Why the Right Must Take the High Ground When it Comes to Free Speech

This is the text of the annual oration I gave at the Robert Menzies Institute in Melbourne, Australia on Wednesday, September 24th.

I’d like to thank the Robert Menzies Institute for inviting me to speak to you tonight and for giving my wife and me an opportunity to spend a few days in this wonderful city – and thanks to Angie Scanlon for letting us stay in her house.

Several British people we’ve bumped into have said Australia is like a version of England in which everything works, and that’s particularly true of Melbourne. Many of our cities look a bit like Melbourne might after a nuclear apocalypse. In fact, if anyone knows George Miller, tell him he could save a lot of money by setting the next Mad Max movie in Middlesbrough. He won’t have to spend a penny on set design.

I’m exaggerating, but not by much. There’s a widespread feeling back home that Britain is broken and that anger is fuelling the rise of Reform UK, the party led by Nigel Farage. In the latest opinion polls, Reform is on 34%, whereas Labour and the Conservatives are neck-and-neck on 16%.

And it’s not just Britain. Right-wing, populist parties are leading the polls in France and Germany as well. Trump’s victory in last year’s Presidential election looks like a foretaste of the coming regime change in Europe’s three biggest economies. Maga Republicanism – evangelical Christianity, tub-thumping patriotism, social conservatism – faith, flag, family – is America’s most successful ideological export since left-wing identity politics. Brash, unapologetic nationalism is the antidote to the woke mind virus.

And for that reason, I quite like it. After decades of being told that the English-speaking peoples have been nothing but a blight on the world – leaving behind a legacy of economic exploitation, environmental despoilation and cultural annihilation – it’s refreshing to hear a different story, recognizing what we’ve been able to build together. Donald Trump and JD Vance don’t just want to make America great again. They want to save Western civilisation from its enemies, starting with the Anglosphere – and I’m on board with that.

But there’s one aspect of this movement I’m nervous about and that’s its equivocation when it comes to freedom of expression, which at times feels like that famous formula by Nat Hentoff, “Free speech for me, but not for thee.”

This has become particularly apparent in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. Kirk, for those of you that aren’t aware, was a 31 year-old evangelical Christian and Maga Republican who devoted much of his life to debating his political opponents on university campuses. Indeed, he was killed while addressing a large student audience at Utah Valley University. He was, in short, a free speech champion. Yet the fact that he was assassinated by someone who objected to his criticisms of trans ideology – and the fact that his murder was openly celebrated by woke activists – has led members of the Trump administration to declare a holy war on the radical progressive left, abandoning their commitment to free speech in the process.

A few days after Kirk was shot, the US Attorney General, Pam Bondi, blamed ‘hate speech’ and threatened to prosecute anyone indulging in it. She subsequently walked that back, but it was a disturbing echo of the excuse the woke left makes for no-platforming gender-critical feminists and other heretics. Brendan Carr, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, seemed to threaten ABC with a regulatory investigation when he urged the network to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air for wrongly claiming Kirk’s assassin was a member of the ‘Maga crowd’. And the vice president, JD Vance, told employers to identify and discipline anyone guilty of celebrating Kirk’s murder

Their anger is understandable, but anger, however justified, is a poor policy advisor.

First of all, it makes the administration look hypocritical and the next time President Trump calls out European democracies for not doing more to defend free speech – as he did in his address to the United Nations – the leaders of those countries will be able to accuse him of double standards

Then there’s the fact that it plays into the hands of the administration’s left-wing critics, who are constantly raising the alarm about the ‘fascists’ in the White House. Like it or not, using the machinery of government to silence your political enemies is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.

