MEDIAWATCH: Free Speech smackdown: Woke Lynch Mob vs Civil Liberty Lawyers

SHOTS FIRED!

Thank Christ for the civil rights lawyers!

Roderick Mulgan & Patrick Winkler: Chilling effects of outlawing hate speech

About a year ago, the Government proposed new laws to control “hate speech”.

Various spokespeople, including the Prime Minister, struggled to say how their own legislation would work – before tactically retreating. The traditional position is that speech should only be illegal if it advocates someone is actually harmed. Merely being offensive is not enough. The distinction is workable in practice and vital in principle, as being “offensive” can mean many things.

However, exclamations urging a drive forward, are again being recited. Commentator Morgan Godfery, for one, recently wrote that new laws are needed because “the far-right is worryingly emboldened harassing journalists and academics at their place of work.” True personal harassment would be deplorable, but the key insight is the reference to “the far-right” – a term that the linguistically-immoderate far-left has in the past felt justified in affixing to even centre-right characters.

Godfrey and fellow left-wing apologists routinely seem to believe that the focus of extending criminalised speech can only be “right-wing” opinions. Clumsily partisan, these protagonists need to be careful of what they wish for. While the nature of our current Government is left and (very-left) Green, laws once enacted, have a way of taking on unexpected trajectories. And the colour of the government will one day change.

In 1940, when there was deep concern about the influence of extreme opinions, the United States passed “the Smith Act”, which made it a crime to advocate the violent overthrow of the government. Subsequently, numerous socialists were jailed and deported for having Marxist affiliations. It was held that merely adhering to the doctrine – since it endorses violence – was enough to trigger the law, even for those who said they only sought a peaceful change of government.

In the 1970s, Halt All Racist Tours spearheaded opposition to rugby tours with apartheid South Africa and seriously irritated Prime Minister Robert Muldoon. Even though HART’s adherents advocated violence against members of the South African population, there was no “hate speech” law to shut down mere political language that our government didn’t like and HART is now part of left-wing folklore.

But fast forward to a world where upsetting the status quo is illegal. Irrespective of the present free-speech positions of right-aligned parties, would the same tolerance persist if a future government didn’t like vigorous protests fundamentally opposed to its positions? A National-ACT coalition might find more-robust climate advocacy untenable, particularly if activism follows British trends toward vandalism and blocking public roads. With the precedent then set, closing down those opinions could be an easy step.

Likewise, if old-school militant trade unions reappear. There was a time, again in the 1970s, when major strikes were a part of life. The hard-left pines for that power and the current Government is throwing some succour by reviving the nationwide awards system that drove it all. Soon, we could witness picket lines and the Cook Strait ferries routinely tied up during school holidays. Or not, if legal tools for squashing union talking points lie handy.

The left should not be surprised at how little public concern might then be expressed over union suppression. Nor, next, as to the silencing of spokespeople for Extinction Rebellion, Tax Justice Aotearoa, or Auckland Action Against Poverty. One can also theorise that median voters are hardly going to demonstrate when politicians with foot-in-mouth proclivities of the Trevor Mallard flavour, find themselves in the gun. Relatively few people may focus on whether those disappearances from the establishment-left ensemble were because of repeated ineptitude, or for say, insulting “rich pricks” – that “marginalised-minority” (the economically successful) having been by then added to the legislative schedule of “vulnerable communities”, to be protected from vocal attacks from the “affluence-phobic”.

Smith Act prosecutions were eventually constrained by the US Supreme Court, years after government indictments had ruined many lives. That was possible because the Court could refer to a written constitution of basic rights – such as free speech – and throw draconian laws into history’s dustbin.

Only the trustingly naive can believe that we are as safe.

Alas, our flaccid “unwritten constitution” provides no US-style system of checks and balances for overruling legislative intention and, if Parliament passes a bill to crush opinions, we are stuck with it.

So, the loud voices of the left might not be so secure in their longer-term liberty if our current Government gets its way.

Letting the left-wing cat out of the bag now might mean that unleashing the right-wing Kraken later is not such a big step. Once loosened, leftist champions could find that this Government’s success in subjugating free speech to the criminal law came at a debilitating cost.

• • Roderick Mulgan and Patrick Winkler are criminal defence lawyers.

This is the fundamental problem for the activist woke middle class identity politics clique who believe micro aggressions lead to macro violence, they seem to have no proportional view of what happens if we build vast State powers and they fall into the hands of a reactionary right wing?

Once we start strangling off free speech, the next Government along might be immediately using it against us!

People do not understand how far right a National/ACT Government will be. David Seymour means it when he says he will amputate the Ministry of Youth Affairs, the Ministry of Māori Affairs, the Ministry of Ethnic Communities, the Ministry for Women, the Ministry for Pacific People AND the highest civil rights court in the land, the Human Rights Commission!

You honestly think we are not as a progressive movement going to lose our collective shit when he starts ramming that through Parliament?

Every single time the State has gained freedom of speech powers like this and we are all told they are only for the baddies – they get used on us!

The middle class woke are frightened, the Dumb Lives Matter protest on Parliament’s Lawns scared them, that’s why you had woke edge lords like Clint Smith calling for the Governor Generals to remove the Police Commissioner because he wouldn’t bash the people who scared Clint…

…that fear was evident in the Fire and Fury middle class docudrama and it’s evident when they come across it on Social Media.

Whenever the middle classes are frightened, Politics jumps.

It’s middle class fear of crime that drives punitive get tough on crime rhetoric and politics, similarly it’s their middle class woke dogma that is triggering a desire to criminalise free speech.

The woke are frustrated that the hate laws failed after both the Minister and Prime Minister couldn’t even explain what would get people arrested, so the energies have gone into the secretive National Centre of Research Excellence for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism who will tell the Intelligence Agencies who the Eye of Mordor should be turned on.

Rather than risk political backlash by passing an actual law, Woke Academia have simply partnered up with the domestic intelligence and security services to help them target the new enemies.

With our failure to de-escalate the Dumb Lives Matter protest, we have radicalised an entire army against us and now desperately need to ascertain who is violent and who is not in a social media landscape driven by hate algorithms and desperate loneliness.

We are feeding the whirlpool into a maelstrom.

The only winners are the security apparatus budgets.

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