Posted on behalf of Peter E.
I’m grateful to Brian for drawing attention to holocaust21’s thoughtful (and thought-provoking) response to my piece on Inquisition21.
I agree that it’s never good, even in jest, to call for an entire category of people to be eradicated or persecuted simply for being who they are rather than for anything they’ve done. I wouldn’t ban such viewpoints, of course, but neither would I endorse them. Which brings me to the core point I’d like to make.
Free speech is under threat in the West to a degree that it hasn’t been since European National Socialism and Fascism were defeated in the middle of the last century. Unlike then, the new threat comes from within, not from some belligerent foreign power.
Paul Joseph Watson is in fact trenchantly opposed to the horrible alt-right and has taken issue with their beliefs in his irreverent, no-holds-barred way on numerous occasions. He’s given to the occasional overstatement, granted, but it seems to me that his ethical and political sentiments are predominantly spot on.
That doesn’t stop him being repeatedly labelled as alt-right by the intersectionalist far Left, because they seem to believe that anyone who disagrees with their simplistic reduction of the world to a power-play between the “oppressor” and the multitudinous “oppressed” must be a goose-stepping, cross-burning Nazi Klansman. They combine shocking historical and political ignorance with arrogant, self-idealising faux-virtuousness, and they lash out venomously at all who take issue with their dogmas.
If a group of people is being demonised in our Western countries, if they’re being used simply as repositories for the self-deludedly “virtuous” to off-load all their darkest rejected desires and drives onto, there’s only one possible way that I can see of improving the situation: free debate and argument. If argument is prohibited, it seems to me that the only two possible responses left open are despairing submission or terroristic violence. This is what I find most objectionable to the “progressives” of the SJW-intersectionalist Left: in their obsession with power, in their overweening need to police everyone’s thought and language, they convert all human relationships into fundamentally sadomasochistic submit-or-retaliate ones.
To conserve the West’s most precious inheritances for future generations – which I would describe as liberty under the democratic rule of law, free speech, freedom of civil association, the presumption of innocence and Habeas corpus – we simply cannot afford to stay within purist enclaves. We have to build alliances, often with people who hold some views we disagree with or find odious. There’s enough in PJW’s output to suggest to me that he’s a man free speech defenders can, and should, do business with.
If we miss the urgent necessity of creating and sustaining a ‘liberty alliance’ with those we differ from but can unite with on this issue, if we refuse to stand up and be counted in this alliance because we wish to remain pure, the alternative hardly bears thinking about. If the postmodern neoMarxist intersectionalists get their way, and they’ve already effectively created a three-legged “feminist uniparty” at the elite leadership level of all three major political parties in the UK, there will not be the slightest chance of having that debate and argument, or any other for that matter.
We’ve seen it in action this last week, when the YouTube comedian Count Dankula was found guilty by a Judge in a Scottish court of causing gross offence because of his “Nazi pug” spoof. I personally found Dankula’s short video distasteful, but it was clearly taking the rise out of Nazi mentalists, not endorsing them.
The judge’s humourless, grim-faced ruling means that anyone can be prosecuted for hate speech regardless of context and intention. In other words, this sets the chilling, freedom-shrivelling precedent that you can be convicted and even imprisoned for wrongthink as defined by malignantly resentful feminist-SJW snowflakes, whose only expertise resides in taking offence on other people’s behalf as well as their own. And this ruling was made here in Britain, the birthplace of individual liberty.
We are living in dark times and it seems to me desperately important that an alliance to defend liberty and free speech gathers momentum now, before my grandchildren and their peers are forced to live out their lives in some sordid Airstrip One dystopia.

Interesting thoughts, and fair point that Paul Joseph Watson does not describe himself as alt-right (I'll admit, I rather went off him, and didn't read his rejections of being called alt-right). Still, I regard him as the British equivalent of the alt-right i.e. not quite as obviously insane as his American counterparts, but still heading in the same direction

Jesting aside, I understand and respect your thoughts on alliances & free speech. However, my, perhaps still developing, thoughts on this are that in many ways it is the free society that has given birth to the social justice warrior. It is because the social justice warrior has been given the freedom to spread lies and nonsense that they have grown to such influence. I might quote a video game I once played (Wing Commander) "the price of freedom is eternal vigilance". People weren't vigilant enough when society was freer, they were too apathetic and/or looking in the wrong direction (like worrying about Nazis instead of worrying about those "silly little issues" like feminist legal reforms), and so social justice warriors were able to rise up and take over. So I guess what I'm saying is that just calling for abstract concepts like "free speech" is probably not enough to remove the social justice warrior. You need to have a deeper culture or ideology to back this freer society.

