A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable

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Witness the rise and rise of Safe Spaces on university campuses, designed to ensure students’ psychic security against the terrible threat of their hearing an idea they disagree with. The European Parliament has no jurisdiction over the appointment of the European Council’s presidency. One in which the powers-that-be punish not only the expression of certain beliefs and ideas, but also the expression of fact itself.

Free thought at stake in the New Inquisition as gender

There will have been few apologies from Lilburne for causing offence, few denials that words can indeed hurt, especially his words. The plot against the Hungarian presidency is ultimately an attempt to prevent the Hungarian government from having a platform to promote its own values, such as its attachment to national sovereignty and to tradition. But in the great disinformation panic of our time, sparked by the populist revolts of 2016 and sent into hyperdrive by the paranoia of the pandemic, the word has come to mean something very different among our elites.Ideas that people felt they could not live without, whose destruction they felt would propel them into sorrow and chaos, have been wiped out by free speech. The delusions of the elites carry more weight than truth itself – that is how arrogant the new authoritarianism has become; how determined our rulers are to remake reality in the image of their own fevered opinion. This post-truth elite insists that we doubt the evidence of our own eyes, and the light of our own reason, and instead accept its truth as the truth. Then, in 2018, he sued three newspapers after they claimed he was complicit in acts of murder and war crimes in Afghanistan.

All great truths begin as blasphemies - spiked

We need to stop countering the new censors by accusing them of exaggerating the power and the potency of words. We saw something similar in a Big Brother Watch report published earlier this year, which found that tabs were kept on David Davis MP because he opposed vaccine passports on civil-liberties grounds. Tyndale’s Bibles were smuggled on ships to England, hidden in cargos of grain and among other merchandise, ready to be spirited among the people by his sympathisers. It was surely for the Australian public to decide among themselves and for themselves whether the papers had substantiated their extraordinary claims about Roberts-Smith.They’ve been described by one legal expert as the ‘most media-hostile laws in the common-law world’. This isn’t about rescuing the truth from social-media derangement – it’s about a deranged, blundering establishment trying to take back control. We need to stop reacting to their branding of speech as a weapon, as a tool of ambush and degradation, by effectively draining speech of its power and saying: ‘It’s only speech. Through the extravagant folly of suing the press for defamation, the war hero has outed himself as a probable war criminal.

The EU plot to humiliate Hungary - spiked

The idea of representative democracy spread through England like a fire in the 1640s, largely thanks to the ‘blizzard of gloriously intemperate pamphlets from the pen of John Lilburne’. That is what freedom means, is it not – the right of the populace to use our moral muscles to sort truth from falsehood, right from wrong? Prior to the English Civil War, Lilburne, then young and not well-known, had shown himself as willing as Tyndale had been a century earlier to suffer for his beliefs.They discussed the tyranny of conformism, the derangement of the new elites, and how ordinary people can push back. A new blockbuster investigation by the Telegraph and civil-liberties group Big Brother Watch details the shady activities of the Counter-Disinformation Unit (CDU), which is still operating and was set up by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and the now-closed Rapid Response Unit (RRU), which was run out of the Cabinet Office.

EVENT: Brendan O’Neill’s book launch - spiked

No, the slaughter of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo offices in January 2015 was not officially sanctioned, as was Tyndale’s strangulation and Lilburne’s public torture. The people are not ignorant – they know very well how to judge the truth and meaning of media claims.The European Parliament has long been committed to cutting Hungary and its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, down to size. We at spiked are so excited for the upcoming release of Brendan O’Neill’s new book, A Heretic’s Manifesto. There is only one way to know if we are right about something, said Mill, and that is by submitting our beliefs to the severe test of public opinion and public dissent. Where you are in your thinking is very much needing a lot of enlightenment and reading’, said a British police officer last year to a woman whose speechcrime was to put stickers on her front door questioning the idea that transwomen are women.