Leftist ‘leaders’ hate free speech

OPINION:

Throughout the modern era, left-wing political actors and politicians have consistently wrapped themselves in the cause of democracy and loudly marched under the banner of human rights.

Unfortunately, despite the historical association between liberalism and liberty, freedom of speech is not the exclusive province of any so-called progressive society.

Over the course of the past decade, virtually every left-wing “leader” and regime has viciously attacked and oppressed the right to free speech.

This right was brutally suppressed in Britain by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s hyper-left-wing government. Throughout the Starmer era, the British government leveraged warped interpretations of vague laws that criminalized “annoyance, inconvenience, [and] anxiety” that in 2023 alone accounted for the arrests of more than 12,000 Britons, many under questionable circumstances.

In fact, about 30 people are arrested every day in Britain for “petty offenses,” such as “retweets and cartoons.” Free speech is now at its lowest point in England since the 18th century, said Toby Young, founder and president of the Free Speech Union.

Even the U.S. State Department itself has condemned Britain’s “censorship” and said that “the U.K.’s persecution of silent prayer represents not only an egregious violation of the fundamental right to free speech and religious liberty, but also a concerning departure from the shared values that ought to underpin U.S.-U.K. relations.”

The right to free speech has also become critically endangered in South Korea as a consequence of the nation’s left-wing government and neo-socialist president.

President Lee Jae-myung has ordered crackdowns on anti-Chinese rallies and on any political discourse overly critical of China or communism. Mr. Lee has rebranded conservative discourse as hate speech and a crime in South Korea. His regime has steadily pursued an array of penalties aimed at quashing any political discourse that strays into territory the government labels as dissent.

In fact, the Lee government recently introduced new amendments and legislation with unclear, arbitrary provisions, such as the revised Information and Communications Network Act. In this measure, the regime allocated itself what critics say is the power to stem the outflow of unbiased information and indefinitely silence the people and the press.

It is happening in North America too.

In Canada, conservative media outlets are routinely censored, and Christians are frequently forced to exclude their beliefs from public discourse. Data indicates that about 50% of all Canadian university students have now been forced to conceal their true beliefs to avoid poor treatment.

In the past decade, Canadian citizens have consistently been silenced and precluded from publicly espousing ideology that exceeds the confines of the Liberal Party’s dogma. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government recently gave itself the power to imprison for life any Canadian found guilty of hazily defined hate crimes with easily manipulable parameters.

Worse still, the Carney regime has already demonstrated that it will violate the right to free expression with impunity. A newly surfaced 35-page government paper shows that Ottawa now contemplates taking legal action against any Canadians who disagree with the Liberal rendition of truth on social media.

Diverse political thought and free expression have become offensive to the left writ large and are now nearly universally verboten within every liberal nation.

Perhaps most important, although left-wing political actors and politicians have consistently attempted to associate conservatives with fascism and human rights violations, it is readily apparent that an attack on the right to free speech is the quintessential hallmark of any “progressive” society.

• William Barclay is an award-winning political theorist and policy expert, as well as one of Canada’s leading conservative voices. Follow him on X at @WillBarclayPCBG.