S5E9 Free Speech: Is it all talk?
49:35 Share

The NBA playoffs are here, and I'm getting my bets in on FanDuel. Talk to me, Chuck GPT. What do you know? All sorts of interesting stuff. Even Charles Barkley's greatest fear. Hey, nobody needs to know that. New customers bet $5 and get $250 in bonus bets if you win. FanDuel, America's number one sportsbook.

21 plus and present in Virginia. Must be first online real money wager. $5 deposit required. Bonus issued is non-withdrawable bonus bets that expire seven days after receipt. Restrictions apply. See full terms at fanduel.com slash sportsbook. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.

This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. It's tax season, and we're all a bit tired of numbers. But here's one you need to hear. $16.5 billion. That's how much the IRS flagged for possible identity fraud last year. Now here's a good number. $100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it. Guaranteed. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.

Just before we begin, we want to tell listeners that we are bringing you a MediaStorm live show. We will be walking through the three biggest media shit storms of the past year, and we would really love to have you in the room with us. We'll be joined by some special guests. It's on Tuesday, the 20th of May, 7pm at the Business Design Centre in Islington. Tickets will be out today at 10am and the link is in the show notes below. See you there.

Helena, guess what time it is? Quiz time! Oh my god, it's been so long! It has been so long! Okay, I think it was our first ever episode I did the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire theme tune. Can I do it again? I will cry if you don't. Okay, here we go. Da da da da da da da. Hello.

I'm gonna play a news clip and I want you to tell me if it's from the left-wing media or the right. Okay. There is a very fine line, of course we believe in free speech, but when your free speech is actually inciting violence and causing other individuals to cause destruction and harm to others, that is no longer acceptable.

Okay, so she's saying free speech has its limits when it causes harm to other people. Pretty much. Left wing? Gotcha. Oh, you set me up. What a surprise. This is a Fox News segment about... Okay, can I guess? I actually think it's about the...

Student protests for Palestine. Exactly. OK. But remember the January 6th capital riots, or better yet, the UK's violent riots against mass migration last summer.

Guessing the right-wing media didn't feel the same way then? Not really. Megyn Kelly is one of the firmest conservative voices in US media, backing the penalisation of student protesters, even those who don't personally get involved in violent behaviours. She's defended this in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student activist currently in ICE detention for his role in pro-Palestine protests.

You could charge conspiracy. You could charge extortion. Whether it's been done or not is irrelevant. He violated the terms of his permission slip to be here and he can be deported for that alone. But here's what she thought about the UK government's crackdown on people who incited racist violence on social media during the riots.

People like Lucy Connolly, who has been jailed for calling on protesters to set fire to asylum seeker hotels on X, who we talked about on yesterday's Newswatch. If you haven't listened, please go back and listen because it's very relevant to this upcoming conversation. Yeah, exactly. Here's Megyn Kelly. There is a crisis enveloping the West at this moment, and perhaps nowhere is it more evident than in the UK.

British authorities are warning via X, anyone, anyone who incites violence or hatred, even exclusively online, could be prosecuted. And prosecuted they have been. More than 120 of them have had their court cases fast-tracked and are already getting lengthy jail sentences. Among them, a man who, yes, posted something vile, but did not even take part in any violence.

Okay, so back then, the prosecution of people for things they tweeted was a crisis in the West because they were attacking racial minorities instead of defending them? No, that can't be it. This takes us pretty neatly on to today's topic, free speech. Now, if we were going to do this episode during season one, given that MediaStorm's priority is platforming groups who don't get right of reply in the mainstream media, this episode would have had probably quite...

quite a clear angle on the free speech debate, right? Sure, like how to protect free speech without allowing hate speech. How to make sure everyone gets as much freedom of speech as each other. Right, we'd probably have looked at the left's so-called council culture, whether it was fair, whether it was effective. Whether it's a thing at all. Yeah.

Because back then you had the anti-wokes, the MAGA movement, the right to offend diehards parading around as free speech crusaders. And the dangers they posed were less to do with loss of freedom of speech

and more to do with the harm that could come from saying hateful, corrosive and untrue things. Which is where one person's freedom of speech can infringe on another person's freedom to not face discrimination, for example. Exactly.

As many on the left typically point out, in this political climate, right, the threats to freedom of speech, at least in the mainstream narrative, were generally seen as coming from the left in the form of political correctness and the so-called woke mob. Right.

