THE TRANSCRIPT
<opens with our hero sitting on a set of fancy stairs>
"I wonder if this is the beginning of a new campaign here, because the right should never have been able to steal the garbs of free speech and all the rest of it.
You know, the way they tried to redefine it was a right of powerful people to say, often bigoted, prejudiced, worse, more extreme things than that about minorities that are marginalised without any right of anyone to respond to what they said, that even the very act of characterising their speech as inflaming prejudice against often relatively voiceless minorities, that’s an attack on free speech. Even though we hear that people who claim they’re cancelled, who do so from their newspaper columns, from television screens, from their book deals, you know, the whole thing is ludicrous.
I think we should start a new campaign for actual free speech, and I think it’s borne out of what we’re seeing at the moment, which is, you know, throughout history it’s always been progressives who defended actual genuine free speech and the right of free academic enquiry, which is what the government doesn’t want. And I just wonder if it’s now the beginning of a, you know, given they have tried to turn this on us, that we build a broad based campaign, where we actually use this as a case study, of how the government has tried to shut down free speech.
And the reason I say this is, you know, they claim that this idea of cancel culture, which they’ve claimed is intimidating often powerful people who keep their powerful positions is some new phenomenon.
The left, those deemed progressive have always been on the receiving end. You had the first Red Scare back after World War I, in which you had deportations, arrests, academics being intimidated, and you had of course, McCarthyism, which was known as the second Red Scare at the time. There’s a long tradition of this, and it’s so important that we stand our ground, we build these broad coalitions, and we make it clear that we are erm, you know, the true- that uh, that we hold the flame of genuine free speech and free academic enquiry, the ability of academics to freely explore often areas deemed controversial by the establishment, and that’s what they want to shut down.
I just think a new campaign could be born."
<smug face to camera>