The Global War on Free Speech

You could soon find yourself in jail for life because of something you said. You could be placed under house arrest and blocked from going online because of something the government fears you might say in the future. You could find yourself denounced to authorities by a “friend,” who would collect a bonus from the government for turning you in. And you could find the police on your doorstep because of a statement you made in the privacy of your own home.

Laws that would do this, and more, are under consideration in countries with long histories of freedom, democracy and rule of law.

Perhaps most startling of all, American states have already passed some of these restrictions—despite the First Amendment and the world’s most robust protection of free speech.

Will the First Amendment Save You?

If you live in Washington State, you are already a governor’s signature away from having neighbors paid to snitch on you. The state House and Senate passed a bill in March that will create a hotline where callers can receive up to $2,000 by reporting “hate speech.”

The law empowers the government to “provide compensation … to persons targeted or affected by hate crimes and bias incidents.” A “bias incident” includes speech where “criminal investigation or prosecution is impossible or inappropriate.” So you could make a perfectly legal comment but still be reported for a bounty. Is Washington trying to set up its own Stasi?

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has announced plans to expand her state’s hate crime laws. She also has set up a phone number and a website to report hate crimes and “bias incidents.” Michigan’s House has passed Bill 4474, which would make it a felony to cause someone to “feel terrorized, frightened or threatened.” “Misgender” someone, and if he says he feels threatened, you could face five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

In Massachusetts, six eighth graders have been accused of making “hateful and racist comments” in a group chat, including a mock slave auction. If that is accurate, clearly these kids need some punishment from their parents and perhaps the school. But they are facing criminal charges.

Policing Private Conversations

If you live in the United Kingdom, you already have to watch what you say online—even in private group chats. A former police officer was jailed for 20 weeks over a joke he told in a private WhatsApp post. A man who filmed his dog giving Nazi salutes was fined £800 (us$1,000) because he posted it online. Police have investigated journalists for refusing to use someone’s preferred pronouns.

If you’re in Scotland, you really need to watch out. Starting April 1, a comment made in the privacy of your own home could land you in jail. The Hate Crime and Public Order Act has officers and prosecutors policing “hatred” against people of certain ages, disabilities, religions, and those who are transgender or homosexual. Government advertisements are prompting people to report each other to police or at convenient and discreet “third-party reporting centers” located in a salmon wholesaler, a caravan park, a mushroom farm or a sex shop. If you misgender someone or insist that marriage can only be between a man and woman, the Scottish government wants to hear about it.

If you’re in Ireland, you could soon be subject to a new bill, well on its way to becoming law, that criminalizes the possession of “hate speech.” You can go to jail for something you say—or even something you receive. If the Trumpet magazine or Trumpet Brief e-mail is deemed hateful by a bureaucrat in Dublin, you could be living in a prison cell for five years.

Pre-Crime

In one bill, Canada is legislating against retroactive crimes, future crimes and thought crimes. Its C-63 Online Harms Bill would enact a life sentence for “incitement to genocide.” According to activists, “misgendering” is violence, and refusing to allow transgender people into the bathroom of their choice is genocide because you are trying to erase all trans people. Will Canada adopt this definition?

If a judge finds that you expressed “detestation or vilification” of a protected group, you could lose up to $40,000 and go to jail for five years.

If the government thinks you might commit a hate crime in the future, it can put you under house arrest for a year and block your communication—including the Internet. Access the Internet anyway, and you could go to jail.

This bill also applies retroactively. Someone you annoyed might be trawling through your social media posts for something that could send you to jail and force you to pay him $20,000 to compensate for the “hate” you subjected him to.

Overseeing all this activity is the Digital Safety Commission, which can block any content, hold secret hearings, and has no oversight. Unlike police, it can investigate and punish you without a court warrant. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association says this board has the power to “interpret the law, make up new rules, enforce them, and then serve as judge, jury and executioner.”

Politicians are justifying this bill as a way for government officials to catch and punish online child abusers and child pornographers, but these same powers can clearly grant other government officials the power to target their political opponents and everyday people.

