Sudden converts to the cause of free speech

The double standards of the left-leaning commentariat (is that a tautology?) have been laid bare by the fuss over Australian philosopher Peter Singer.

Singer, you’ll recall, was scheduled to speak at Auckland’s SkyCity Theatre in June, but the event was cancelled by risk-averse management worried about possible protests. Disability activists object to Singer, and with very good reason: he has argued that in some circumstances, it’s morally acceptable for parents to kill a seriously disabled child.

It should be noted that no one had threatened to disrupt Singer’s appearance, so SkyCity’s cancellation was a case of corporate timidity which the company tried to disguise with some PR mumbo-jumbo about the need to respect values of “inclusion and diversity”. In any case, Singer’s tour promoters soon secured an alternative venue, so his speech will go ahead – as it should in a country that professes to allow freedom of expression, regardless of whether some people find the speaker’s views repugnant (as I do in this instance).

But never mind all that. The really significant thing about the Singer kerfuffle was the sudden emergence of a whole bunch of new converts to the cause of free speech. Commentators who were silent about the de-platforming of the Canadian speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux in 2018, and in fact by their silence gave the impression of approving it, seemed to undergo a remarkable Road to Damascus-type experience now that it was a favoured leftie philosopher’s right to free speech that was threatened. But their feeble attempts to justify this  about-face left them open to accusations of rank hypocrisy.

Danyl Mclauchlan on The Spinoff was among the first to object to SkyCity’s cancellation of Singer’s speech. Possibly alert to the risk that he would be accused of double standards, Mclauchlan asserted that Singer couldn’t possibly be compared with the Canadians. Why not? Because according to Mclauchlan, “Singer is a category of thinker we should pay attention to and whose ideas we should consider, even though we disagree with some of them”.

So how, exactly, did this make him different from Southern and Molyneux? That wasn’t explained. We are left to conclude that Singer should be allowed to speak because Mclauchlan thinks he has something worthwhile to say, whereas the Canadians couldn’t possibly have been worth hearing.

Perhaps I can help here by suggesting some reasons why Mclauchlan might find Singer acceptable and the Canadians not. The obvious one is that Singer supports causes that the left embraces. He donates 40% of his income (which, given the enormous fees paid to celebrity speakers, plus his author’s royalties and professor’s salary from Princeton, would be not inconsiderable) to charity. He’s a champion of animal rights and veganism, and he believes people in wealthy Western countries have an obligation to help those living in poverty (none of which strikes me as either profound or original, but then what would I know?).

All of these stances tick the right boxes with the left – so much so that they seem willing to overlook the inconvenient fact that Singer has advocated euthanasia for disabled babies, which even hard-core lefties must find hard to defend.

While Mclauchlan is prepared to cut Singer a lot of slack, no such tolerance was extended to Southern and Molyneux, who were summarily dismissed at the time of their visit to Auckland as being “far right” or “alt right”, whatever that means, and who therefore couldn’t possibly have had anything interesting or provocative to say. (As it happens, New Zealanders still have little idea what message the Canadians intended to push, because we weren’t able to hear them and evaluate their arguments for ourselves. The totalitarian bigots of the far left, ably assisted by Phil Goff, the Gauleiter of Auckland, made sure of that.)

Mclauchlan went on to write: “ … thinkers who genuinely challenge conventional wisdom and the status quo are going to be wrong a lot of the time, and even their good ideas are going to generate a lot of uncertainty. If we ignore them because they’ve been cancelled for being wrong about something else we diminish our ability both to change our own minds and change things for the better”.

So this argument, which is a classic justification of free speech, applies to Singer but not to the Canadians? We’re supposed to retain an open mind about Singer’s provocative positions and allow that he might be right, but squeeze our eyes shut and clamp our hands over our ears for fear that Southern and Molyneux might have contaminated our thinking?

Here, laid bare, is the conceit of the leftist elite that presumes to know what opinions other New Zealanders (presumably less enlightened ones) may safely be exposed to. There’s an element of plain, old-fashioned bigotry in play here, combined with an authoritarian urge to control the public conversation. Together they make a toxic mix.

A similar line – essentially, “We believe in free speech, but not for people we disapprove of” – was taken in a commentary by someone named Emile Donovan on the Newsroom website. Donovan recalled the controversy over the Canadians in 2018, then went on to say: “But this case is a bit different. Singer is a world-renowned philosopher whose professional role is to conceive and debate boundary-pushing ideas and arguments”.

There it is again. Singer is somehow "different" from Southern and Molyneux, though Donovan makes no attempt to explain why Singer’s “boundary-pushing ideas and arguments” are worth hearing while those of Southern and Molyneux were not. The leftist commentariat has taken upon itself the right to decide whose ideology makes them acceptable and who should be regarded as beyond the pale.

