The tide of censorship, Orwellian word-wrangling, and prosecution for speech or peaceful behavior has been rising in the United Kingdom for years. From Scottish comedian and YouTuber Count Dankula being legally targeted in 2018 for creating a spoof of Adolf Hitler, to the British government prosecuting a retired scientist for holding a sign that offered conversation to people outside an abortion mill, to UK cops twice arresting a woman for SILENTLY PRAYING outside an abortion center, to the recent 18-month prison sentence slapped on an “unruly” protester for shouting “Who the F--- is Allah?” to the shocking Heathrow Airport arrest under Section 12 of the 2000 “Terrorism Act” of international peace advocate and reporter Richard Medhurst (whose parents both have won the Nobel Peace Prize), just a few days ago, the dyspeptic dystopia of UK censorship is growing darker and darker.
Now, police are openly bullying people who post information or opinions the state does not like, and insanity seems to be walking hand in hand with authoritarianism.
And it is getting worse.
Camilla Turner reports for The Telegraph that the tax-consuming UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has ordered “a review of Britain’s counter-extremism strategy to urgently address” what the government arbitrarily calls “extreme misogyny.”
No need to ask about whether Ms. Cooper and the Home Office might engage in “extreme misandry” when targeting what they claim is “extreme misogyny.”
In fact, to consider a tit-for-tat approach to this matter of government punishment for either kind of behavior is to embrace a fundamentally immoral error.
Instead, it is important to see that this is the furthering of the long-standing attempt to portray as violent what actually are non-violent activities – peaceful acts such as writing, publishing, speaking, offering an exchange of payment for work, denying employment to someone one doesn’t want to hire, or even looking at someone.
And this becomes clear the further one explores the news.
Turner digs deeper into the public relations spin on this new step in jack-booted UK speech-and-thought-policing, and, at first blush, one might think this is about violence:
“It will look at tackling violence against women and girls in the same way as Islamist and far-Right extremism, amid fears that current Home Office guidance is too narrow.”
Which also might inspire one to wonder why the Home Office is claiming this has something to do with “national security” and why only male-on-female “violence” is the focus, in a nation where violent crime, regardless of the gender of the target, continues to rise.
But, more to the point, it might inspire people to suspect that Ms. Connor isn’t really talking about actual violence, but, instead, is purporting non-violent, perhaps oafish or completely respectable, behavior to be “violent,” and worthy of arrest.
As Turner writes, this latter is precisely what the UK government intends to target as a “national security threat.”
“This could mean teachers will be legally required to refer pupils they suspect of extreme misogyny to Prevent, the Government’s counter-terror programme.
It comes after warnings that misogynistic influencers are radicalising teenage boys online.”
Two poisonous assumptions in one.
First, assume that boys should be claimed to be engaging in that foggy, ill-defined, term “extreme misogyny,” and, second, claim that those nefarious “influencers” drove them to it. This allows the government-indoctrination centers of school to police for “too much maleness” and to additional targeting of online opinion.
“Ms Cooper said: ‘For too long, Governments have failed to address the rise in extremism, both online and on our streets, and we’ve seen the number of young people radicalised online grow. Hateful incitement of all kinds fractures and frays the very fabric of our communities and our democracy.’”
What “radicalized” means, again, is up to the tax-fed government goons, but, likely, calling them by appropriate descriptors, such as “tax-fed government goons,” would be unacceptable to the tax-fed government goons.
Related: Understanding UK's Free Speech Crisis Amid Abortion Clinic Protests
And they, who will silence voluntary speech, they get to continue to wave the banner of so-called “democracy,” a flag that to them can mean anything, as long as it gives them comfy cover to censor and engage in greater collectivism, and which rarely is challenged and shown as the tyranny that “democratic” majority rule over others actually is. They will include everyone in the “our democracy” of collectivism, regardless of the fact that it’s all predicated on force.
Adds Turner:
“There are several extremism categories ranked by the Home Office as an area of ‘concern’, including Islamist, extreme Right-wing, animal rights, environmental and Northern Ireland related extremism.
There is also a category for ‘incel’ – an abbreviation of the term ‘involuntary celibate’ – which refers to a male subculture that includes violent feelings towards women as a result of feeling rejected. Officials now fear that this category does not capture other forms of extreme misogyny.”
Remember, only men can get feelings of rejection, and, regardless of how intense one's heavy emotions might be, someone who doesn’t actually bring harm to the body or property of another, someone who doesn’t lie and engage in defamatory conduct, that person, clearly, is a “national security danger.”
And the highly bureaucratized, mind-sanitized, Orwellian state of Britain will be charged with reporting your non-violent “extremism” of speech or even your interest in what they call a source of said “radicalisation.”
“Teachers, healthcare professionals and local authority staff are under a legal duty to make a referral to the Prevent scheme if they believe someone is susceptible to becoming radicalised.”
How many UK residents will recognize that it is the government that engages in threats?
That remains to be seen. But it was just this kind of nanny-statism and speech-control that, more than a century ago, British writer John Stuart Mill found to be a looming threat to freedom. Published in 1859, his “On Liberty” remains a classic defense of free speech and the need to exchange differences of opinion, to discover, and to individually discern truth in a marketplace of ideas.
Ms. Connor and her “team” plan to present at the start of 2025 their recommendations for inclusion of their “misogyny” policing into the new UK “countering extremism strategy,” so there still is time for them to read Mill’s classic essay.
Given the fact that they already have attacked free speech so much, the prospect of them reading and learning from Mill is unlikely.
More likely: his work will be frowned upon as archaic, male-centered, and dangerous.