Furthermore, unfortunately one of the ways in which free speech has been removed is not always a literal legal criminalisation of free speech but often social demonisation. This tends to lead to job loss, friend loss, possible violent assaults on a person and so on. And my contention with Paul Joseph Watson's rhetoric is he does nothing to remove this problem and instead everything to advocate for more of it. To illustrate this more clearly I found the link of the video in which he advocated that paedophiles deserve a bullet to the head and should kill themselves: (the particularly violent rhetoric is at the end of the video). Is that video likely to actually give free speech to those who in any way advocate for paedophiles? I would say quite the opposite, and in that respect, he is much like the liberal progressives before him. They would also always advocate for "free speech" and "human rights". But there was always what they would call a "line". Once you cross that line you are into territory that no one would ever possibly support! Your free speech should be taken away! Of course, progressively those progressives have moved that line to cover more and more speech, hence the current backlash as more and more people find their speech is considered beyond the pale. But while Paul Joseph Watson moves the line back a shade, the same problem of the existence of a line is still there so he offers nothing new. And I intensely disagree with his position, so I'm not going to support him.

Sadly, also a young youtube activist who was a self-confessed paedophile committed suicide recently (he went by the name of omnipolitics16 and was just 17 when he died). I just remembered that I think he made a video, now deleted from youtube, that was a direct reply to Paul's video. It is tragic to think that Paul's vindictive rhetoric has contributed to his death.

I agree with you, of course, that the prosecution of Count Dankula is a reckless travesty of justice and has dangerous implications. Though as a curious aside and rather unrelated to his conviction, in a discussion he had with paedophile advocate Amos Yee (who originally gained fame after he was jailed in Singapore for criticising Christians & Muslims, and now has sought asylum in the US no less!) it seems like Count Dankula has similar violent inclinations as Paul Watson towards anything he considers paedophilic to the point that he is literally one triggering away from brutally murdering someone suspected of paedophilia - even if it is a relationship he *knows* is completely consensual. See the discussion here (it's quite long, mind):

Bravo, Peter E

I couldn't agree more.

Bravo.