But today the waters are much muddier. Yes, the threats to free speech, the crusading of free speech, it's all suddenly coming from unexpected directions, which has ultimately meant that our job putting this episode together has been an absolute friggin nightmare. Hence the massive bags under our eyes. Oh my God, I am so tired. I think I might be dead.

Okay, well to wake you up, here is a mix of MAGA maniacs criticizing the left for coming after free speech. Free speech is under siege in this country. Bullies on the left aiming to silence conservatives. No one is safe from the left's ward police. The leftists, they've become the thought police. They basically declare themselves God and judge us for our thoughts. We are declaring ourselves gods. We are basically gods, it's true.

And look, this is a very simplistic narrative and it's pretty flattering to the right. I would personally argue that the biggest threat to freedom of speech in our adult life in the UK came from the Conservative government's police crime sentencing in Courts Act in 2023, which tried to criminalise protests for being noisy and annoying and issued a 10-year prison sentence for anyone vandalising statues of slave owners and the likes.

But I hear you. Superficially, this has been a basic divide. The left is more likely to advocate for restrictions on speech that is deemed harmful or discriminatory, while the right is more likely to defend protecting all speech, even if it's hateful or offensive. Right. In recent months, though, there's been a redrawing of the lines in the freedom of speech debate.

Thanks in large part to the tariff-wielding, pussy-grabbing leader of the free world, Trump. Trump has literally banned everything from researching diversity to acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ plus people to criticizing Israel to not calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. He's actually banned the Associated Press from the White House for this.

Government agencies have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid. Words like DEI, BIPOC, anti-racism, Latinx, Native American, black, women. Seemingly random words like expression, at risk, political, and even mental health and sex.

Surprise, surprise then. For all their parading as free speech warriors, they turned out to have zero tolerance of perspectives and words they disagree with. So who are the libertarians now? Who are the thought police now? God, I feel like I'm having a bit of an identity crisis. Yeah, you joke. But to be honest, I do think that there are questions for the media commentariat on both sides of the political divide.

on the one hand, about the importance of tolerating different views in the name of free speech. On the other, the importance of recognising the limits of tolerance in the name of safety from violence. This should be a time for introspection in the political media. It's also a test of integrity for the news media, especially in the US, as those who comply with the official line are rewarded and those who do not are punished.

"I believe that CNN and MSDNC, what they do is illegal." "I think CBS should lose its license, but I think ABC should lose its license also because of what they've done." The Trump administration has given a whole new meaning to cancel culture. But this time, it isn't coming from a mob. It's coming from the man at the top.

We have saved free speech in America. It's a little bit different when we talk about free speech when you're an American versus when you are here on a visa. Starmer poses, I think, the biggest threat to free speech we've seen in our history. George Orwell was right. The thought police come next to punish thought crime. Be very careful.

very scared. Welcome to MediaStorm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Matilda Mallinson. And I'm Helena Wadia. This week's MediaStorm. Free speech, hate speech, and the new dividing lines.

Welcome to the MediaStorm studio. Our guest today is a British journalist and political activist who is no stranger to being attacked for his views and even removed from spaces for his views. He's an outspoken human rights analyst, co-founder of the pro-EU youth group Our Future, Our Choice, and has written for news outlets such as The Independent, Guardian and Metro.

Welcome to the studio, Femi Oluwole. Hey guys, how you doing? Hey Femi, so nice to see you again. You too. So...

Freedom of speech, that's what we're talking about today. It has always been a major political battleground, but in today's world it's considered a core human right, a pillar of democracy. It's enshrined in the US's First Amendment. It's also enshrined in the UK's 1998 Human Rights Act, but it is not without controversy, and some argue that free speech absolutism is its own kind of tyranny. Femi, in theory, where do you stand on...

on this spectrum? Should free speech have a limit? I think the limit in terms of what should be legally punished is it can't

can't go up to the level of implied incitements to violence. So if you tell somebody to hurt somebody else, I think that crosses the line because it's like a mob hit. You're telling them, go hurt this person. If your language implies that that person is less than human and therefore is worthy of being taken out, for example, calling people vermin, that sort of language, I believe that crosses the line. However, I do believe that

that in terms of how society functions, in terms of what the law should punish, I think the line should be drawn implied incitements to violence. That's interesting, OK, because a lot of people would say you should never be criminalized for something you've said, only for something you've done. But I guess what you acknowledge there is, well, speech can be an action. The line between speech and action is always blurred. And if what you were saying incites... Yeah.