And it’s an odd way to honour the memory of Charlie Kirk who believed in defeating your opponents by besting them in open debate, not by getting them fired.
As the Supreme Court justice Brandeis said in a landmark First Amendment case, if you think your antagonists are trafficking in falsehoods and fallacies, “The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

This view probably isn’t shared by everyone in this room. I’m often told the only way to force the radical Left to abandon cancel culture is to give them a taste of their own medicine. The problem with that is it seems to take for granted that the Right’s use of these authoritarian tactics is just temporary and once they’ve reawakened the Left’s regard for free speech they’ll rein themselves in. But how often have powerful politicians voluntarily relinquished the tools of censorship?

Another argument is that if people on our side defend our enemies’ right to free speech, given that they won’t defend ours, we’ll be fighting with one hand tied behind our back. I disagree. Our most powerful weapons are reason, evidence and logic, and provided we don’t relinquish them we will prevail, just as Charlie Kirk always did in public debates.

So I want to use this opportunity to try to stiffen the backbone of our would-be saviours when it comes to this fundamental human right – and what better place to do it than the Robert Menzies Institute?

Sir Robert was a passionate believer in free speech. In The Forgotten People and Other Studies in Democracy, published in 1943, he made his radio broadcast on ‘Freedom of Speech and Expression’ the second chapter, behind only ‘The Forgotten People’.

“Why is this freedom of real importance to humanity?” he asked. “The answer is that what appears to be today’s truth is frequently tomorrow’s error. There is nothing absolute about the truth. It is elusive. In the old phrase, ‘It lies at the bottom of a deep well.’ It is hard to come at. So few of us have objective minds – detached minds – and what we conceive to be the truth is very often coloured or distorted by our own passions or interests or prejudices. Hence, if truth is to emerge and in the long run be triumphant, the process of free debate – the untrammelled clash of opinion – must go on.”

That’s one of the best arguments for free speech, originally set out by JS Mill in On Liberty: “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. If wrong, they lose what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

It is this method of exchanging error for truth – what Karl Popper called conjecture and refutation – that has enabled mankind to make such extraordinary progress since the great scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th Century. As Stephen Pinker put it: “Everything we know about the world – the age of our civilization, species, planet, and universe; the stuff we’re made of; the laws that govern matter and energy; the workings of the body and brain – came as insults to the sacred dogma of the day. We now know that the beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified, doubtless including some we hold today.”

Pinker makes two more arguments for free speech, also echoed by Menzies, which is that it’s a necessary condition for the flourishing of democracy, and its suppression is always a hallmark of tyranny.

The first of these is obvious enough – how can we have fair elections without a free press? – but the second is worth fleshing out. According to the Harvard psychologist, tyrants are only able to stave off popular revolt because the citizens are unaware of how widespread popular discontent is. Provided people cannot voice their unhappiness without risking punishment, the regime’s opponents don’t know how numerous they are. As Pinker says: “People will expose themselves to the risk of reprisal by a despotic regime only if they know that others are exposing themselves to that risk at the same time.”

A good illustration of this is the example of the greengrocer given by Václav Havel, the great Czech dissident. In a communist society, Havel said, it’s easy to imagine a greengrocer displaying a sign in his shop window saying ‘Workers of the World Unite’ even though his faith in Marxism has long since lapsed. He displays it because a failure to do so might be taken by the authorities as a sign of disloyalty. So he puts it in his window and his customers, who are equally sceptical, assume they are alone in dissenting from communist dogma.

The suppression of what Pinker calls ‘common knowledge’ – knowing that a particular point of view is widely shared, as well as knowing that those who hold it know it’s shared – isn’t confined to despotic regimes. It’s also the logic behind cancel culture, which is how ideological dogmas are enforced in liberal democracies. Those dogmas may only be adhered to by a tiny minority, but so long as anyone challenging them is dealt a swift punishment beating in the form of a social media mobbing – or worse – the extent of the dissent isn’t common knowledge.

To illustrate this, take the example of the disciplinary investigation of Professor Garth Cooper by the Royal Society of New Zealand four years ago.

