Free speech ain’t what it used to be. Thankfully, the good guys are still entitled to it. Twitter seems to have taken a leaf out of Sadiq Khan’s ‘vibrant diversity’ playbook, deciding that pretty much anything goes – so long as the target of said speech meets with approval. The Ayatollah Khamenei is still up there, God bless him, as are ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban – provided they tone it down a bit, and don’t ‘glorify violence’.
You have to take your hat off to Twitter in fact, for the sparkling array of death threats they manage to handle for Geert Wilders, often before the man has made it out of bed. Not to mention their embrace of Trans activist parents, who see nothing wrong with a bit of underage genital mutilation; and if that’s what it takes to get likes and retweets these days, so be it.
No. The problem for social media is not what to do about woke jihadists, but the real bad guys – the inveterate, middle-aged, Marks & Spencers sporting, conservative honkies, who have the audacity to think that free speech extends to them and all their white privilege – a group to which I’m a fully paid-up member.
I don’t get religious on much these days, but I remain committed to free speech. In fact, I’d go as far as to say I’m a free speech zealot – I want to know what the enemy is thinking, and I like to extend him the same courtesy – it saves time with fatwas, you understand, which build up after a while, and tend to make one’s in-tray unsightly. As detestable as genuine conservative views are, I harbour the delusion that there is still a place at the table for us; not this morning, however.
I woke to discover that Twitter is regrettably no longer a place for The New Conservative. Clearly we overstepped the mark, when we retweeted a Mark Steyn interview with Dr Aseem Malhotra, who had the gall to quote Pfizer’s initial trial data back to them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWaYdDKKTXc&t=460s
In hindsight of course, we should have played it straight by livestreaming a bit of inter-racial gang rape, but I’m afraid I just didn’t have the energy.
Although almighty, Twitter is not unmerciful. Our ornithological blue overlords have instructed us to simply delete the blasphemous tweet, and we’re good to go; we won’t be doing that. GB News is hardly beyond the pale, neither are they hamstrung by the state. They are therefore free to air a wide range of views, including those which run contrary to the prevailing groupthink of the mainstream. Furthermore, not only is Mark Steyn a man who believes profoundly in facts, but Dr Malhorta is an eminent cardiolodist, who I believe told the truth precisely as he sees it. That’s good enough for The New Conservative, until Pfizer does us the courtesy of refuting his data.
More to the point, The New Conservative has absolutely no intention of retracting ‘offensive speech’, as we made clear in our mission statement:
We are passionate believers in free speech for all, even those we disagree with. Our words will certainly offend from time to time (they’d be meaningless if they did not). This is not something we shall ever apologise for.
If you cannot even quote Pfizer’s own data in a forum which claims to uphold free speech, then the outlook is even worse than we concluded earlier this week (in response to the lukewarm support for Salman Rushdie):
The cowardice of the West in the defence of free speech is not unexpected, but the pace at which capitulation has become fashionable is truly frightening.
TNC will continue to defend free speech as best we can, though you may find us absent from Twitter for a while, or perhaps indefinitely.
Thank you for your support.
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