Peter E. responds
Thanks for another thoughtful reply, h21, and to Randall for his kind words.
I appreciate that freedom of speech generates some nasty side effects, and I loathe the demonization of human beings for immutable characteristics that they didn’t choose but somehow have to live with. I was deeply saddened to hear of the suicide of the boy you mentioned, although I’d hesitate to attribute his tragic decision to a single video from PJW. Suicide is usually more complex than that and is more heavily correlated with persistent loneliness, depressive thinking and enduring isolation (although of course all three can be exacerbated by social persecution).
I’ve come to believe, though, that the less pleasant effects of free speech are unavoidable. Few things in this world are perfect but some are a good deal less perfect than others - like the abolition of free speech in the public sphere. The only way to prohibit these effects is through state policing of language – the road to tyranny. OR, we could all begin to agree that we use the public sphere to engage in free civil debate, meaning debate which is conducted with civility. Freedom, it seems to me, does rest upon a shared decorum of behaving well.
Some people, I fully, accept will exploit freedom. They’ll use it to cause gratuitous offence and to launch ruinous twitch-hunts, destroying reputations with no corroboratory evidence simply by orchestrating a mob of twitchfork-wielding, publicity-seeking, narcissistic accusers.
My own view is that some actions are certainly immoral – deliberately offending or demonising people who can’t defend themselves is appallingly immoral - but should nonetheless not be illegal. As soon as that happens, we hand over liberties that were once ours (secured by heroic sacrifice and fortitude on the part those who lived before us) to the State. And then we’ll never get them back. Very few people beyond the West, and the Anglosphere in particular, enjoy the astounding liberty (astounding because it’s the exception, not the rule, in most human societies, past and present) that our young are now being taught is nothing other than an oppressive patriarchal tyranny. Yet the progressive Left seem unable to answer a basic question about the overwhelming direction of flow of global migration: it's from the "developing" world to the West. Are these desperate people risking life and limb to come here because they want to be oppressed, or might they just be seeking freedom from corrupt, oppressive, violent, thuggish patriarchies?
I take your point about the surreptitious legal reforms and pervasive institutional corruption the feminist-postmodernist neoMarxist authoritarian Left have been up to for decades. They warned us they’d do this in 1968, when the Marxist student activist Rudi Dutschke advocated that the Left abandon their allegiance to the working class and instead embark on “a long march through the institutions” to corrupt the professions, the media, the law, education etc., rendering them instruments of unmandated Leftist power and social engineering.
I believe their fingerprints are all over State education, where children can “learn” that they’re entirely “gender fluid” and were merely “assigned” their biological sex by patriarchal heterosexual parents at birth, the Crown Prosecution Service, which believes that convictions for rape are "too low" (because the Western patriarchy inculcates rape culture among its male offspring), the police service, social work, the civil service and, of course, the Fourth Estate: the predominantly “liberal” mainstream-conventional media, which relentlessly peddles feminist lies such as the non-existent gender “pay” gap (which in truth is an earnings gap based on the different interests and different work choices made by men and women).
But as it happens, I think the deeper culture of commitment to a free society already exists, even if it’s ailing and being buried beneath mounds of turbid Leftist horseshit. It’s just never, ever acknowledged by the Leftist elite. They ignore or caricature it instead. It seems to me that the election of Trump and the Brexit vote in the UK were above all (whatever else they might have been) gigantic rejections of the unremitting efforts of the multiculturalist-intersectionalist Left elite to indoctrinate the populace into embracing their horrible, anti-white racist and venomously misandrist ideology.
The large numbers of working class people who voted in favour of both outcomes suggests that they’ve quietly put up with being derided and besmirched by the privileged, intolerant, smug intersectionalist-Left media commentariat as thick, illiterate, racist scum. When given a chance, they stuck two gigantic fingers up to their progressive superiors, flatly rejecting their melodramatic posturing, their mendacious fearmongering and their grotesque moral exhibitionism.
All is not yet lost. But the clock is ticking. I’m no fan of 'The Donald', but the “progressive” Left have been hysterical in their efforts to kill the Trump Presidency, unable to understand that their sly and pervasive Gleichschaltung, crafted over decades of surreptitious infiltration, failed to work. Big time. Their latest sickening stunt was to blatantly exploit traumatised teenagers who survived a recent US school shooting to advocate the repeal of the Second Amendment to the US Bill of Rights.
Whatever you think of the merits or demerits of gun control, hiding behind recently bereaved young adolescents who know nothing about what they’re grandstanding about is one of the dirtiest of dirty, devious political tricks that I can think of. And it’s backfiring: since the progressive Left used teenagers as marionettes to mouth their repulsive ideological lies in the March for Our Lives, electoral support for the previously beleaguered Republicans has been growing rapidly, slashing the Democrat-progressive poll lead from 15 to just 5 percentage points.
People were being heavily programmed to support the Left by means of mass media renditions of emotive, ignorant speeches from rather obnoxiously smug adolescents, who were simply enjoying their five minutes of fame. But instead, the "stupid" people talked to one another about the broadcasts and refused to be socially engineered.
Free speech isn’t as dead as the left would like it to be. But it needs a huge collaborative effort on the part of all those who defend it, of whatever political persuasion. The people Jonah Goldberg eloquently described as “Liberal Fascists” want to kill it on their path to a miserable, hellish Utopia. We have a duty to the young and the unborn to prevent them.

I'll reiterate what Randall said and say yes, now I couldn't agree with you more Peter, Bravo

You captivated what I wanted to say. Free speech can be used to take away free speech, but if you start trying to limit it then that does also lead to tyranny. So the preferable solution is to have absolute free speech but with a culture of debate and disapproval for those who use it to aggressively slander or take away the freedoms of others.

That said, when you are in a society that is falling off the cliff, I sometimes wonder to myself... If someone said to me that he will grant me one wish to have just ONE law enacted then which law would that be? I'd be very tempted to say that law should be the criminalisation of feminist speech. Enacting any other law would soon get revoked by the loony feminazis and we'd be back where we started! That would be the one law that would shut them up, provided it was enforced with the level of zeal that Jim Gamble prosecuted child pornography offences.