Professor Cooper is the professor of biochemistry and clinical biochemistry at the University of Auckland and in the autumn of 2021 he was one of seven signatories to a letter in the New Zealand Listener that took issue with a proposal by a government working group that schools should give the same weight to Māori mythology as they do to science in the classroom. That is, the Māori understanding of the world – that all living things originated with Rangi and Papa, the sky mother and sky god – should be presented as just as valid as the theories of Galileo, Newton and Darwin, which the working group labelled ‘Western science’.

The authors of the letter, ‘In Defence of Science’, were careful to say that indigenous knowledge was “critical for the preservation and perpetuation of culture and local practices” and should be taught in New Zealand’s schools. But they drew the line at treating it as on a par with physics, chemistry and biology: “In the discovery of empirical, universal truths, it falls far short of what we can define as science itself.”

In a rational world, this letter would have been regarded as uncontroversial. Surely, the argument about whether to teach schoolchildren scientific or religious explanations for the origins of the universe and the ascent of man was settled by the Scopes trial in 1925? But the moment it was published all hell broke loose. The views of the authors, who were all professors at Auckland, were denounced by the Royal Society of New Zealand, the Association of Scientists and the Tertiary Education Union — as well as their own Vice-Chancellor.

Two of the authors’ colleagues issued an ‘open letter’ condemning them for causing “untold harm and hurt”. They invited anyone who agreed with them to add their names to the letter – and 2,000 academics duly obliged. Before long, five members of the Royal Society had complained – three of the seven signatories of the Listener letter were members of the Society – and an investigatory panel was set up.

Who do those 2,000 academics remind you of? Our old friend Havel’s greengrocer. It’s inconceivable that they genuinely believe that scientific knowledge has no greater claim to being true than Māori mythology. As Steven Pinker says, “If scientific beliefs are just a particular culture’s mythology, how come we can cure smallpox and get to the moon, and traditional cultures can’t?” You can bet your bottom dollar that if any of the signatories of that ‘open letter’ suffered a heart attack or a burst appendix, their first telephone call would not be to a Māori healer.

Yet, the fact that, deep down, they probably all thought scientific knowledge was superior to Māori mythology was not common knowledge. On the contrary, they harboured this belief like a guilty secret and felt obliged to advertise their fealty to what they took to be the prevailing orthodoxy for fear of being singled out as heretics if they didn’t. And the fact that Professor Cooper and his colleagues were being publicly shamed for daring to voice their dissent deterred anyone else from speaking out and ensured the survival of the relativist dogma.

Eventually, Professor Cooper and his colleagues were exonerated by the investigation, although not before one of them had died before the process had concluded. But the fact that the Royal Society, an institution set up to champion the scientific method, felt obliged to investigate them for defending science is a source of enduring shame. Not surprisingly, Professor Cooper resigned his membership.

But here’s the thing about cancel culture and something I hope will temper the authoritarian impulses of Maga Republicans: it may be effective when it comes to keeping the elites in line, but less so ordinary members of the public. To illustrate this point I’m going to take the issue of climate change.

Yesterday, it was reported that the Australian Human Rights Commission had urged the federal government to take various measure to tackle “climate-related misinformation and disinformation”, including passing a new law making climate change denial a criminal offence.

I have a dog in this fight since I run a news publishing website – the Daily Sceptic – that’s frequently accused of spreading false and misleading information about climate change. If the Australian Human Rights Commission has its way, next time I set foot in Australia I could be arrested.

One of the problems with criminalising climate mis- and disinformation is there’s no infallible authority the courts could rely on to determine whether a particular claim about something climate-related is true or false. Advocates of net zero and other measures designed to reduce carbon emissions often use the term ‘climate deniers’ to describe their opponents. But even the most hardened sceptics wouldn’t dispute that average global temperatures have increased in the past 150 years. Rather, the argument is about the role of human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels, and how much impact changing our behaviour would have. We also dispute just how catastrophic rising global temperatures are and are unimpressed by the hyperbole of the environmental lobby. In other words, proving us wrong isn’t as straightforward as pointing to rising temperatures.