Donovan then goes on to quote broadcaster Graeme Hill, who has twice interviewed Singer, about the dangers of society succumbing to oppressive groupthink. Er, quite so.

Now we turn to a Stuff editorial headlined The slippery slope of cancel culture, which talked admiringly of Singer’s “deep engagement with tricky and important moral issues” and his “eloquent” advocacy for Syrian refugees wanting to emigrate to New Zealand. All of which is fair enough – but the editorial simultaneously rebuked a rival media outlet for daring to suggest that Singer was in the same category as those “infamous YouTube activists” Southern and Molyneux. 

Again, by implication the Canadians’ views were without merit and therefore not worthy of a platform, although the editorial writer didn’t bother, or perhaps wasn’t able, to make a case for that proposition.   

It was clear that the writer heartily approved of free speech for Singer, but didn’t think the same right should be enjoyed by couple of provocative neo-conservatives from Canada. But that’s not how free speech works; it can’t be applied selectively so as to reinforce approved political prejudices to the exclusion of unpopular ones. I find myself again forced to quote Noam Chomsky: “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”

Freedom of speech, Rachel Stewart-style

New Zealand Herald columnist Rachel Stewart is a true champion of free speech. Except, that is, when someone wants to say something she doesn’t like.

In her column this week she savaged an occasional Otago Daily Times columnist named Dave Witherow. Witherow is guilty of the unpardonable sin of being (like me) an ageing, conservative male. In the eyes of the left-leaning bigots who have acquired almost total control of the public conversation in New Zealand, this automatically disqualifies him from having a valid opinion on anything.

What specifically pushed Stewart’s buttons is that Witherow wrote a column criticising Maori Language Week – or as he put it, “media apologists the length and breadth of the land prostrating themselves before the holy altar of te reo”.

He was especially critical of Radio New Zealand. “For the last couple of years,” Witherow wrote, “RNZ has been ahead of the pack in obsequiousness. Everything indigenous is sacrosanct, and even formerly redoubtable interviewers now shrink from the slightest demur when boring bigots drone on about the mana of all things native.”

Witherow used provocative language, as he’s entitled to do, and duly copped a barrage of self-righteous condemnation.

One of the more frenzied responses came from someone named Glenn McConnell, who was described as a Stuff reporter. That word “reporter” used to mean someone who reported, but that was before journalism training was politicised and new entrants to the profession were inculcated with the view that their mission was to correct the world’s iniquities. Many of them struggle to string three coherent words together, but they can spot sexism and racism a mile off and never hesitate to pass judgment. So McConnell had no compunction in labelling Witherow as a racist and accusing him of “casual bigotry”.

Hmmm. I wonder who the real bigots are here, but we’ll come back to that.

McConnell condescendingly allowed that most racists don’t know they’re racist. Ah, but he knows a racist when he sees one. Such are the superior moral insights conferred by modern journalism training.

Meanwhile, on the news website The Spinoff, Madeleine Chapman (no, I hadn’t heard of her, either) indulged in her own casual bigotry. She apologised for having to condemn yet another “bad column” (sigh – it’s just so tiresome having to constantly correct all these knuckle-dragging reactionaries) but justified it by saying she hoped it would be “the last goodbye to a generation of old men standing on their media platforms, yelling at clouds”.

You almost have to admire the conceit underlying that statement. Chapman seems to think the irresistible force of her argument will shock people like Witherow into silence. Good luck with that, as they say.

Another Spinoff contributor, Danyl Mclauchlan, categorised Witherow as representative of a “mostly older, mostly Pakeha subset of the population” whom he said were routinely provoked into outrage by Maori Language Week. Mclauchlan sneeringly referred to “drunken uncles at summer barbecues, bores holding forth in work tea-rooms and columnists and cartoonists on provincial papers”, all perpetuating their own ignorant versions of New Zealand history.  

(If I can slightly digress here, you can’t help but note a striking consistency in both Spinoff pieces. In an era when the Left is vigilant to the point of obsession in condemning stereotypes and prejudice, the one form of discrimination that’s not just tolerated but encouraged is the disparaging of older white males. The epithet “male, pale and stale” now serves as a coded synonym for someone who is misogynistic, racist, homophobic and stubbornly resistant to everything that’s progressive and enlightened. It’s a caricature, used to dismiss the legitimacy of anything that older white men might say or any opinions they might hold. So much for the Left’s supposed embrace of diversity.)

Witherow’s column also attracted the inevitable admonishment from Race Relations Commissioner Susan Devoy, who unfortunately has emulated her immediate predecessor, Joris De Bres, by morphing into a tedious, finger-wagging prig.  But the most poisonous attack, and I use the word deliberately, came from Stewart.

Stewart has the gall to say she believes in free speech – “absolutely” – before going on to say she “struggles with what basically amounts to gratuitous hate speech”. But she can’t have it both ways.

