20 Jan 2026 | Americas, Europe and Central Asia, Features, United Kingdom, United States, Volume 54.04 Winter 2025
This article that first appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Index on Censorship, Gen Z is revolting: Why the world’s youth will not be silenced, published on 18 December 2025
Within weeks of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, his vice-president JD Vance flew across the Atlantic to lecture European leaders about “free speech”. Yet within days of this, students were being taken off the streets by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) patrols and deported because they had been protesting about Gaza; foreign nationals who had criticised Trump on social media were denied entry to the USA; federal websites containing materials relating to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) issues or climate change were being taken down; universities were being defunded and faculty sacked for teaching courses and conducting research deemed to be “woke” and/or – ironically – for allowing antisemitic speech to be expressed on their campuses.
After the assassination of Charlie Kirk – posthumously sanctified – in September 2025, many public officials, including FBI agents, schoolteachers, academics and others deemed to be insufficiently reverential in their remarks about him were fired. Famously, the late-night chat show host Jimmy Kimmel was “cancelled” by Disney simply for expressing a dissenting view about Kirk’s secular beatification. (Disney reinstated the programme after a public outcry.) The VP, having seemingly forgotten his European lecture tour, encouraged US citizens to engage in the mass “doxing” of anyone who didn’t quite see eye-to-eye with Kirk.
In the UK, the political right also claims regularly that free speech is under threat from an overbearing state, policing speech on behalf of a “woke” elite keen to suppress the “common sense” and “legitimate concerns” of “the people”. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage even raised the parlous state of “free speech” in the UK at a US congressional hearing, citing the cases of Lucy Connolly [who had called for people to set fire to migrant hotels after the Southport murders] and Graham Linehan [who regularly posts content about his views on trans people]. Right-wing activist Tommy Robinson jumped on the bandwagon too, proclaiming that September’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally was about defending “free speech”.
Robinson has erroneously claimed that more people are arrested in the UK for offences relating to online comment than anywhere in the world. Neither Robinson nor Farage, though, have said a word about the proscription of Palestine Action in June 2025, and the arrest of more than 2000 people protesting this. And while Farage claims that Connolly’s incendiary tweet – “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care … if that makes me a racist, so be it” (one hotel was, in fact, torched) – should be treated as protected speech, he has himself testified in court on behalf of a prosecution against threatening social media posts directed at him. Meanwhile, Reform UK in power has itself shown little tolerance for a free press, with local councillors denying access to media outlets critical of the party’s actions.
I could go on and on. The ocean of hypocrisies swirling around the issue of “free speech” is vast and is growing. Such hypocrisy must be called out, of course. But there is a bigger story here. This story begins in the early 1980s, when US conservatives first began to weaponise “free speech”, part of a deliberate political strategy to re-establish the social and political hierarchies that had been rocked by the civil rights and second-wave feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Among their many achievements, these movements understood that the languages of racism and sexism were as responsible for the reproduction of racist and sexist social hierarchies as the everyday practices of racial discrimination and patriarchal subordination. The two, in fact, mutually reinforced one another. There was, thus, a concerted struggle to challenge, contest, overturn and overwrite racist and sexist representations circulating through culture and the media. This was accompanied by the insistence that such forms of representation be considered unacceptable. This was a necessary first step toward dismantling the hierarchies and barriers preventing racialised minorities and women from participating in public life on equal terms, and from entering the social and institutional spaces that they had traditionally been excluded from.
Universities were among the first institutions to recognise that certain forms of language and representation needed to be excised if people historically excluded from these institutions were to take up the opportunities that they offered. Many universities developed campus speech codes, prohibiting the use of racist or sexist language in order to create a safe and welcoming environment for all. Outside academe, many other workplaces and institutions followed suit from the 1980s.
