Freedom of expression advocate Andrew Doyle has criticised the “regressive” left for branding any speech they don’t like as “hate speech”, also warning that in light of police forces being found to have recorded some 120,000 ‘non-crime hate incidents’, that as history teaches us, “once the police start making lists of people for non-criminal activity, we are in serious danger”.
“Without freedom of speech, we don’t have any other liberties at all. I fear that people have lost sight of that,” the comedian behind the perennially offended Social Justice Warrior character Titania McGrath remarked on Monday.
Doyle, a Shakespeare scholar who recently published Free Speech And Why It Matters, went on to acknowledge how the battle for free speech has been pitched between the right and the extremist left, despite the fundamental issue of free speech being one which “should be a non-partisan principle”.
He went on to tell talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer that all of the assaults on the basic right of free speech “is coming from the left, but a particular kind of left: an identity-obsessed social justice left” which will “claim to be on the side of the angels, and they use the language of progressivism to actually mask very regressive ideas.”
“And what they’ll say, for instance, is, they’ll carve out exceptions within free speech, and they’ll call it ‘hate’,” he said, before citing the attacks by pro-trans ideology leftist radicals attempting to cancel Harry Potter and Cormoran Strike author JK Rowling — herself a left-winger and feminist — because she seeks to defend women’s legally protected spaces from biological men who claim to be women.
“Of course, they’re not using these words accurately. So the people that they call ‘transphobe’, ‘Nazi’, ‘fascist’, ‘hateful’ — in particular — are often nothing of the kind… Nine times out of ten, those phrases are used in such a way that they simply don’t apply in that way.
“It’s just a way to say, ‘Actually, we’ll call it “hate speech” because what it really is is speech that we hate.’’’
Isaiah 5:20-21 King James Version (KJV)
20 Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
21 Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!