It makes you wonder what current Canadian leaders are planning. These same powers could be used against liberals when conservatives win a future election. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has famously dressed in blackface and could himself be convicted for some of the things he has said or done in the past under these nebulous definitions and unaccountable enforcement bodies. Do the leftists who currently control the legislature and judiciary believe they will never have to give up that control?

Of all the bills, Canada’s is furthest from becoming law and could be substantially amended. But Canada’s left has spent years pushing in this direction. If it can’t go all the way this time, expect it to try again later.

Policing Thought Patterns

These English-speaking countries have long traditions of free speech. In Europe, that tradition is much shorter, and policing and prosecution of words and thoughts is already much more forceful. In February, the European Union’s Digital Services Act went into force, obliging social media giants to delete anything the EU deems “disinformation.”

To counter the rise of the “far right,” governments are getting much more involved in policing speech. Last month, a 16-year-old German girl was pulled out of chemistry class by three police officers because she shared a TikTok video of Smurf cartoon characters supporting the Alternative für Deutschland. Some AfD members are outright neo-Nazis, but this draconian crackdown on speech by those currently in office could be even more dangerous.

“We should treat right-wing extremist networks like organized crime groups,” German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said in the Bundestag in February at a parliamentary debate. “Those who mock the state must have to deal with a strong state ….” She wants the government to go after the bank accounts of “right-wing extremists” with a high “potential for action and social influence.” Some of these “right-wing extremists” are genuinely dangerous; others simply want less migration and fewer climate-change restrictions. But the German government will be determining where to draw the line and when to shut you down.

At the same parliamentary debate, Thomas Haldenwang, head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, said the government must not allow right-wing “thought and speech patterns to become part of our language.”

At another event, Family Minister Lisa Paus targeted people who express “hate” on the Internet that “falls below the threshold of criminal liability.” People “know exactly what is protected by freedom of expression” and therefore express thoughts that are, for now, still legal. Paus said they must be stopped.

When even the anti-Nazis in Germany are debating the regulation of “thought and speech” patterns, you know it could be just a matter of time before your life—and your nation—changes dramatically.

A Global Force

Why are so many governments oppressing free speech so drastically at the same time?

In many of these countries, this is an attack on objective truth. Say that a man in a dress is still a man, that mass immigration has downsides, or that homosexual “marriage” hurts children and society, and someone in power who labels these demonstrably true facts as “hate” can shut you down. A government that silences such statements is at war with reality.

These pending and active laws—especially statutes policing what you might say in the future—exert powerful forces not only on your speech but also on your thoughts. They drastically reduce the amount of knowledge that ever reaches you to inform your opinion. They affect what you do and think in your own home. And when reality conflicts with the views of those controlling the government, these laws enforce conformity.

Around the world, government coercion is roaring back in a huge way.

For as long as men have exerted governance over each other, the powerful have had the impulse to shape reality according to their will. The 1650–1500 b.c. Hittite law code—one of the oldest—states: “If anyone rejects a judgment of the king, his house will become a heap of ruins.” In the ancient world, freedom of religion, and largely therewith freedom of speech and thought, was very rare. Very few ancient laws explicitly forbid free speech because there was no such concept. There was no rule of law either. If a ruler disliked what someone said, he simply ordered men, usually armed, to ruin him financially, destroy his property, or execute him.

Powerful men have policed free speech across civilizations, continents and generations. China’s first ruler to use the title “emperor,” Qin Shi Huang, implemented what might be the world’s first recorded book burning in 213 b.c.: Confucian literature and historical records made prior to his reign were destroyed. A subsequent history that survives to our day, by Sima Qian, states that his regime buried 460 scholars accused of owning forbidden documents.

Free speech occasionally pops up in history as a tool for the underdog, a plea from the powerless. When they took over, sometimes they instituted it, but more often it went out the window. Perhaps the closest the ancient world came to free speech was Greece. Athens threw off its tyrants and established a democracy where citizens (freeborn men whose parents were both born in the city) could speak freely. But there was no “human right” to free speech—voters could punish the speaker with exile or death.