Yeah, I mean... A criminal action, then it should be criminal. It would be insane if we said that if I pay somebody to murder somebody else, then because I haven't actually done it myself, I'm not liable for the crime itself. If I tell somebody, go out and burn down a hotel with refugees inside, I should be liable for that as well. And there are those on the left who would go further than I do in terms of saying that saying racist things should be criminalized. But I personally don't think so. I think one of the reasons why I'd like to be in a position where we say...

free speech should include things that we fundamentally disagree with is because if we had a proper democracy, then I believe most people are generally good. Unfortunately, in this voting system where majority of votes effectively don't count, that our voting system continuously skews politics towards the right and against marginalized groups, it's because of that that people often feel, well, if the system isn't fair, we have to clamp down on the stuff that endangers us.

Yeah, OK. I mean, I think that that's what I would have expected your answer to be. We will get on to the challenges, to the sort of traditional left-right logic on the free speech debate. But let's bring it into current affairs. Yeah, free speech has basically been in every current affairs story recently. And the first one we want to look at looks at the pulling of fact checkers from social media, apparently in the name of free speech.

In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook and Instagram would ditch independent fact-checkers in the name of restoring free expression, though many argue it was to please Trump. If so, it worked. Mark Zuckerberg came to the White House, who I like much better now. Elon Musk also pledged to turn X into a free speech forum by sacking 80% of engineers dedicated to trust and safety on the platform.

Instead, he now uses it as his personal propaganda playground and is literally at the top of my notifications every day, even though I neither follow him nor engage with any of his content ever. Twitter, now they call it X. And it's great that Elon bought that. He's done us all a big favor.

Elon Musk, for example, banned the account at ElonJet, which tracked his private jet using public data, but promoted fake news stories about an asylum seeker being behind the stabbing of three little girls in the UK last summer. In fact, before the killer, the real killer, went on his stabbing spree, we have since learned that he watched a graphic video of a stabbing in Sydney on X that the company had refused to take down.

there is a clear algorithmic bias to the so-called free speech forum. Studies by the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and academic organizations have found that the site forced political content on users. That content was almost invariably pro-Trump, pro-Republican and pro-Musk. Social media was once heralded as a way of circumventing media gatekeepers and giving a voice to the people.

But the algorithm favours clickbait and breeds fake news and bots. Femi, do we have to rethink our ideas about free speech in an era of social media?

I think the reason why you're seeing this clamp down on fact-checking, this buying up of social media platforms by the billionaires, is because they realize that if they don't do that, they will lose. Given that our generations, millennials, Gen Z, have a kind of politics that is very different from everything that's gone before. In fact, the Financial Times actually worked out that

at the age of 35, your average boomer, your average person from the silent generation and Gen X was five points less conservative than the national average. But by the time they reached the age of 70, there were five points more conservative, which is the general trend of you get more conservative as you get older. But millennials at the age of 35 are 15 points less conservative than the national average. So we've fundamentally broken that trend. If you don't support equality, our generations don't want to hear from you.

And so in the face of that, people like Trump, people like Farage, people like your Jacob Rees-Mogg's, I see them as the dying gasp of an ideology that's never going to see the light of day again. And the other reason why people are turning against the right is because we can see the rights agenda play out. We can see that right now in America.

things aren't going so well with Trump's tariffs crashing the economy. I think the UK has an advantage in terms of Brexit, in terms of the fact that the far right has already tied their flag to the mast of Brexit for 27 years saying, this is going to help working class people. And now even Brexit voters by a ratio of 45 to 9 believe that Brexit has made us poorer. You can't make that argument based on facts anymore. So you have

have to push out fake news. You have to push out misinformation. You have to buy up media platforms and control the conversation because they have no choice. Otherwise, they will lose. So you say you can't make that argument in facts anymore. Okay, so you make it in

