Free Speech and Anarcho-Tyranny in the UK

Woe to Those Who Call What is Evil, Good

The last two weeks have witnessed social and political upheaval in the United Kingdom. After a knife attack in a Southport dance school on July 29 left three young girls dead and ten others badly injured, riots broke out in England and Northern Ireland. The rioting began in Southport (understandably) but quickly spread elsewhere, and involved street unrest, arson, looting, and attacks on mosques and police headquarters. Much of the violence was directed at immigrants, foreigners, and Muslims.

Predictably, the riots have been denounced by political and religious authorities in the harshest terms. The protests are supposedly fueled by islamophobia, racism, and xenophobia. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Webly, labeled the “far right” groups unchristian, and proclaimed they were racist, anti-Muslim, anti-refugee, and anti-asylum seeker. Predictably, he also blamed “lies and misinformation”: “It was detonated by lies and fuelled by deliberate misinformation, spread quickly online by bad actors with malignant motivations.”

For his part, the newly elected UK Prime Minister and leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer, has cracked down hard on the protestors. Touting the themes of “law and order” and the priority of executing swift justice for the safety of British communities, the Prime Minister has had little trouble marshalling the police forces necessary to counter the violence. Controversially, PM Starmer has targeted “hate speech” in public and online (including memes), and numerous British citizens have since between arrested, tried, and received jail time: Jordan Parlour, a 28-year-old man from Seacroft, was jailed for 20-months for social media posts condemned as “stirring up racial hatred”; likewise, 26-year-old Tyler James Kay was booked for over three years for “utterly repulsive, racist and shocking posts” online; and David Spring, a 61-year-old man from Sutton, was slapped with an 18-month jail sentence for chanting “Who the f**k is Allah?” This is just a fraction of those caught up in the crack-down.

The Crown Prosecution Service posted an ad on X.com warning citizens to “think before you post” or even share material that “incites violence or hatred.” Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, vowed to develop new school curriculum to battle against “putrid conspiracy theories” and enable children to spot fake news online—a policy which Fr. Calvin Robinson rightly condemned as indoctrination. For his part, billionaire businessman and owner of X, Elon Musk, blasted UK authorities for what he considered their heavy-handed response and draconian censorship and prosecution of citizens expressing sensible outrage. London Metropolitan Police Chief, Mark Rowley, threatened to extradite and imprison U.S. citizens over online posts—including Musk. The European Commission threatened X with legal consequences. Tensions are high.

False Paradigm: Freedom v. Censorship or Common Good v. License

The conflict between Musk and the UK has centered around free speech, specifically the right of British nationals to speak out against immigration policies, migrant violence, or the Islamification of their societies. This specific debate represents a greater divide between Americans and the British in which each side tends to view the other in starkly negative terms. Americans champion freedom of speech as a constitutional and God-given right, and they chaff against any restriction as stultifying censorship. The British emphasize order and the common good, arguing that speech must be regulated for the good of all and to prevent abuses of freedom. Musk tends to collapse any kind of regulation into “censorship” and extols an unbridled “freedom” as endlessly benevolent and with few downsides. Brits tend to use the “common good” to justify intrusive policing, believe “misinformation” is a real threat, and emphasize the safety and well-being of society.

Both sides of this debate are right, and both are wrong. As a classical liberal or libertarian, Musk’s understanding of “freedom of speech” or “freedom of the press” in America is anemic and superficial. Yet the British authorities are oppressive in their attempts to control citizen speech because their entire civilization is disordered and crumbling. The former reasons according to strict principles and thus loses the substantive purpose of speech; the latter reasons substantively, but they have no true substance, since they have neglected and destroyed the public good.

The ideal of free speech, in which humans can say whatever they want whenever they want and with no consequences, has never existed. Libertarians will quickly point out that they don’t really believe this: all speech must still be within the bounds of law. For example, you cannot openly threaten to assassinate a sitting president and when arrested and presented before the judge expect to be released on the grounds that you were merely exercising your First Amendment speech rights. Libertarians and classical liberals, therefore, delimit the outer boundaries of free speech according to “no harm” moral principles: as long as speech does not result in physical harm, violence, or death, it is permissible. Of course, this merely begs the question of what constitutes harm, and opens the door for innovators to claim that speech can be violent, and that “hate speech” of various kinds can do great harm.

