Stop complaining and start fighting the online mob

Britain’s Free Speech Union is GetUp for normal people who find themselves hunted by the PC mob.

The Free Speech Union is a response to what Toby Young calls the witch-hunt generals.

The British Army has a special mine-clearing device it once called the Giant Viper. When launched, the trailer-mounted rocket unleashe­s a trail of explosives from behind, blasting hidden mines over an impressive radius so that trucks and tanks can travel safely through the detonated minefield.

In the introduction to his latest brilliant book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, Douglas Murray said his aim in writing was to build something similar, a Giant Viper to detonate the minefield of identity politics, making it safer for us to navigate this explosive cultural terrain.

This week a new, more powerful weapon was added to the arsenal to combat cancel culture, no-platforming, social media mobs and the prowling offence-hunters who will ferret through someone’s background to get them sacked.

On Wednesday night in London­, British journalist and education reformer Toby Young launched the Free Speech Union. This is not a gabfest for those frustrated with the fact that free speech has so quickly gone to the dogs in the country that gave us John Stuart Mill. This is GetUp for normal people, regardless of your political leanings, big profile, no profile, anyone who might get hunted by the mob or anyone who wants to help other people who are hunted down by what Young calls the witch-hunter generals.

Where Murray helps us understand the complicated, contradictory and downright dangerous substructures of identity politics, Young’s FSU provides a plan of ­action for people who are tired of getting angry with our stifled culture­ and our waning freedoms. The FSU is how those who are committed to free speech get even.

These are perilous times, after all, for those who ask questions or do not toe the full caboodle of ­orthodoxy on a range of issues, but especially about homosexuality, women, race and, more recently, transgender issues. But it is no longer enough to get worked up when a disabled grandfather is fired for circulating a clip by comedian­ Billy Connolly ridicul­ing suicide bombers. Connolly poked fun at Catholics without so much as a raised eyebrow.

It is not enough to worry when police call on an ex-policeman for posting a silly verse about transgender people on Twitter. The ­officer who questioned the man said he was there “to check your thinking”. The man was guilty of committing a non-crime hate incid­ent. One of 87,000 non-crime hate incidents recorded across ­England and Wales in the past five years, according to Young, which means police in Britain are investig­ating, on average, 47 non-crime hate incidents a day.

We need more than outrage when Jordan Peterson’s invitation to give a series of lectures at Cambridg­e University is rescinded ­because he had a photo taken with a man wearing a T-shirt that said: “Proud to be an Islamophobe.”

Toby Young.

Israel Folau. Picture: David Geraghty

As Young says on the YouTube clip launching FSU this week, all these things and more happened in Britain last year. And not just political views will land you in a minefield, he adds during his powerful call to arms.

Young mentions Ann Francke, chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute, who said last month that companies should stop workers talking about football at work because it can be a “gateway to more laddish behaviour … ­including boasting about conquests over the weekend”.

Speaking to Inquirer on the eve of launching the FSU, Young says it is time to fight back, and he points to the FSU attracting ­upwards of 2000 members within days, with a rate of a new member every five minutes. Trevor Phillips, former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, spoke at the launch, and guests ­included MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, historian Andrew Roberts, columnist Dominic Lawson and novelist Lionel Shriver.

“If we can save people from the mob, if we can stop some people from being cancelled, if we can send a message to the witch-finder generals that we are not going to stand for their nonsense any more, that would be a huge victory,” Young says.

Young brings a fine pedigree to this mission. He was at the centre of a witch-hunt two years ago after he was appointed by then British prime minister Theresa May to the board of a new higher-education regulator.

The diversity police were not impressed that this position was filled by a white, Anglo-Saxon, ­heterosexual male who has helped set up four free schools in Britain, worked for several education charities and been a journalist for more than 30 years.

It wasn’t long before one of the “offence archaeologists” — as Young dubs them — trawled through his stash of writings and struck offence culture gold.

Young had written an article for The Spectator in 2001 praising a new TV show called Men and Motors. It featured topless girls draped over fast cars. The sub-­editor, a friend of Young’s, had fun with the headline: “Confessions of a Porn Addict.”