What she really wants is to deny Witherow a right that she claims for herself – that of free speech. She goes a step further by attacking the Otago Daily Times for publishing his column and therefore, in her eyes, being complicit in hate speech.

That’s why I describe her attack as poisonous. In a breathtaking display of moral and intellectual conceit, Stewart wants us to accept that her opinion is legitimate and noble while that of Witherow is hateful and contemptible. But she can’t exercise her own right of free speech while simultaneously seeking to deny it to others. A democratic society is built on the contestability of ideas. The moment any set of ideas is outlawed, democracy is diminished. Enlightened leftists (that is, those who can genuinely lay claim to the honourable term “liberal”) realise that. Stewart either can’t, or doesn’t want to.

In any case, who defines “hate speech”? Stewart doesn’t explain, so I’ll attempt it for her. Hate speech, in the eyes of some on the Left (not everyone, by any means), can essentially be defined as any opinion that runs counter to identity politics. This is the ideology that seeks to polarise society by breaking it down into supposedly oppressed minority groups, all pursuing their own divisive agendas, and which assesses everything in Western civilisation – art, literature, history, politics, the media – in terms of class, race and gender.

Playing the “hate speech” card is one of a range of tactics now routinely employed to marginalise any opinion the Left doesn’t like. Others include dismissing any expression of conservative opinion as a “rant”, thus implying it’s the product of a deranged mind, or caricaturing even moderately right-of-centre opinion as extreme, as New Zealand writer Ben Mack did in a hysterical, pants-wetting Washington Post column describing New Zealand First as a “far right” party and its involvement in the coalition government as “terrifying”. (The headline read: How the far right is poisoning New Zealand. Notwithstanding my own detestation of Winston Peters and his role in the shonky formation of the new government, I didn’t recognise the country portrayed in that headline and I don’t know any New Zealander who would.)

“Denier” and “denialist” (which are used in the context of the climate change debate to imply that global warming sceptics are on a par with Jew-hating Holocaust deniers) are part of this repertoire of attack too, along with the terms “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobe” and “misogynist” – all of which are used to portray the person so labelled as either stupid, evil or both, and thus to shame or intimidate them into silence. The ultimate objective of this strategy is to redefine the boundaries of public discourse so as to exclude anything that doesn’t conform to the neo-Marxist agenda.

But here’s the thing. Stewart’s entitled to fume all she likes about hate speech, just as long as she doesn’t attempt to shut other people down. I’m not in the habit of attacking other columnists and wouldn’t be criticising her here if she hadn’t stepped over that line. (Incidentally, I don’t know of any conservative group that argues people like her should be silenced. It’s always those on the Left who seek to stifle opinions that upset them.)

Now, back to McConnell, the Stuff columnist who accuses Witherow of bigotry. But who are the real bigots in this debate? My Oxford dictionary defines a bigot as an obstinate and intolerant believer in a religion or political theory. If that accusation is going to be hurled at Witherow, then it should be thrown right back at some of those attacking him. People should never make the mistake of equating bigotry with conservatism. Some of the most resolutely closed minds I’ve encountered have belonged to diehard lefties.

Fortunately there are left-leaning commentators who see the danger of the route people like Stewart would take us down. They are prepared to defend Witherow’s right to an opinion, and the ODT’s right to publish it, even if they don’t agree with what he says. On Pundit, for example, Tim Watkin described Witherow’s column as insulting and narrow-minded (fair enough), but drew the line “when criticism becomes an attack on civil debate and free speech”. And in the Herald, veteran writer Gordon McLachlan chided Stewart for thinking her own opinion sacrosanct. She should accept, he wrote, that she was not in command of ultimate truths.

Amen to that, but I suspect Stewart is so wrapped up in her own conceit, and so lacking in critical self-awareness, that reasoned criticism will fly straight over her head.

This debate still has some way to run. It’s likely to be revived tomorrow when Radio New Zealand’s Kim Hill interviews Don Brash, who endorsed Witherow’s column and posted a statement on Facebook saying he was “utterly sick” of hearing Te Reo Maori on RNZ. Brash identified Guyon Espiner of Morning Report as the worst offender and accused him of “virtue signalling”. (Good on Espiner for learning Maori, but he does give the impression that he enjoys showing off his fluency. And it’s hard to see the point of the increasingly frequent usage of Maori on Morning Report, unless it’s to make listeners feel that they’re not being good New Zealanders unless they learn it too. RNZ needs to understand that it’s not the function of the state broadcaster to inspire us to good works – we can go to church for that – or sign up to some idealistic vision of biculturalism.)

I can’t decide whether Brash is being foolhardy or courageous entering the lion’s den with Hill, since he has about as much chance of fair treatment as I have of being crowned Miss Universe. In my experience, the only time Hill interviews conservatives, it’s with the intention of trying to demolish them or make them look stupid. But good luck to him.