328: ‘The scale of censorship is insane’ | Greg Lukianoff on Britain’s speech police
The spiked podcast
The spiked podcast
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 December 2024
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
Is the UK a free country any more? An estimated nine people per day are arrested for making offensive comments online. In fact, more people had their collars felt in Britain for speech crimes in 2015 and 2016 than were arrested in the US during the entirety of First Red Scare. Here, Greg Lukianoff – president of the US’s Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression – warns that laws against so-called hate speech, and the elite panic over ‘misinformation’, have given licence to the British state to trample on our liberties. He also discusses the Trumpian threat to free speech, the explosion of campus censorship in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war, and what it really means to ‘incite violence’.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Misinformation and disinformation surely exist. |
| 0:03.7 | But the idea that it's no biggie to give government the power over deciding what misinformation and disinformation are is giving people in power the power to decide what is true, which is insane. |
| 0:18.0 | If you make government the arbiter of truth, that's the whole ballgame. |
| 0:28.4 | Hello, I'm Fraser Myers, Deputy Editor of Spiked, and I'm delighted to be joined in conversation with Greg Lukianoff. |
| 0:34.8 | Greg, welcome. |
| 0:36.1 | Good to be here. |
| 0:37.1 | And I'm always glad when I'm in Britain. |
| 0:38.0 | People can actually pronounce my name for some reason. I try my best. And I'm glad you're in Britain |
| 0:43.3 | because I want to talk to you about your experiences as an American free speech campaigner. You're a First Amendment lawyer. |
| 0:49.7 | Also, head of fire, the foundation for individual rights and expression, author of co-author |
| 0:55.6 | of coddling of the American mind and canceling of the American mind. |
| 0:59.4 | But as someone from the great home of free speech, the home of the First Amendment, could |
| 1:03.8 | you give us maybe a bit of context into the depths that the UK has fallen? |
| 1:08.4 | Because it feels like a lot of people here don't realize how bad we have it in terms of free speech. |
| 1:12.6 | Yeah. |
| 1:13.6 | It really is, I think you guys got Stockholm syndrome or something, because like so you've gotten used to so many things are just absolutely insane. |
| 1:20.6 | So just for like historical context, because that's, you know, when people look back on the first red scare, like in the United States, there's an assumption that this was this absolutely horrible period. And the right. Thousands of people were arrested for ties to anarchist or communist organizations. And about 800, I think, were deported from the United States. |
| 1:47.4 | But it's also important to remember that we have a tendency to sort of pat ourselves on the back |
| 1:51.2 | as being like, well, they were crazy back then. |
| 1:54.0 | It's like, well, there was an incredibly bloody revolution going on in Russia. |
| 1:57.5 | There was a mass bombing campaign going on in the U.S. that targeted including the Attorney |
| 2:04.1 | General and Justice of the Supreme Court, I think including Oliver Wendell Holmes. |
... |
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