Politics & Rights

Recently, a growing chorus of voices has become increasingly hostile to free speech. Certain speech, we are told, must be suppressed in order to combat “hate speech,” stop misinformation, and “protect democracy.” But, as Jacob Mchangama explains in his book, Free Speech: A Global History from Socrates to Social Media, these arguments are not new.

If Jacinda Ardern were as empathetic, compassionate, and insightful as most reactions to her departure suggest, she would have respected the rights of New Zealanders, including their liberty to travel and to speak their minds freely. She didn’t, and that is how she should be remembered.

Americanism isn’t a matter of where you live or which government rules over you. It’s a matter of the principles that recognize individuals as individuals with their own minds and lives, and thus enable them to live by the judgment of their own minds.

The stalemate over house speaker brings to mind a question: Isn’t it strange that in a nation of such ambition and inventiveness, our options for political candidates basically range from bad to worse, from senile morons with no understanding of basic economics to ditzy Marxists and outright frauds and crooks?

Responses to the Twitter Files display a fundamental misunderstanding of what censorship is—and point us toward “solutions” far more dangerous than the problem.

Incitement to violence and the spread of “disinformation” are common rationalizations for expanding government powers to restrict speech, but how does such censorship actually pan out?

The Chinese Communist Party perpetrates some of the worst censorship in the modern world. Film companies have a moral responsibility not to sanction the CCP and its horrors by capitulating to them—much less collaborating with them.

On November 25, ten people were killed and nine more were injured in a fire in a residential tower in Urumqi, Xinjiang province. Although such fires are common in China, the Urumqi fire exposed the human cost of China’s unjust “zero-COVID” policy and precipitated some of the most overt antigovernment protests China has seen in decades.

Israel is the only state in the Middle East that substantially recognizes individual rights. Yet many American and European professors increasingly show support for anti-Israel movements and tyrannical regimes that aim to erase Israel from the map.

On September 21, 2022, the Russian government announced that it was conscripting 300,000 men to go to the front lines in Ukraine. This desperate act on the part of Putin’s regime further demonstrates its complete disregard for individual rights—not only those of Ukrainians, as was already obvious, but of Russians as well.