At the same time, a new understanding of “free speech” emerged through the course of the 20th century, first in the USA and then among the other liberal democracies of the developed world (albeit slowly, and with local inflections). This was driven largely by First Amendment jurisprudence and decisions of the US Supreme Court from the 1920s onwards. This understanding of “free speech”, drawing largely on the arguments of John Stuart Mill, held that “speech” should be as unrestricted as possible. This, the argument goes, gives all ideas the opportunity to be freely exchanged within a “marketplace of ideas”, which can sift what is valuable and true from that which is worthless and false. The obvious parallel here is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, guiding real markets towards a price that represents a product’s “true” value.
No idea or form of speech should therefore be ruled out until it has been given a hearing within the marketplace of ideas. In fact, Mill went much further than that; he suggested that no idea should ever be ruled out, because even if thought to be false in the present, it may yet turn out to be true at a later time, when more is known about it. (Mill’s 19th century liberal faith in progress is clearly evident here.) So, “free speech” involves an insistence on what might be called “infinite and perpetual openness”.
This increasingly capacious understanding of “protected” or “free” speech created something of an opening for US conservatives pushing back against the egalitarian movements struggling for social justice in 1980s USA. The First Amendment could be used to argue that campus speech codes were unconstitutional – creating a space for the re-insertion of racist or sexist speech, even if the Fifteenth Amendment prevented the overt and explicit reintroduction of the discriminatory practices associated with them.
These were the first skirmishes in what we call today the culture wars. It marked the beginnings of a potent political strategy whereby “free speech” has been increasingly weaponised to deliver one principal aim: the rehabilitation of racism (and misogyny, homophobia and other inegalitarian ideologies) and its normalisation within mainstream political discourse.
Within this overall strategic aim, there are three interconnecting and mutually reinforcing objectives. The first is to ensure that racist tropes, images, motifs, ideas and beliefs are allowed to circulate as freely as possible within the channels of public discourse. “Free speech” is a very useful lever with which to prise open the gates of acceptable public discourse and thereby poison the well. The idea of infinite and perpetual openness means that no idea should ever be excluded, so racist and other inegalitarian discourses have as much right as any other discourse to be part of the marketplace of ideas. We then have to tolerate them and accept their presence – even if this results in the creation of a hostile environment for racialised minorities, women, LGBTQ+ and other vulnerable groups of people. This is the price we have to pay for “free speech”.
The second objective is to suggest, tacitly, that racism and anti-racism are politically and morally equivalent in value. Again, the way we understand “free speech” now is a highly effective tool for establishing this objective. In theory, the marketplace of ideas is a neutral space within which all ideas and beliefs jostle for acceptance on equal terms. In practice, of course, this is not the case. But this hasn’t prevented the idea that it is indeed a neutral space from establishing itself in the social and political imagination. And while racism has, in the words of Hannah Arendt, been subjected to “libraries of refutation,” its continued resurgence suggests that, within the terms of liberal free speech theory, it has not, in fact, been definitively discredited. This reveals more about the inadequacies and limitations of the concept of “free speech” than it does about racism; nevertheless, it is the case that, according to the marketplace of ideas model, racism must be treated as equivalent in value to anti-racism until proven otherwise.
Taken together, these two objectives have been very effective in achieving the strategic aim of the normalisation of racism. Recent academic research corroborates what we can all see happening to political discourse across the liberal democracies in the West. Once the sluice gates are opened, once the well has been poisoned, tropes, images, ideas and beliefs once confined to a far-right niche enter the political mainstream. Mainstream political parties have been drawn into aiding and abetting their normalisation, in turn amplifying these ideas and elevating their significance.
It is not surprising that so many “free speech” controversies involve race, nor that the political right only succeeded in effectively leveraging “free speech” for their own ends after the internet and social media removed some of the old gatekeepers that might have protected public discourse from being poisoned. The “democratisation” of discourse that social media offers closely approximates the marketplace of ideas model of “free speech”. But while this may have provided a useful condition of possibility for the strategy to be ramped up, it is clear that racism, homo- and transphobia, and misogyny are fertile grounds on which to build this strategy, because they tap into wider anxieties shared by more mainstream right-wing and even centre-left parties about racial, sexual and gender equality. This has more to do with the effective political mobilisation of emotions than with ideas, “truth” and reason; an ironic situation has emerged, wherein which the very things upon which our contemporary faith in “free speech” rests have been displaced by the things that this rationalist model of “free speech” was supposed to overcome – prejudice, anxiety, anger and fear.