Emotions, that's something that really carries currency in the social media space. And this is, I think, the tricky thing with social media and free speech. It changes the rules, right? In traditional news media space, things have to be fact-check or they can't pass. But in the social media space, emotion carries more currency than fact. I say that's slightly idealizing the traditional news media, but, you know, you get my point. Also on social media, unlike in the marketplace of ideas,

in face-to-face conversation, we can be anonymous. And so people can put out any speech and they don't have to tie their identity to it. And that also changes the rules. And so these ideals that we have about free speech, right, that they're grounded in this logic of a marketplace of ideas. People can say bad things, people can say good things, and the good things will win out in this free form of speech. But on social media, it plays into and rewards

the worst tendencies of human nature. It doesn't reward reasoned, evidence-based conversation. That's not the speech that wins out on social media. It rewards a totally different type of speech. And that's why I'm like, do we have to rethink our idea about free speech in a social media climate where it's a mob rule of a wholly different thing we've seen before? So I believe that...

If social media was essentially fair, if every voice had an equal weighting, things would end up in the right direction. I mean, there's a reason why the right hates and demonizes academia, because they know that academics, the more you study society, the more you're aware of the injustices, and the more by definition, you become the definition of woke. That's why I believe that TikTok is potentially such a huge tool, because...

in that marketplace of ideas, it's actually a free market in theory. Because people are telling their own stories, you get a different perspective on different groups of people. For example, my favorite TikTok was from a Muslim woman in the States who said that one of her colleagues

said that the only Muslims she'd ever come into contact with were on TikTok, not from Fox News, not from Hollywood demonizing Muslims as terrorists. It was exclusively from Muslims saying, this is who we are. And it's a lot harder to convince somebody that you should bomb or invade another country if the day before you saw somebody from that country do a makeup tutorial. That perception of people comes from having an actual free marketplace of ideas.

The problem is that the people that are running these companies, they are trying to not make it a free marketplace of ideas precisely in order to skew things against marginalized groups and in favor of the right. You can't have a free market of ideas and a free market of media ownership. It doesn't work. Because if you have a free market of media ownership, eventually it will be owned by those who have the most money. They will create a monopoly and eventually you'll only have certain views being able to dominate.

it defeats the very concept of a free market of ideas. So how could we regulate freedom of ownership to improve freedom of speech?

I think you'd want to set a limit on the percentage of the market share of all media, mainstream media like TV, radio, etc. that any one individual can have to make sure that nobody can essentially control the narrative of an entire country or the West in general. And I think you should also have rules on social media platforms that prevent them from being owned by one specific individual. If it could be democratized in some way, I'd like that.

And also, I don't think we should be at the mercy of this idea of, oh, whichever post gets the most interaction, that's the one that should get promoted, because we should be able to have AI that can tell what kind of interactions are happening. Is this post being flooded with thousands of comments saying, no, that's a lie? In which case, then, no, that's not a good post to promote. We have the power to make this better.

That is interesting because social media, you know, from that perspective, it can be a key to better free speech. Media gatekeeping is a huge issue. I think it's three quarters of newspaper circulation in the UK is owned and controlled by just four people.

very, very wealthy families. MediaStorm, we literally started this podcast because we recognize that not everyone has an equal voice. How free is free speech when some people have more free speech than others? Social media could change that.

However, to take it back to the Zuckerberg Facebook story, well, Zuckerberg said in the name of free speech, he was removing regulation. He was removing fact checkers. And this was widely reported in our media, right, as a story about U.S. domestic politics, democracy in crisis.

But outside of the US, and beyond a lot of the mainstream media's watch, many of Facebook's fact-checking bodies were set up in response to genocidal propaganda spreading on the site. For example, against the Rohingya in Myanmar or against Muslims in India.

An open letter signed to Zuckerberg by over 100 fact-checking organisations from all over the world warned after his announcement that some of these countries are highly vulnerable to misinformation that spurs political instability, election interference, mob violence and even genocide. If Meta decides to stop the programme worldwide, it is almost certain to result in a real world harm in many places.

This story, it shouldn't have just raised alarm about US democracy. It should have raised questions about minority safety all over the world. I think that points to a sort of hierarchy of rights in this debate about free speech. Some people's free speech come before other people's right to not face discrimination or not face violence. How big a role does race, ethnicity play in the free speech debate?

And does our media sufficiently recognize this? I think that's a perfect example because we saw like here at home with the riots last summer and let's call them what they are. They were white supremacist terrorism. People were being targeted in the streets. People were trying to burn down hotels because of the either ethnic minority status or immigration status of the people in those hotels.

