Free Speech Is Dying in Britain. Here’s Why the US Has Kept It.

Sep 13, 2019 by

by Jules Gomes, Daily Signal:

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” President-to-be Ronald Reagan warned in an address to the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce in March 1961.

That’s because, now as then, slavery not liberty, and serfdom not freedom, is humanity’s default setting.

Those of us in Britain have seen the fulfillment of Reagan’s prophecy. We sleep-walked into slavery, and it’s in the domain of speech that the death of our freedom is most pronounced. We hate “hate speech,” but don’t love free speech anymore.

In “Areopagitica,” John Milton’s seminal essay on free speech, the poet understood freedom of speech as the freedom defining all others, calling for “liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely, according to conscience, above all liberties.”

“In a free society of free citizens, speech is the medium and proof of freedom itself,” concurred Michael Walsh, author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West.” In contrast, he added, an “unfree society” is noteworthy “for what you cannot say.”

In Britain, our freedom—or lack of it—is now defined by what we cannot say, which is just about anything.

Dr. David Mackereth, a physician with 26 years’ experience in Britain’s National Health Service, was sacked because he wouldn’t refer to a hypothetical “six-foot-tall bearded man” as “madam.”

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