I suppose the prosecution could summon distinguished climate scientists as expert witnesses, but then so could the defence – for instance, Dr John Clauser, joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2022, who recently signed a declaration stating there is no climate emergency.

No doubt the would-be jailers would invoke the ‘97% of scientists agree’ canard, but not only is that stat dubious, it’s also a non-sequitur. Arguing that a scientific hypothesis is likely to be true because a majority of scientists believe it to be so, or claiming that a hypothesis is ‘settled’, is to misunderstand the nature of science and the scientific process. As Einstein said when 100 Nazi physicists published a book rubbishing his theory of relativity: “Why 100? If I was wrong, one would have been enough.”

Perhaps Exhibit A for the prosecution would be a ‘fact check’ by a reputable news organization. But I doubt the evidence of an ‘independent fact-checker’ would be taken as gospel by a jury. A defense barrister could ask them during cross-examination why they never scrutinize the statements of climate alarmists like Al Gore, who predicted in An Inconvenient Truth that within a decade there would be no more snow on Kilimanjaro. That was in 2006 and last time I checked there is still snow at the top of Kilimanjaro. Or the claim made by Paul Erlich, author of The Population Bomb, in an article in the New York Times: “We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.” That was in 1969. Or King Charles’s prediction in 2009 that we only had eight years left to save the planet or we faced “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse”.

So, criminalising climate scepticism won’t be easy. But this recommendation is just the most extreme example of how little tolerance the climate change lobby – in which we now have to include the Australian Human Rights Commission – has for dissent and how unwilling they are to engage in public debate.

The fate of Peter Ridd is a case in point. When he challenged the prevailing orthodoxy about the Great Barrier Reef in a jointly written article in 2018, James Cook University placed him under investigation – and unlike Professor Garth Cooper, he was fired. He sued his former employer and won, but JCU successfully appealed that judgement in the federal court and Ridd’s subsequent appeal to the High Court was dismissed.

But here’s the point: the climate change lobby’s unwillingness to engage in open debate has meant that public support for policies designed to mitigate the impact of global warming, particularly when they hit people in their pocketbooks, is fragile.

A recent opinion poll for the Times revealed that less than a third of British voters are in favour of banning new petrol and diesel cars, down from 51% in 2021.
Four years ago, just 11% of voters thought that global warming was not the result of human activity, while only 16% believed that the warnings from environmentalists were exaggerated. Today 16% think global warming is not the result of human activity, while 25% think the threat has been exaggerated.

The lesson here, and one I hope the Trump administration pays attention to, is that if you want to bring the electorate with you when driving through a momentous public policy, particularly one that’s going to have real costs, you need to press home your case in the public square. Worried about people spreading mis- and disinformation, as the Australian Human Rights Commission is? Or ‘fake news’, as Trump calls it? As Louis Brandeis said, “The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

Here’s another reason why it’s in the administration’s interests to uphold free speech. Unless people feel free to speak up, who will correct its policy errors?
My news publishing site, the Daily Sceptic, was originally called Lockdown Sceptics and I was one of only a handful of journalists who opposed the lockdown policy from the very beginning. I believed then – and believe now – that shutting down businesses and locking people in their homes was a catastrophic mistake that caused far more harm than it prevented. I’m sure that’s a view that some of you share, given that the city of Melbourne has the dubious distinction of having been locked down for longer than anywhere else in the world.

Why was your state government able to persist in this error for 267 days? Because too few people were prepared to publicly criticise the policy, including leading medical scientists and senior public health officials. No one wanted to risk undermining public confidence in the Covid restrictions for fear that people might be less inclined to observe them and the critics would then be accused of having blood on their hands. So they bit their tongues and, as a result, public debt skyrocketed, inflation spiralled, small businesses closed, children lost a year of school and elderly people in care homes were left to die alone.