The reason why speech is such an explosive political matter and something over which people will fight dearly is because speech lies at the core of what makes us human and what we think is good and just. We are, according to Aristotle, “by nature political animals” because man alone among the animals “has speech” (lógos) (Politics 1253a1-10; Ethics 1098a5). This means that humans can be persuaded by reason (lógos), and we can think through matters according to cause-and-effect, such as actions and their consequences. However, speech is not merely a more advanced form of human communication over and above animal instinct or noises, for it is qualitatively distinct. Aristotle explains: “But speech serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful, and hence also the just and unjust. For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and the other things of this sort” (Politics 1253a15-18). Because human speech is deeply associated with morality and teleology—with understanding who we are, why we exist, and how we ought to live—speech is essential to political society and to living well. To lose speech either through external suppression or internal corruption is to lose reason’s ability to deliberate over the good, advantageous, and just; it is to become irrational and so to cease to be human and descend to the level of a beast. It is no wonder, then, that all societies care deeply about regulating the speech of their citizens, for unregulated and erratic speech will have the same effect as unregulated and erratic behavior. It is the difference between civilization and barbarism.

Regulating Speech in Early America

Classical liberals often believe that America was founded upon the principle of freedom of speech (along with freedom of religion and the right to self-government). This is not wrong in theory, but many aspects of the official narrative are simply incorrect. First, the sweeping prohibitions of the First Amendment apply only to Congress. “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” (italics added). Only after the incorporation of the Bill of Rights to the states in the twentieth-century does this constitutional limit expand to gobble up state law, creating national uniformity in ever-increasing liberal speech codes. Prior to this, states could regulate the speech of their citizens as they thought best for the welfare of each state.

Second, some states did have constitutional protections similar to the First Amendment. A common clause read, “That the people have a right to freedom of speech, and of writing and publishing their sentiments; therefore the freedom of the press ought not to be restrained” (PA Const. 1776, Declaration of Rights, Art. XII; VT Const., Declaration of Rights, 1777 [Art. XIV], 1786 [Art. XV], 1793 [Art. 13]; NH Const. 1784, Bill of Rights, Art. XXX; CT Const. 1818, Declaration of Rights, Sec. 6; MI Const. 1835, Bill of Rights, Art. 7). Yet there were no laws above the states requiring that states include such a clause in their constitutions. Certainly, many colonists believed that freedom of speech was a natural right—a right by nature and a divine gift—but they differed on how that right ought to be constitutionally protected.

In the third place, however, freedom of speech was less an individual matter and more a corporate right of the people to be represented in their state legislatures. As the 1784 New Hampshire constitution declared, “The freedom of deliberation, speech, and debate, in either house of the legislature, is so essential to the rights of the people, that it cannot be the foundation of any action, complaint, or prosecution, in any other court or place whatsoever” (cf. VT 1786, Declaration of Rights, Art. XVI; MA 1780, Declaration of Rights, Art. XXI; MD 1777, Declaration of Rights, Art. VIII; PA 1790, Art. 1, Sec. 17; DE 1792, Art. 2, Sec. 11; KY 1792, Art. 1, Sec. 23; ; TN 1796, Art. 1, Sec. 10; OH 1803, Art. 1, Sec. 13; CT 1818, Art. 3, Sec. 10). Free speech and deliberation in local assemblies was the lifeblood of self-government. Not only that, but apart from this corporate free speech right, the personal right to speak and publish openly would be insecure and at risk. Accordingly, the corporate right of legislative speech is mentioned more often and in more of the state constitutions than the personal right to speak one’s mind or opinion.

Fourth, a study of early state case law reveals that judges were not afraid to censor public sentiments that were deemed malicious and harmful to society. A famous case was that of People v. Ruggles decided by Judge Kent in New York in 1811. In that case, the defendant had uttered the words, “Jesus Christ was a bastard, and his mother must be a whore.” This was not merely considered unkind or uncouth, but “false, feigned, scandalous, malicious, wicked, and blasphemous words” that was deeply offensive and harmful to “diverse good and Christian people.” In seeking to determine whether speaking this way was a public offense, the court determined that it was, for three reasons. First, the attitude or disposition of the defendant was important, for the words were uttered with “a wonton manner” (carelessly) and revealed a “wicked and malicious disposition.” The individual, therefore, was intentionally trying to cause disorder and offense, and he was “not in a serious discussion upon any controverted point in religion.”

Second, the defendant’s words struck at the root of the people’s religion, Christianity, and thus represented an attack upon the people themselves. The received English common law declared that “Christianity was parcel of the law, and to cast contumelious [scornful, insulting] reproaches upon it, tended to weaken the foundation of moral obligation, and the efficacy of oaths. …for that whatever strikes at the root of Christianity, tends manifestly to the dissolution of civil government.” In other words, unnecessarily provocative and offensive speech like this, if left unchecked, could eventually cause the collapse of civil society by destroying the credibility of that society’s religion. Judge Kent made it clear that this did not rule out debate over religious matters, holding up Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason as an example of “disputes between learned men upon particular controverted points.”