Hey, if they're already playing dirty (by criminalising MY speech), then why can't I criminalise THEIR speech?

can't believe I'm reading claptrap about the odious little creep Paul Joseph Watson.

Next there will be an exercise in praise for the ludicrous faux Libertarian website Spiked & the ridiculous bore Brendan O'Neil, neither of whom have the courage to admit their backers are billionaires Rupert Murdoch and Gina Rinehart both who would remove anyone's "free speech" within a heart beat.

Peter E. responds to Hedda

It’s not immediately obvious to me that Paul Joseph Watson is an “odious little creep” or that Spiked-online is a “ludicrous faux-libertarian website”, largely because I don’t personally know Mr Watson and I have no evidence that Spiked is orchestrating some kind of deviously authoritarian sub-agenda. Perhaps such evidence exists somewhere, but it doesn’t seem to me to be present in any credible way in the public sphere. For all I know, Watson may love David Hare plays or Carol Ann Duffy poems, which would certainly make him an odious little creep in my book. But I don’t know that, so I’ll leave it aside as a consideration. I can only judge him on his public utterances, and I think he’s pretty sound on the issue of free speech, even if he’s prone to the occasional injudicious overstatement. The same applies to Spiked.
I’m not, I hasten to say, claiming that I’m right. But the only way that I know of that I can be corrected if I’m mistaken is through the free exchange of words with other people. People who don’t try to shut down free debate by pre-emptively hissing “sexist!”, “racist!”, “fascist” or accusing their interlocutors of one the new hard-Left thought crimes such as “transphobia.”
When intersectionalists claim that free speech isn’t as important as the right not to be offended, it seems to me that they’re gratuitously confecting a fake right that doesn’t formally exist. As Professor Jordan Peterson put it in his Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman when he made this point: in order to be able to think truthfully, you have to risk offending people. And there’s no one more expert at taking incendiary offence than the postmodern-intersectionalist Left, who are clearly highly adept at orchestrating social media mobs to frighten people away from speaking freely and truthfully, or risk irrecoverable reputational damage if they do.
Whatever we might think of PJW, Spiked or the Murdoch dynasty, this can’t be good. There’s a meme in circulation that was perhaps wrongly attributed to Teddy Roosevelt but is nonetheless pithily relevant to today. I’ll paraphrase it: “To anger a free speech advocate, lie to him. To anger an intersectionalist ideologue, tell the truth.”
When free debate is curtailed through hysterical displays of moral exhibitionism in order to prevent any challenge to dogma-driven lies, key pillars of Western civilisation – freedom of speech, due process, the presumption of innocence – are under attack. Perhaps those of us who want to conserve liberty and free speech from further effacement ought to be defending them, with allies, from those who want to tear them all down under the intersectionalist delusion (or “lie” in more prosaic terms) that they constitute an oppressive “patriarchy.”

Brian R. wrote:
Peter E. responds to Hedda

It’s not immediately obvious to me that Paul Joseph Watson is an “odious little creep” or that Spiked-online is a “ludicrous faux-libertarian website”, largely because I don’t personally know Mr Watson and I have no evidence that Spiked is orchestrating some kind of deviously authoritarian sub-agenda. Perhaps such evidence exists somewhere, but it doesn’t seem to me to be present in any credible way in the public sphere. For all I know, Watson may love David Hare plays or Carol Ann Duffy poems, which would certainly make him an odious little creep in my book. But I don’t know that, so I’ll leave it aside as a consideration. I can only judge him on his public utterances, and I think he’s pretty sound on the issue of free speech, even if he’s prone to the occasional injudicious overstatement. The same applies to Spiked.
I’m not, I hasten to say, claiming that I’m right. But the only way that I know of that I can be corrected if I’m mistaken is through the free exchange of words with other people. People who don’t try to shut down free debate by pre-emptively hissing “sexist!”, “racist!”, “fascist” or accusing their interlocutors of one the new hard-Left thought crimes such as “transphobia.”
When intersectionalists claim that free speech isn’t as important as the right not to be offended, it seems to me that they’re gratuitously confecting a fake right that doesn’t formally exist. As Professor Jordan Peterson put it in his Channel 4 interview with Cathy Newman when he made this point: in order to be able to think truthfully, you have to risk offending people. And there’s no one more expert at taking incendiary offence than the postmodern-intersectionalist Left, who are clearly highly adept at orchestrating social media mobs to frighten people away from speaking freely and truthfully, or risk irrecoverable reputational damage if they do.
Whatever we might think of PJW, Spiked or the Murdoch dynasty, this can’t be good. There’s a meme in circulation that was perhaps wrongly attributed to Teddy Roosevelt but is nonetheless pithily relevant to today. I’ll paraphrase it: “To anger a free speech advocate, lie to him. To anger an intersectionalist ideologue, tell the truth.”
When free debate is curtailed through hysterical displays of moral exhibitionism in order to prevent any challenge to dogma-driven lies, key pillars of Western civilisation – freedom of speech, due process, the presumption of innocence – are under attack. Perhaps those of us who want to conserve liberty and free speech from further effacement ought to be defending them, with allies, from those who want to tear them all down under the intersectionalist delusion (or “lie” in more prosaic terms) that they constitute an oppressive “patriarchy.”

