First, online platform Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov is arrested on his arrival in Paris. Next, Lula da Silva’s Supreme Court cronies ban X in Brazil. And then Minnesota’s Democratic Attorney General Keith Ellison posts (on X, naturally): ‘Thanks, Brazil’. This is the moment Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, Robert Reich, chooses to declare Elon Musk ‘out of control’ and that America should ‘stop him’. Meanwhile, Keir Starmer’s Labour government begins scouring social media sites with the intention of arresting people who share ‘harmful’ footage of the latest riots in the UK. Starmer finishes the week with an ominous warning to the British people: ‘Think before you post.’ Might there be a pattern here?

For many mainstream media outlets, including CNN, Brazil banning X was a nuanced business and not without justification. ‘It further escalates a months-long feud over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation,’ said one commentator. Brazil’s earlier ‘sweeping investigation’ of X, according to CNN, targeted ‘hate speech aimed at undermining the country’s democracy’. To be fair, one opinion piece in the Washington Post did query why all 220 million Brazilians had to be excluded from X on account of some 140 ‘far-right’ sites posting ‘misinformation’.

One problem with the promiscuous use of the ‘far-right’ tag is its power to deligitimise all dissenting opinion, even dissenting opinion that might turn out to be valuable. Consider, for example, that for over a year Facebook assiduously removed ‘false claims’ about the man-made origins of Covid-19 in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. PC orthodoxy, in league with the financial interests of some very powerful actors on the world stage, deemed it inappropriate for ordinary folk to bandy about terms like ‘Wuhan Virus’ and ‘China Virus’. That lab-leak hypothesis, we were duly informed, was ‘misinformation’, the stuff of far-right conspiracy theories – until it wasn’t.

Musk’s 2022 purchase of Twitter, now X, has seen more nonsense than ever getting an airing, and some of that nonsense might be called far-right (or far-left for that matter). For Musk, a self-described ‘free speech absolutist’, that is the price any democracy must pay if important matters are to be properly debated. For liberals-cum-progressives, on the other hand, free speech fundamentalism is less a pillar of a fully functioning democracy than a mortal threat to democracy. Tony Blair, who helped transform the Labour party from a forum for Britain’s indigenous working class into a high-handed middle-class soirée, has just condemned the current lack of censorship at X and elsewhere: ‘We can’t go on like this.’

The PC brigade’s attitude to ordinary people, specifically white, male, heteronormative working-class people, was famously revealed in 2016 when Hillary Clinton made her ‘deplorables’ speech. The original blueprint for the revolution had been revoked. It is as if the message of the Communist Manifesto had been inverted to create a Woke Manifesto. Instead of the proles revolting against bourgeois civilisation, it is now a question of the wokist bourgeoisie protecting democracy from the revolting proles. And so the PC brigade must be forever vigilant against the purveyors of ‘hate speech’ – which, according to them, extends to anyone, far-right or not, who refuses to submit to the soft totalitarianism of left-wing identitarianism; old-school feminist J.K. Rowling being but one example of PC intolerance.

Lula da Silva’s declaration that the lack of censorship on X constitutes a ‘far-right free-for-all’ ideology is transparently self-serving. Free speech, the Brazilian president intimates, is good a thing if pro-Lula but bad if ‘far-right’ and pro-Bolsonaro, his political rival. If there’s a valid criticism to be made of Elon Musk, it’s that he has not always lived up to his freedomist rhetoric. Before Turkey’s 2023 presidential election, for instance, Musk’s leadership team announced that certain critics of President Erdoğan would be denied access to Twitter. This is a valid criticism of Musk but not of the principle of free speech itself.

There was a time when progressives welcomed free speech fundamentalists into their ranks. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), for example, was founded along the Voltairean lines of ‘defending to the death’ the right of another person to say things with which one disapproves. But there has been a shift in the thinking of America’s progressives since the halcyon days of the ACLU. No longer is the focus on defending the rights of the individual – attained through the laws of libel and defamation – but, rather, defending the rights of the group. And so America is now burdened with the despotism of group identity and a political organisation, the Democrats, which has assigned itself the role of guardian (and beneficiary) of modern-day tribalism.

Enter Donald Trump on a golden escalator. White, heteronormative and male, his original sin was to emanate from the oppressor tribe. Incorrigibly politically incorrect, he has the temerity to refer to radical Islamic terrorists as, well, ‘radical Islamic terrorists’. If Trump had remained a member of the Democratic party – woke central, if you will – he might have continued to be a friend of Oprah Winfrey or The Panel and perhaps turned himself into another Tim Walz. He could have sought absolution for being white, heteronormative and male – and installed tampons in boys’ toilets in schools. Was it hubris that prevented him from doing so? In any case, progressives have always felt entirely justified declaring Trump racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic and so on. Trump Derangement Syndrome, a function of woke psychosis, has a bigotry all of its own.

Progressives acclaimed Jack Dorsey’s Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook when they permanently suspended the ‘Misinformer-in-Chief’ from their platforms in early January 2021. Only now do we discover from Zuckerberg himself that Facebook censored the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election – a story, if it had seen the light of day, that would have likely destroyed the electoral chances of Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s candidate. And who, according to Zuckerberg, pressured Facebook to stifle this ‘far-right conspiracy theory’? The FBI. And which intelligence agency colluded with the Democratic party to bring down the Trump administration per the Kremlin Hoax? The FBI. Now we might ask ourselves this: who agrees that Elon Musk is ‘out of control’ and America needs to ‘stop him’? The answer to that question might tell us what we need to know about the real motivation of the opponents of free speech.