Third, malicious speech was rightly punished because it undermined public morals, which were indispensable for civil society. As Judge Kent reasoned, “the reviling is an offense, because it tends to corrupt the morals of the people, and to destroy good order.” Thus, this is not merely an impious act of religious blasphemy, but “affects the essential interests of civil society.” No functional society can exist without virtue among the people, self-discipline, mutual respect, and restraint: “We stand equally in need, now as formerly, of all the moral discipline, and of those principles of virtue, which help to bind society together. …Nothing could be more offensive to the virtuous part of the community, or more injurious to the tender morals of the young, than to declare such profanity lawful.” To legally ignore, or even approve, malicious and blasphemous speech was to risk what no modern country had dared. “No government among any of the polished nations of antiquity, and none of the institutions of modern Europe … ever hazarded such a bold experiment upon the solidity of the public morals, as to permit with impunity, and under the sanction of their tribunals, the general religion of the community to be openly insulted and defamed.”

Thus we see that even in America there was a robust tradition of rightly policing speech, as all understood that speech was not harmless but had the potential to weaken the moral and religious foundations of society. This civilizational insight and impulse was not novel; Socrates faced the same dilemma at his trial. On this score, America was as traditional as they came, and she owed this habit to her English heritage.

Anarcho-Tyranny in the UK

This may lead us to think we should side with the UK authorities in this debate. The problem, however, is that while they may be right in the abstract that speech should be regulated and violent protestors arrested, they are wrong in the particulars of their historical setting. And that setting is of a century-long English civilizational decline that has descended into anarcho-tyranny. In a context in which the political elite are responsible for the intentional destruction of English and UK government, society, and religion, the outburst of citizen violence and harsh speech to condemn the erasure of their own culture and heritage is not only understandable, but entirely appropriate.

In a ground-breaking 1994 article in Chronicles Magazine, the historian and political scientist Sam Francis expounded at length a phrase he had coined, “anarcho-tyranny,” describing it as an “entirely new form of government.” Francis explained that in anarcho-tyrannies, governments perform some functions well, or at least decently (e.g., tax collection). Yet basic elements of law and order, especially criminal and civil law, are lax and unenforced: “the state does not perform effectively or justly its basic duty of enforcing order and punishing criminals, and in this respect its failures do bring the country, or important parts of it, close to a state of anarchy.” This is then combined with a heavy government hand against peaceful citizens that effectively tyrannizes them, in which “innocent and law-abiding citizens are punished by the state or suffer gross violations of their rights and liberty at the hands of the state.” Anarchy and tyranny are thus combined: criminals go free, and when citizens resist, they are punished. By using a criminal (or in our case, migrant) underclass to sow societal disruption, instill fear in the people, and create the pretense for ever-widening government crackdowns and control, the ruling class is able to accomplish indirectly what it could never do by itself. Since Francis first articulated these ideas in the early 90s, other scholars have consequently reflected upon and applied the insights of anarcho-tyranny to explain events in the U.S. over the last five years.

The same phenomenon is occurring in Great Britain. Why have the governments of the United Kingdom (and Europe and America) adopted anarcho-tyranny? This form of misrule would seem to be self-defeating and will inevitably result in civilizational transformation, if not collapse. Yet this is the point, because anarcho-tyranny is the natural political expression of oikophobia—self-hatred for one’s own country and people. This is the origin of the current crisis of the Western societies and explains a host of related problems: government misrule especially regarding immigration policy, the rise of multiculturalism and DEI ideology, and the criminalization of “hate speech.”

Somewhere in the mid-twentieth-century, amidst the end of British colonialism, civil rights upheavals, and anti-communist wars, and the rise of academic fashions like postmodern literary criticism, third-wave feminism, and race and gay critical analysis, Western leaders came to believe that they and their societies were the epitome of evil. Justice demanded not only that their societies be deconstructed and torn down, but that their foundational ways of life—their forms of government, traditions, religion, moral virtues, language, education, and even the ethnic stock of the people—be terraformed, reprogrammed, and replaced. Possessed by false guilt and a zealous drive to reclaim moral purity and cultural authority, the Western ruling class gradually but increasingly employed the tools of mass migration, multicultural reeducation, and “hate speech” criminalization to prosecute their own civilizational suicide.

Europe and America’s immigration policies that favor third-world immigrants (from Africa, Asia, and Latin/South America) can easily be explained by the racial asymmetry that has now been taught in schools for over three generations: if whites are inherently racist, privileged, and prejudiced, and black, brown, and indigenous persons are innocent victims, then society can be cleansed, and her sins atoned for by inviting in ever-increasing numbers of innocent minorities while white transgressors are pushed out. Only a reversal of colonialism, imperialism, racism, and xenophobia can rebalance the cosmic scales of justice. The West must suffer the same fate she inflicted on others for over four centuries. Not until then—not until modern Western civilization has been decimated, her errors and wickedness expunged, and her people taught the gravity of their inherited sins—can there be any hope for world peace or cosmic justice.