And it was being fueled by misinformation online, it was being fueled by the misinformation that the killer in Southport was a Muslim refugee, blah blah blah, whereas in fact he was a boy called Axel, born to immigrant parents, who was born in Cardiff. And that misinformation directly put...

millions of ethnic minority people across the country in danger. I remember personally waking up from a nightmare during those riots with my fists clenched looking around the room, because I genuinely believed I was about to be pulled from my car like happened to that man in Hull. This put genuine fear in the minds of ethnic minority people across the country, and you

your right to say, let's go burn down that refugee hotel isn't exactly as important as my right to know that I can cross the street without being attacked for the colour of my skin. Yeah, and I can speak to that as well. I think what was missing in the media, especially at that time, getting caught up in that free speech debate, was the real life experiences of ethnic minorities like you, like me, and the fact that we were scared to go outside even. Yeah.

And I think we spoke about it on a MediaStorm episode when there was a feed that came through that said, oh, there's going to be a potential riot in West London where a lot of my family are. You know, it was genuinely scary. And I don't think that that narrative was put across. And now we have articles calling the person who has been found guilty for inciting racial violence. A mother. A mother, but also a political prisoner.

Yeah. And I have a friend of mine who lives in the Northeast and he and his wife are the only non-white people on that street. And he now has to go around with a...

object in his car because he's too scared and when you put it like that you know even even though we are not big fans of custodial sentences and lucy connelly just in general lucy connelly the woman who wrote this got a you know what some would see as a disproportionately heavy custodial sentence well that's a sentence too the sentence of living in fear in your own city in your own home for god knows how long that is a sentence too yeah exactly

Femi, you have personally spoken out about one particular incident where you felt your freedom of speech was taken from you by a party who self-brand as being pro-free speech. Can you tell us what happened and why this was an affront to free speech in your eyes?

So the Reform Party's attacks on my free speech go back a fair way. It goes back to 2019, when I tweeted that Richard Tice had set up an overtly anti-Jewish organization, because he was one of the founders of leave.eu, which has been regularly tweeting pictures of George Soros, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, holding puppet strings controlling politicians such as Tony Blair.

which is such an overt anti-Semitic trope, it doesn't even need to be defended. And so he then sent an email to me from his lawyers telling me to take down the post, apologize and pay £10,000 to a charity of his choosing. I had two grand in the bank and I showed him my bank balance in the video that I put up saying, hey, come at me, I've got nothing to lose. You're the one who looks silly as a champion of free speech and standing up for the little guy while sending an army of London lawyers after a student activist for a tweet online.

And then fast forward, I tried to go to their rally in Stafford. I showed them my press pass and let me in. I managed to interview several of their candidates. And I got them to say on camera that Brexit had made people poor. And the quote, sometimes you have to take a little pain for things to work in the future. They're not going to want you interviewing their candidates again, are they? Exactly. So they kicked me out of the venue because of that.

Then fast forward to 2024 when I showed up, I bought a ticket and I was just waiting in the queue quietly. I had nothing on me. I just had my press pass and a selfie stick with my camera on it. And then they singled me out from the queue and said, your ticket's been revoked. You need to leave. And I said, why? They said, we haven't got a reason. And they physically pushed me and pulled me to get me out of the venue. How much do you think race in itself played a part in that? Uh...

I would be interested to know if there are any white journalists who've been kicked out of four consecutive Reform Party rallies. You point out as well that one of the founders of Reform Party has said that black men are inherently violent.

This is a party that supposedly believes in free speech and is refusing to be challenged by journalists and removing a journalist, a black male journalist, without given reason, denying themselves of accountability for that view to that demographic. And also just generally denying your ability to challenge their ideas in the free marketplace of ideas that any free speech advocate should believe in.

Yeah, they fundamentally are not in favour of free speech. It has always been a lie. Thing is, I feel like these individuals, a lot of them, I think they do believe that they believe in free speech and don't necessarily see the hypocrisy of their own actions. I think it's always really important to make a distinction between the politicians and those who follow them. I do believe that a lot of Reform Party voters do believe in some of the stuff that's being spewed by the people at the top.

But if you are working in politics full-time, you cannot be stupid enough to A not be aware that Brexit is damaging the country, B not be aware that suing student activists for tweets isn't compatible with being the champions of free speech. It's not possible. So they're either literally brain dead or they're liars.