“I thought it was funny too,” says Young. “Until it came back to bite me in the bum 17 years later … (when) … an online metal detectorist found it in The Spectator’s digital archive, stuck a screen grab on Twitter and within minutes London’s main evening paper turned it into a news story — the headline ran: New Pressure on Theresa May to sack ‘porn addict’ Toby Young.”

I was in London when the mob came for Young. It was a form of deranged hysteria. The puritans were thrilled to find other silly things that Young says he posted on social media, usually late at night after several glasses of wine. A week after his appointment, Young’s role had been debated in parliament and an online petition of more than 220,000 people called for his removal.

“I resigned from the board of the regulator and apologised for my sophomoric scribblings, imagin­ing that would draw a line under the affair,” Young says.

But the witch-hunter generals were not done yet.

“I had to stand down from the board of the free school chain I had helped set up, resign as a Fulbrigh­t commissioner, abandon my fellowship at Buckingham University and give up my full-time job as the head of an education­ charity. Almost overnight, I lost five positions, publicly shamed, cast out, cancelled by a digital outrage mob.”

The FSU should resonate across the Anglosphere, where a particular strain of Protestant puritanism seems to encourage a modern-day mob of secular purit­ans to sack dissenters, or at the very least cancel them, rather than debate them.

On a university campus, on a rugby field, it makes no difference to the roving mob. Professor Peter Ridd was forced out of James Cook University for challenging the quality of Great Barrier Reef research. Where were the campus supporters of intellectual diversity?

Rugby champion Israel Folau had his career cancelled because he expressed his Christian views about homosexuality. This week, we learned that Folau’s Christian teammates, Sekope Kepu and Samu Kerevi, felt gagged by Rugby Australia’s management.

Young knows how lonely it is to be hunted by the offence mob. Speaking to Inquirer, he says that “people who are cancelled will tell you that the worst part of it is when your friends and colleagues run for cover rather than stand ­beside you”.

“The reason people are cancelled­ is because, for the most part, no one is brave enough to stand up for them,” he says.

And that is why he has established the FSU.

“If someone writes to your boss to complain about something you’ve said, we’ll write to them too, and remind them of the importance of intellectual tolerance and viewpoint diversity. If a bunch of self-righteous bullies pick on you, we’ll pick on them. If someone launches an ­online petition calling for you to be sacked, we’ll launch a counter petition.”

The FSU will also offer legal ­advice to those who take up full membership, which will cost you 50 quid. “If we think you’ve got good grounds for a lawsuit,” Young says on the website, “we’ll help you fight it”.

For the FSU to build credibility, it will need to make clear this is not about agreeing with people with vile views who the mob will also hunt down, but allowing them to make their case, to defend their views. If their views are trumped by better ones, so be it. That is the beauty and power of free speech.

But Young says that trial by media is killing that process. “The problem with trial by media is that you are presumed guilty and you are not given a chance to make the case for your own defence. You are just tossed to the wolves,” Young tells Inquirer.

“It is mob justice. it is a witch-hunt where even denying you’re guilty is interpreted as evidence of guilt. And saying sorry makes no difference either. It’s like throwing a hunk of raw meat to a shoal of ­piranha fish.”

And scalp-hunters will come for anyone who is curious enough to ask questions, who might stray from the orthodoxy, or even tells a lousy joke. A man who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Tim Hunt, had his career­ terminated after he told a lousy joke about women in science at a conference in Seoul. Feminist Germaine Greer has been cancelled for questioning the trans agenda. Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell was no-platformed by a group of students at Canterbury Christchurch university because­ he signed a letter to a newspaper opposing the policy of no-platforming

“If only we can persuade people to have a little more courage in the face of these mobs,” Young tells me, “that would quickly rob them of their power.

“But the fact is, ­because they hunt in packs and are very good at picking people off, and because the consequences of being cancelled are so catastrophic, people are running scared. If the defenders of free speech are going to defeat these ravenous hordes, they need to band together, circle the wagon and start fighting back.”

Whatever will be next in these mad times? A free speech union in Australia? Why the heck not.