It is no coincidence that alongside the weaponisation of “free speech”, the rhetorics of contemporary racism have decisively shifted away from (pseudo) “rational” arguments in favour of racism. These arguments have pivoted, instead, towards the mobilisation and manipulation of emotional responses through rhetorical repertoires that rely heavily on the use of euphemism, connotation and codes camouflaging the underlying racism. When racism operates as an evanescent, highly mobile and constantly mutating army of metaphors, symbols, images and fragments of beliefs and prejudices, it is no wonder that a conceptualisation of “free speech” grounded on “truth” and reason cannot be used to expose its fallacies. Liberals have duped themselves into believing that it could; the right, however, saw through this delusion and capitalised on it.
The third objective is to discredit anti-racism, feminism and other egalitarian movements, by casting them as totalitarian censors intent on policing language and eroding “free speech”. Anti-racist thinkers have long argued that it is racism that constructs the racial categories through which a racially hierarchical society is produced. This in turn creates the conditions of possibility for racist practices to take hold, which then reinforce racial categories in a vicious dialectical feedback loop. Racist “speech” is, therefore, not a by-product of a racist society rooted in human differences that “objectively” and naturally existed prior to their construction as differences; it is, rather, essential and central to the way racism works.
This means, however, that racist speech must be restricted, which is anathema to a society that insists on “free speech” as “infinite and perpetual openness”. It is therefore easy to turn this idea of “free speech” back onto anti-racist movements by characterising them as intolerant and anti-freedom – even though anti-racism and other egalitarian movements seek the realisation of freedoms that are precluded by inequality. By characterising these movements as a threat to “freedom”, they can be discredited without explicitly having to argue in favour of inequality – itself part of the euphemistic and evasive ways in which racism works today.
The term “woke” is a good example. Initially used by African-American communities in the mid-20th century, and then by the progressive left in the 2010s, in the hands of the right it has become an empty signifier; it can be made to mean anything precisely because it refers to no one thing in particular. The “woke” mob or “mind virus” or whatever you want to call it is a way of discrediting social justice and the concept of equality through assertion and insinuation, rather than through argument. If the right were to actually argue the case against social justice and equality, they would have to let the cat out of the bag and expose the underlying racist and inegalitarian rationale.
It is time to call out the right’s “free speech” charade and see it for what it is: a weapon that can be wielded against socially subordinated groups so that they can be put back in their place. The aim is the reconstitution of a hierarchical (that is, racist, sexist, homophobic etc.) social and political order, an order within which “freedom” is restored and restricted to those from whom it has been partially wrestled away. Hence the hypocrisies: free speech for me, but not for thee.
3 Dec 2025 | Belgium, Europe and Central Asia, European Union, Hungary, News, United Kingdom
The conference, the Battle for the Soul of Europe, opens in the Belgian capital on Wednesday (3 December). Below is an interview with Frank Furedi, director of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Brussels, which has organised the event.
Furedi, one time professor of sociology at the University of Kent (and still an emeritus professor), has lined up a list of mostly conservative and right-wing figures to speak. A central theme of the conference is free speech, including one panel entitled Against the language police: Why we must reclaim speech.
Speakers include British journalist Melanie Phillips and political scientist Matt Goodwin; US author Patrick Deneen and right-wing figures in Europe including Giorgia Meloni ally, Francesco Giubilei, and the French right-wing feminist Alice Cordier.
The MCC is a Hungarian think-tank and educational institute based in Budapest (with a Brussels outpost run by Furedi). Its board chairman is Balázs Orbán, who is also the political director for Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán (no relative).
We talked to Furedi about free speech, his relationship with the leader of Europe’s biggest “illiberal democracy”, Viktor Orbán, and being funded by MOL, Hungary’s largest oil company through which Hungary imports its oil from Russia with an EU exemption.
Index: How would you define your politics?