The ideology of multiculturalism is the philosophical justification for oikophobia and mass immigration to the West. It strains vainly to deny national borders and ethnic differences, and denies that there can be some cultures and religions that are superior to others. It is the crowning ideology of polite and enlightened bourgeois sentimentality and its supposed “love of humanity.” If all cultures are equally good, if all ethnic and racial differences collapse in the light of human sameness, rights, and dignity, if all religions lead to God, and if all moralities are really human inventions, then mass societies composed of a mashup of the world’s citizens can move from dream to reality. To make this possible the values of tolerance, kindness, inclusion, acceptance, diversity, and equity must be proclaimed. (Note that these are not virtues—they are not well-motivated actions to accomplish human goods, but sentiments of a heart whose passions dominate reason.) To make all this work, a kind of bureaucratic and professional managerialism is necessary.

Consider, for example, the headmaster of Michaela Community School in London, Katherine Birbalsingh, who, after the Southport attacks, doubled-down on the virtue and necessity of multiculturalism. For her, multiculturalism “needs careful management” in order to prevent intercultural conflict and violence. Only when all kids are taught to “make sacrifices for the sake of the whole,” will disparate cultures learn to live together in peace. Thus, multicultural ideology and government managerialism go hand-in-hand. Citizens must be made to submit—either through reeducation or police force—to reckless immigration policies meant to humiliate them and stamp out their cultural heritage. Anarcho-tyrannical policies that allow migrant criminals to go free while patriotic citizens are smothered with draconian punishments is merely a tool of the managerial multicultural leviathan currently desecrating Western nations. The speed at which patriotic Britons who spoke out against migrant crime and the destruction of their homelands—arrested, tried, and sentenced in less than a week—simply reveals the anarcho-tyrannical determination of pathetic managerial strivers desperate to prove that the multicultural experiment can be managed to successful outcomes.

This includes the criminalization of “hate speech”—a subjective euphemism for anything considered distasteful by the proponents of multicultural managerialism. This is quite different than outlawing malicious speech as articulated by Judge Kent. In that case, the speech was considered objectively wrong and harmful to genuine goods of society—religion, morality, public virtue, and government itself. The intention of the perpetrator was, of course, taken into consideration; and Judge Kent was able to determine that the defendant was being intentionally and unnecessarily provocative in his speech as he was not interested in vigorous debate over contestable opinions, but merely offending his hearers. Authorities cracking down on “hate speech,” on the other hand, assume the prerogative of being able to peer into the heart of the speaker and discern hatred toward others, which is then judged to be illegal according to amorphous fears of inciting “racial hatred” in others or spreading generic “violence.”

The difference between the two examples is one of both degree and kind. Early nineteenth-century American society was extremely healthy and functional in many ways (not perfect, of course): it did not suffer from oikophobia but pride and self-confidence; it successfully staved off both anarchy and tyranny; its justice system targeted criminals, not citizens; and it did not imbibe the petty stupidity of multicultural ideologies or revolutionary academic theories. In this case, local speech codes meant to protect that which was substantively good were appropriate. Yet the current “hate speech” laws in the UK and Europe come at the end of decades of government misrule and intentional societal immolation. These laws are not ordered toward substantive or common goods, but toward suppressing voices speaking out against an anti-Western, global elite that is wielding the law to protect itself and legitimate its pet projects. While UK authorities gaslight citizens in calling their protests “disorder,” the real civilizational disorder comes from those authorities who have perpetuated the current crisis.

Conclusion: A Needed Counter-Revolution

Is there any hope for the English-speaking peoples, those heritage Britons and Americans who have not drunk the multicultural Kool-Aid? Many commentators seem to think there isn’t, and it’s not hard to see why. Societies, like cruise liners, cannot be turned on a dime. We cannot undo in one night the damage that was wrought in our and our parents’ lifetimes. Violent protest and mobs, or rallies that degenerate into spontaneous capitol sit-ins make for easy targets. Anarcho-tyrannies will have (and have had) a heyday with English and American citizens who bravely, yet foolishly, resist in an open and defiant manner, naively envisioning a world of constitutional rights and liberties that is long gone and unaccustomed with the iron fist of managerial oligarchies.

What is needed is a long and patient counter-revolution. This must be a revolution of hearth and home; of those things most loved and cherish; of the strength of religion that comes from immortal souls trusting in an all-wise, loving, and providential God; of visions of true beauty and happiness; of an experiential knowledge of the joy of virtue and concord with friends; of a productive relationship with the land and the animal life God has made; of a mind that possesses knowledge and loves the truth. This counter-revolution will require daring and intelligent political leadership and new statesmanship, social organization at the local and state levels, novel commercial and financial resources, independent media, and very possibly an alternative militia. But above all, it will require a steely political will to do what can and must be done if Western civilization is to survive.

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Image Credit: Unsplash

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