When you think about super successful businesses that are selling through the roof, like Heinz or Mattel, you think about a great product, a cool brand and brilliant marketing. But there's a secret. The business behind the business making selling simple for them and buying simple for their customers. For millions of businesses, that business is Shopify.

Upgrade your business and get the same checkout as Heinz and Mattel. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash promo, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash promo to upgrade your selling today. shopify.com slash promo. Our next current affairs story is the censorship of critics of Israel and its allies in the West.

Probably one of the most terrifying attacks on free speech in our listeners' societies today is happening in the US, where student activists calling out genocidal actions against Palestinians, actions that have been described as genocide by some of the world's most respected bodies, are being literally abducted off the streets and detained without judicial process.

This is not just an issue in the US. Much of the so-called free press around the liberal world have conformed to official narratives in their coverage of the war and the occupation and the downplaying of crimes against humanity wherever Western governments are complicit.

One analysis by Intercept last year compared over a thousand articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, found a gross imbalance with highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like slaughter or massacre or horrific, which were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians,

rather than the other way around. For example, the term slaughter and massacre were used to describe the killing of Israelis 60 times more than for Palestinians. The list goes on. We've talked about this on MediaStorm many times and we've talked about the indirect censorship driving this, such as the conflation of Palestinians with terrorists as a way of denouncing anyone who humanises and mourns them as terrorist sympathisers.

or the conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism as a way of censoring legitimate criticisms of the Israeli state under hate speech protections. What does the state of debate and coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tell us about free speech in the West?

That it's fundamentally broken and that those in charge of how our discourse runs are incredibly hypocritical. My favorite, if I can use that term, example of this is genuinely Richard Tice, because Richard Tice has been for the past year and a half accusing anybody who goes on those protests against the genocide in Gaza of being anti-Semitic. And this is the same person who tried to sue me for a tweet where I called his organization anti-Semitic.

That is a really pointed comparison. I called having a cartoon of a Jewish Holocaust survivor holding puppet strings, controlling politicians, anti-Semitic. He's calling complaining about the genocide of thousands of innocent people anti-Semitic. The hypocrisy is off the scale. I think something interesting about this topic in the context of the free speech debate is that

With anti-Semitism, which is a real and nasty form of racism, and the valid protections that are in place against anti-Semitism, those have been used to censor a legitimate form of criticism and free speech that is not to do with Judaism, but to do with the actions of an Israeli state. And I think that that's very interesting in the free speech debate because, you know, in the past, it would be the left talking about

protections against hate speech and some people on the right would say that the line has been blurred between hate speech and legitimate speech. At least it's a very, very hard line to draw. So there's issues sort of seen as switching of hands of the free speech banner from the right to the left. And some on the right might say, oh, you know, the lefty mob have no right now to demand free speech after their use of council culture. So I'm

I wonder if there is any truth to this and whether there is any cause for introspection right now on the left about how to demarcate the territory of legitimate free speech, even if it may not always be likable, and the territory of speech that can and should be criminalized. So if we're talking about anti-Semitism in this context, I do believe that

The left and those who generally stand up for the people of Palestine should be more self-policing in terms of what words we use, because ultimately the biggest weakness in our campaign, the thing that's most used against us, is the accusation of anti-Semitism.

So if you genuinely care about the people of Palestine, you should be trying to make sure that that weakness is not used against us. And I think that we have been too liberal with our use of the word Zionist. I would prefer if people would use descriptors when they talk about Zionism, i.e. military Zionism, colonial Zionism, expansionist Zionism, to distinguish it from Zionism as a core concept of should Jewish people have a homeland of some description in some demarcated area.

There are many Jewish people who have been on those marches who are fundamentally call themselves Zionists in the belief that there should be a Jewish homeland, but fundamentally oppose everything that Netanyahu is doing. And I think if you use the word Zionist as a catch all, it gets used in very dangerous ways. Right. And if the left is sensitive to everything they've been saying about policing language, you know, then they should...

they should enact that among themselves. Exactly. Because every time I see a tweet along the lines of, yeah, and they won't let this be said on the Zionist controlled media, I'm like, come on. Right, yeah. I think that that's actually a really, really fair point. Do you think cancel culture exists?

