A collection of 24 posts
In 2021, Canadians were told that the remains of 215 Indigenous children had been found at a former school. The story turned out to be false—but no one in authority seems to know how to walk it back.
Art in public spaces will always be scrutinised for the propriety of its iconography, and it will remain under attack as long as its guardians are willing to pander to the narcissistic impulses of the activists.
Jonathan Kay speaks to fellow podcast host Kushal Mehra about the ‘eerie similarities’ between censorship campaigns in India and Canada.
Censorship obscures our view of reality and impedes our society’s ability to function.
Every censorship regime in history has claimed to be protecting the public. But no regime can have prior knowledge of what is true or good. It can only know what the approved narratives are.
J.K. Rowling’s scathingly effective takedown of Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act has been a wonder to behold.
A conversation with the director of Australia's new Free Speech Union.
Aggressive content moderation is presented as a necessary response to hate speech and misinformation—but it's more like a moral panic.
It's not just a matter of weighing up one group’s free speech against another group’s counter-speech. It’s also about one group’s freedom of association being impeded.
The true power of free expression is revealed even in defenses of speech advocating against it.
Sensational 2021 claims that unmarked Indigenous child graves had been discovered in British Columbia now seem doubtful. But saying so may soon be a criminal offence
The urge to censor is based on a misunderstanding of what makes literature valuable.
How an octogenarian artist defied curatorial bureaucracy.
While calls to censor hate speech and violent extremist content on social media platforms are common, there’s little evidence that online incitement leads to real-world radicalization. Ironically, such calls may actually galvanize extremists, who interpret hostile media coverage, commentary, and censorship policies as confirmation of their victimhood narratives and
We need to break the spell of illiberal ideology, and come back to our collective senses—to stop self-censoring in fear of the mob and excusing nonsense in the name of political allyship, and to start defending the values of pluralism, humanism, and democracy.