‘sanitising’ books to make them less offensive to the sort of dimwits who probably don’t read anyway but, if they did, would manage to summon up the necessary energy to be offended. If this sort of thing was ordered by the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party one might understand but to voluntarily self censor is an act of pure madness.

Fortunately it’s not all bad news and the namby pambys who brought out a sanitised version of Roald Dahl’s books were forced by public outcry into a virtue signalling retreat. They will now continue to publish the original version.

The pushback is definitely happening and the attention seeking weirdos who attempt to tell the rest of us what we are allowed to say and think are increasingly being mocked and exposed for the narcissistic empty vessels they are.

As someone once pointed out to me when I got into a spot of bother with The Sunday Times back in 2008, you can either give offence or you can take offence. If you decide to take offence it’s entirely voluntary on your part so why on earth should I care? If you choose to identify with the ‘diddums generation’ of cry-bullies then don’t expect any sympathy from the vast majority of normal, well adjusted people.

I’ll leave the last word to English literary giant Kingsley Amis,

“If you can’t annoy someone with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing”.