I don't think cancel culture is a real thing. I think there's consequence culture and as I said before, because younger people are more much more hardline in terms of if you don't support equality, at least in principle, we don't want to hear from you. I think they're realizing there's a much more hard line that will mean that you won't have this audience anymore. It's so hypocritical for the right to complain about cancel culture when ultimately it's called the free market.

If you have a product, you as a person, you as a celebrity, you are a product that we no longer want to buy because you've shown yourself to be a terrible human being. That's the market economy. And you're complaining about it as a supposed capitalist.

Right. When I think of cancel culture, right, I think of moaning and attacks from people like J.K. Rowling who got hate for spreading hate and then complaining about being cancelled whilst continuing to have a far bigger platform than any of the minorities that she was using it to spread hate about. And there is a difference between wanting freedom of expression and wanting freedom from consequences of what you say. And

Yeah, I think the left has the upper hand on that because the ardent defenders of free speech on the right, like Nigel Farage as another example, don't use their platforms to criticize authoritarians so much as to punch down at persecuted people.

Always. And in terms of the way they view cancel culture as a, oh, you've taken this platform from me. I always make the point that I don't own my platform. I had 400,000 followers on Twitter, 100,000 followers elsewhere. It doesn't belong to me. It was given to me by my followers who make the decision. If I do some horrendous stuff, if I say some horrendous stuff, I will lose followers and I should not start complaining that I've been canceled. I've done bad stuff and I deserve to be punished for it. That's how consequence culture works. Yeah. Also,

The frustration I feel about taking JK Rowling as an example and saying, I've been cancelled and, you know, nobody's listening to me. Whereas ironically, I think we've been talking about her way more than we have when she wrote the Harry Potter books, you know?

I don't disagree with what either of you are saying. Sometimes I do think the attacks from the left against people who say things they disagree with do go too far. But that is not the same as locking people up for their views. That is consequence culture. I agree with that. Something I've been thinking about reflecting on as I've tried to make sense of the free speech debate in today's politics is

is at least an opportunity for finding common ground across the political divide. Free speech within the law. That is something that serves everyone, whatever your political view, unless your political view is extremist. I think for me that might sometimes mean swallowing the legality of views I really don't like. Not views like Lucy Connolly, which when expressed, incite violence.

criminal violence, but views that I don't want to see aired. I think for me that has meant accepting the airing of those views is actually probably not a bad thing ultimately as long as the marketplace of free speech exists on an even enough playing field for it to be challenged. And yeah, I guess I would say that I want to see on this topic

some alliance between people who stand at different places of the left-right divide in their shared value of free speech within the law. So on that sense, I would definitely agree that there's definitely some toxicity on the left that seems to be intolerant of other ways of achieving the same objective. And I do think we need to improve on that, especially given this next point, the voting system we're in, we have to work together if we're going to actually achieve any change.

on the issue of the voting system, I think most people would want a proportional voting system, knowing that it would mean that there'd be more seats in parliament for Farage, because ultimately, if we have a population where 12% of our population wants to vote for reform, or even 25% wants to vote for reform, we shouldn't use an unfair voting system to silence those people, because that's who we actually are. Often because

have a voting system that silences those groups they end up feeling disenfranchised they have their conversations away from the eyes of parliament they have them in back alley facebook groups where nobody can really challenge them and that's how you get things like brexit because their ideas weren't challenged for 20 years then we got to 2016 and nobody had actually challenged them for 20 years and here we go next we want to talk about the maga 180 on free speech

Donald Trump and his inner circle have gone from parading as free speech absolutists to barring access to media organisations that criticise them, sanctioning law firms that represent political opponents, rigging social media algorithms to push party propaganda, pulling federal grants that include language they oppose, publishing a literal list of banned words...

and detaining critics for non-violent protest activities without any judicial process. The hypocrisy is so blatant that when Jon Stewart was talking about it on The Daily Show, I think he finally cracked. These guys don't give a f*** about free speech. They care about their speech. Here's Donald Trump on those who would criticize judges that he has appointed.

A lot of the judges that I had, if you look at them, they take tremendous abuse and it's truly interference in my opinion and it should be illegal and it probably is illegal in some form. Yes, criticizing judges. It is interference. It should be illegal. Tremendous abuse. Four days later, not four days later, not a full French work week later.

President Donald Trump just took to Truth Social and deemed this judge responding to this decision here calling him a radical left lunatic of a judge, a troublemaker, an agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama. He says this judge should be impeached. And are we really still doing the Barack Hussein Obama thing? Oh, free Harambee.