Such a great post, I wanted it to appear twice in the thread.

A good defence to the Authoritarian Left is to give not one single solitary damn about their ad hominem character assassinations. I don't give a hoot if some blue haired blob thinks I'm a transracialgenderphobe, or what anyone think I "should" think or say or be allowed to think or say.

If people don't know why Alex Jones bovver boy Watson is a creep they are just not looking hard enough (and I'm not wasting my time on him).

Why he would even enter into any discussion on "free speech" is a mystery. He's part of the problem..a minor part..but quite an effective one in aiding the nobbling of "free speech" & propagating fantasy for evil intent.

Why have people only just discovered free speech is under fire?. It has been for several decades now as a handful of media moguls have consolidated the media in the UK, USA and Australia into a right-wing conglomerate that thinks and acts as one.

Murdoch is a prime example who has nobbled free speech in the way he and his mass media which reaches into every corner of the world (except China which told him to piss off) have crafted basically an "alternative reality" that is pretty bloody evident except to Blind Freddy.

Murdoch has backed every successful government in the UK for the last 40 years. He has decided who rules the UK, USA and Australia although that power is under threat with the advent of (love or loathe him) a Jeremy Corbyn.

Murdoch (and the handful of similar) decide what "free speech" is to be published to the masses. It's so bad now the BBC has become a parody of what it was and plays catch-up to the gutter media (but with far more style).

While Goebbels was the creator of modern propaganda (and I reckon of public relations as well) it's advanced rapidly into ways we can't keep up with.
When a handful of moguls control the media they tell you what is the news, what is important and basically what to think (Corbyn is a Red Spy- last week).

It could be probably summed up by JK's term "A Good Story". That's what you get and that's all you get.

This has been tempered with the rise of Social Media which caught the mass & old media off guard but social media now has collapsed into a pit of lies that are propagated & recycled endlessly in the hands of clever bastards (Alex Jones & Pizzagate but a 1000 more such tales) which freezes out the real news we need to know.

So you still have Free Speech..anyone can now have a voice via the Internet which is where all the real news comes from (much of it phony) but that Free Speech is meaningless because half the planet has no idea what the truth really is.

The Village Gossip or the nasty little woman/man who sent out Poison Pen Letters to all in the village now have a World Wide Audience via the net. And they have a dire effect. People go to jail. No nobbling of Free Speech there.

To again use Noam Chomsky's statement which sums it up : "one must admire the incredible skills the media have in manipulating the population. They managed to convince many that the most passionate anti-racist of the last 40 years-Jeremy Corbyn is actually pro-racist & anti-Semitic"

# this isn't about Corbyn but it's a true and obvious comment on the power of media moguls today (and for the last 40-50 years)and how they have no shame and an absolute gall to perpetuate such propaganda.

You have Free Speech..you have it more than you ever did. The Internet where 90% of people now get their information / news from is a bastion of Free Speech for every person on the planet.

People have been exercising their free speech ever since the internet arrived. The lack of it is not your problem. The real problem is plain old Propaganda has been refined for the current era where fabrications drown out the Truth.

The problem is truth has been submerged, fiddled with and turned into the opposite.
Paul Joseph Watson is just vile propagator of lies and ludicrous conspiracies theories that crowd out the truth. Just a small cog in the wheel but a cog nonetheless.

But the very notion such a small cog could somehow even enter into a discussion on "free speech" really shows how effective the propaganda has become with it's millions of trolls on the planet who repeat Ad infinitum his & other's lies.