Free speech is almost inextricable from freedom of religion. For most of the last 2,000 years in Europe, church and state worked together to police speech and thought. The Bible was kept out of the common language of ordinary people by force of law, preventing disagreement with Vatican-dictated applications of Scripture. The Council of Nicaea officially established the trinity as a core doctrine of the Roman church. Immediately afterward, Roman authorities began burning anti-trinitarian books. In the 13th century, the Catholic Church encouraged the Albigensian Crusade. Authorities burned any Albigensian books they could find. Soon, they went after Albigensians themselves, putting up to a million of them to death.

Protestants initially held similar views on dealing with heretics. Martin Luther presided over a book burning and wanted preachers he disagreed with to be banned by the state.

Of course, this approach to censorship is not unique to Christianity. Muslim armies in India burned Buddhist texts and Buddhists monks in the 12th and 13th centuries.

The free speech the West has enjoyed and benefited from the last 200 years is precious and rare. And humanity is losing it, sinking back into the misery and ignorance that ensues when those in power control the reading, speaking and thinking of the masses.

Why Do Men Seek to Control Others?

This urge to dominate the actions, words and very thoughts of others—and to dominate reality itself—is a perverse expression of human nature. The human mind is actively hostile toward the laws of nature and nature’s Creator, and has been since the very first choices of the very first human generation (see Genesis 2 and Romans 8:7).

The Bible traces this nature in man back to a real, actual, intelligent, powerful single source: Lucifer. This great being said, “I will be the most high” (the correct rendering of Isaiah 14:14). He exalted his will over reality to the point of fighting his very Creator to try to seize the ultimate authority in the universe.

The first human beings, and every human since, have followed after this same desire.

This inbuilt desire to dominate the communication, music, relationships, religion and minds of others has a clear source. Restraining it is only possible with the Creator’s intervention in human history. Read the laws received by the nation of Israel in the 15th century b.c. and see how powerfully they differ from the chiefdoms, warlordships, tribalisms of the rest of the world and the rest of human history.

At the start of the modern era, America’s Founding Fathers recognized this self-evident but long-smothered truth: Not only the chiefs and kings and warlords but all men have rights that are self-evident and unalienable. Why? Because and only because these are endowed by their Creator. Their belief in free speech traces directly from this ancient book—the Bible. Therefore, they reasoned, human governments are just only insomuch as they secure these rights to safety and happiness.

States passed their own religious freedom laws, like Virginia, which condemned the “impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others.” This entire constitutional civil foundation came from the Bible. And to preserve these fragile freedoms, they proclaimed “firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.”

This precious and rare (though incomplete) understanding of the laws of nature’s Creator enabled traditions and institutions of comparative freedom to spring up in both Britain and America. These were additionally accompanied and protected by “accidents” of geography providing good land, seas and oceans from those that would stamp them out.

The worldwide plunge into censorship, then, is a reversion into what has been powerfully and crushingly normal throughout human history. It is a withdrawal of the unappreciated blessings God has given to the world, largely through British and American influence.

This freedom has enabled a great deal of Bible teaching to go out to the world. But the British and the Americans have also led the world in abusing this freedom. With the government unable and unwilling to restrain morals—and rejecting personal, familial and religious restraint—these peoples have used free speech to excuse the most depraved pornography, music and entertainment that have flooded the minds of millions.

In a society run directly by an all-powerful and all-knowing God, free speech would not be an issue. No truth would ever be suppressed. But run by men, protection against the inherent urge to dominate others and impose their own flawed ideas is essential.

For two centuries Britain and America brought that protection to much of the world. That time is now over. As we explain in our free book America Under Attack, we can expect God to intervene to preserve that freedom for just a little while longer, and then this window will close, for now.

But this subject also points to a great hope of freedom for all mankind. Why would God intervene in world history like this? Why open a window of time where free speech is available in much of the world? It points to the fact that God, though unknown to most of mankind, is working out a plan. And He wants you to know that plan—changing world history to allow the truth of that plan to go out.