Femi, help us out if you can. How the hell do we make sense of the MAGA 180 on free speech? I think it's a really good example of how...

how free speech operates in terms of power. When Trump didn't have power, he wanted free speech to be absolute so he could say whatever he wanted without being punished for it so that he could win the election. And then now he's in power, he needs to make sure that only his narrative is allowed to thrive and therefore he wants to completely silence anybody else. So free speech works for you if you don't have power and free speech works against you if you do have power. And that's why free speech is so essential so that people in power can actually be held to account.

That's actually a really simple explanation. It makes total sense. Okay, great. Well, then we can take that story to its next step, which is that this week, Trump and co. had the nerve to threaten the UK over what it called our lack of free speech.

On Sunday, the US State Department released a statement saying it was monitoring the UK case of Livia Tosichi-Bolt, a woman who was charged for protesting outside an abortion centre and breaching the buffer zone. Peaceful protesting, but this buffer zone is designed specifically to psychologically protect people going for abortions.

Now, the U.S. right has expressed outrage. They've called this an affront to free speech. And the Trump administration has reportedly told Keir Starmer there will be no free trade without free speech.

Now, we like to think in the UK that we have a little bit more sense than the Americans or we're more down to earth than the Americans. Apologies to any US listeners. But pundits across the UK's right wing media have spent the week celebrating Trump's attempt to weigh in on our domestic politics. Kelvin McKenzie on GB News said, I thank Donald Trump for his free speech ultimatum to Britain. A free speech ultimatum from a president who has literally banned words he doesn't like from publication.

Andrew Terttenborn in The Spectator wrote,

And he states, with total obliviousness to the irony of this statement, the US position at least comes across as liberal and principled. Why are they just not seeing what we're seeing? It just shows the fundamental bias in how they view things. And so when Trump sees people being kidnapped and black bagged for criticizing the policies on Palestine, he doesn't see that as a suppression of free speech. He sees that as just standing up for America. When he sees attacks on

on people who are trying to harass people going for abortions, he sees that as an attack on free speech. I also think there's so much irony in this media that have branded

their shade of conservatism as liberalism, pro-freedom, that they are now celebrating a foreign government trying to weigh in on domestic politics. So much for national sovereignty, right? Like we leave the EU because we don't want foreign parliaments controlling our policies. Oh, but actually, you know what, if it's MAGA and if they're really our political allies, then great, bring them in.

Yeah. You should have seen the conversation that I had on the BBC a few days ago with Paula London from GB News. She actually said that it was a good thing that Trump was punishing Starmer with this tariff because...

because of the free speech issue. So we've got to the point where Brexiteers are ignoring the fact that they've damaged the country mathematically, celebrating when a foreign power punishes us with tariffs. And she said, America is a huge ally. And sometimes that means we're just going to have to do what Trump says. Yeah.

You sold this country down the river, tore apart British society for a decade on the principle that sovereignty matters more than anything. And now in the face of clear economic damage, you are saying we have to do what Big Daddy Trump says.

Oh my God. The hypocrisy, the irrationality, it's so, so blatant. And this is why I really think, particularly in this topic of free speech, reasonable people need to stand together and start calling out even those of their own political tribe who are weaponizing values like free speech to push something totally different. No one say Big Daddy Trump again. That's ruined my day.

Big Daddy Trump. My apologies. Okay, we definitely have reached our time limit. So before we get kicked out of the studio, Femi, can you tell people where they can follow you and if you have anything to plug? I am on YouTube as Femi underscore sorry. I'm on everywhere as Femi underscore sorry. I'm on Twitter as Femi underscore sorry.

and make sure that you are having a conversation with everybody in your friendship group about how the UK is not a democracy because if the majority of votes have no effect on policy making, we're not a democracy. So Starmer needs to change that. Homework.

Thank you for listening. If you want to support MediaStorm, you can do so on Patreon for less than a cup of coffee a month. The link is in the show notes and a special shout out to everyone in our Patreon community already. We appreciate you so much. And if you enjoyed this episode, please send it to someone. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow a podcast. So please do tell your friends.

You can follow us on social media at Matilda Mal, at Helena Wadia and follow the show at MediaStormPod. MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helena Wadia and Matilda Mallinson. The music is by Sam Fire.