If ever there was a policy that called out for challenge, this was it. As Robert Menzies said, “Power is apt to produce a kind of drunkenness, and it needs the cold douche of the critic to correct it.”

I’m not suggesting that President Trump or other populist leaders will repeat that particular error, but they may be drawn into others and the best safeguard against such mistakes is if people are free to point them out without fear of repercussions.

There are other reasons why members of the new nationalist conservative movement should resist the temptation to persecute their political enemies. For one, they won’t be in power for ever. As the legendary ex-head of the American Civil Liberties Union Ira Glasser said: “Think of free speech as being like a can of poison gas. It seems like a good weapon when you’ve got your enemy in your sights. But once the wind changes, it blows back on you.”

That’s a lesson the radical progressive left is learning in Trump’s America, but it will be no less true when the wind changes again.

Then there’s the increasing polarisation of American politics – something we’re beginning to see in Europe too – with the risk that it could eventually lead to widespread civil unrest.

Trump can legitimately complain about the capture by his political enemies of those organs of the state that should remain above the political fray – the judiciary, the police, the civil service, the media, schools and universities. That’s tilted the playing field in favour of the Democrats, so what choice does he have but to use his brief time in office to redress the balance? I hear the same arguments from the leaders of Reform UK, who are relishing the prospect of taking on what they call ‘the Blob’.

But if the civic institutions of our democracies are going to serve all their citizens and not just the victors of the latest electoral contest, they need to become politically neutral again, not be captured by the right. The view that they can never be impartial – that neutrality is always a mask disguising their alignment with the interests of the powerful – is a key component of the neo-Marxist, post-modernist critique of liberalism that we should reject, not embrace.

We hear the same attack on free speech – that it favours those who want to maintain the status quo and penalises minorities – and we should reject that too.
Without free speech, the suffragettes would not have been able to win votes for women; without the landmark First Amendment victories won by the ACLU, civil rights leaders would not have been able to organise, protest and march; and without freedom of expression, the gay rights movement would not have persuaded the authorities to legalise homosexuality and gay marriage.

Free speech is the friend of historically marginalised groups, not their enemy.

To conclude, I want to deal with one more argument the Maga Republicans make when justifying their pragmatic approach to free speech. It is that they’re engaged in an existential struggle to save America – Western civilisation itself – from its enemies. You don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.

But you can’t justify the suspension of free speech in the name of saving America – or Western civilisation – since the continuing defence of that fundamental right is at the core of its identity.

Listening to the rhetoric coming out of the White House in the last few weeks I’m reminded of the increasingly paranoid leaders of the ancien regime in Europe banning far-right political parties and candidates from standing in elections in the name of saving democracy.

We hear the same arguments to justify laws outlawing disinformation, which is now a criminal offence in nine European countries, including the UK.

But if you’re suspending democratic norms in peacetime, you’re not saving democracy. You’re helping to destroy it.

I said at the beginning of this talk that the Robert Menzies Institute was an appropriate forum in which to make the case for free speech since he was one of its most eloquent 20th Century champions. But we shouldn’t forget his one significant lapse, which was the ill-fated attempt to suppress the Australian Communist Party. In 1950, his government passed an act of parliament outlawing the Party, but it was overturned by the High Court, which ruled it unconstitutional. Menzies then called a referendum on the issue which he narrowly lost.

He justified these efforts with the familiar argument that the West was engaged in an existential struggle with the enemies of civilisation – and, to be fair, we were embroiled in a Cold War with the Soviet Union at the time. Yet, mercifully, his fears about the threat posed by the red menace to Australia’s way of life never materialised.

In the end, your greatest ever Prime Minister proved more than equal to the task of defeating his political enemies through “more speech” rather than “enforced silence”. Trump and the other leaders of insurgent, populist parties would do well to follow the same path.

Thank you.

Stop Press: You can watch a video of my remarks here and of the Q&Q with Georgina Dowler, the Director of the Robert Menzies Institute, here.