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Shut Up, They Explained
A London conference pushes back on the Censorship Industrial Complex./ Eye on the News / The Social Order, Politics and law
Jul 18 2024/ Share
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.
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Shut Up, They Explained
A London conference pushes back on the Censorship Industrial Complex.
www.city-journal.org