Furedi: I cannot put a clear label on it. I think in many ways, political labels at the moment are fairly confusing, given the shift that has occurred. I would say that when it comes to certain issues to do with history, tradition, families, I would call myself fairly on the conservative side. When it comes to individual matters to do with free speech, tolerance, autonomy, I would see myself as fairly liberal, classical liberal. But when it comes to issues to do with economics welfare, I would say that I’m fairly sympathetic to redistributionist approaches, or what I would call classical left-wing approaches in terms of provision of health and education.
So it’s three, where it’s kind of mixed together. And, yes, that’s how I would describe myself. But if anybody asked me, you know, where are you? I would never use a label just because it wouldn’t capture it. The sort of labels that comes closest to us is what they used to call, in the old days, democratic republicans, sort of republican, not in the party-political sense, but republican in the way that it was classically understood. We’re basically seen … and are probably, on the right spectrum. I suppose the main reason why I came here, I set the whole thing up, was to act as a counterpoint to the dominant political culture. We see ourselves as being like Gramsci in reverse, where we’re challenging the cultural norms that are promoted by the European Commission, and that are fairly hegemonic in most of Western Europe.
Index: I think that’s quite intriguing, because in a sense, you’re using the language of the kind of classical left-wing tradition against the European liberal tradition. Would that be a fair?
Furedi: Yes, which is why I’m very sympathetic. We have some people that work with us that I would call old-school left, as opposed to identity-politics left, who I’m fairly sympathetic to, in terms of my own origins and my own instincts. So, yes, that’s the way I would say it.
Index: You have this quite dramatic-sounding conference… looking at some of the invitees, you might describe them as pretty classically right-wing. The term that is sometimes used is National Conservative (NatCon). What do you feel about that term?
Furedi: Yes, I can see why people would characterise some of the speakers as NatCon… I cannot really help that… We had a meeting the other week… and we had a person like that, and then we had a left-wing speaker from Germany, so I do try to mix it all up. At the moment, it’s quite difficult to get people from different traditions who are roughly interested in the kind of themes that I want to pursue. So that’s why you get the balance that you do. And so, yes, I think I would say that probably the majority of the people there, not all of them, would be conservative… They are, amongst themselves, fairly heterogeneous.
Index: Where do your loyalties lie? Are they to Hungary? Are they to the opposition to the Brussels elite? Are you hostile to Britain? Where do you put yourselves? It’s quite hard to work out.
Furedi: Yes. it is hard to work out, but that’s because you’re lucky, because you grew up in a place where you were born. You probably see yourself as having a very clear identity rooted in a particular cultural milieu. I was born in Hungary, I grew up in North America, I lived almost all my adult life in Britain, and now I’m here involved in creating a kind of a cultural political opposition to the [European] Commission. My loyalty is… I don’t know. I mean, I love Britain… All my close friends and my family are, I suppose, English or they live in Britain. I’ve got a very strong kind of affection, even though I don’t feel British, I don’t feel English. So, the way that I explain, if England is playing Hungary in a football match, I would probably support Hungary because of the underdog status. If England plays against any other team in the world, I would support England in a football match,
Index: A sort of football version of the cricket test.
Furedi: Exactly. And that’s not because I’m disloyal or whatever. It’s just, I always think of English as being my intellectual language and Hungarian, my emotional language. I don’t know if that makes any sense. When I get angry, I swear in Hungarian when I think it’s in English. I don’t feel any affinity to what’s happening here in Brussels, or I have no commitment to any abstract Europeanism, except for the fact that I would like to see a stronger, more cohesive, all-European intellectual alternative to the dominant paradigm.
Index: Clearly there are concerns about Viktor Orbán and Orbán’s government. You have been a vocal champion of free speech and free expression. This would seem somewhat contradictory to some of the things that Orbán’s been doing in terms of attacks on free media.
Furedi: I don’t have a selective approach towards free speech, that it’s good in some places, not good in others. I do think the attacks on Orbán’s government and Hungary over the free media are misconceived… You have a situation where there are TV channels in Hungary that are anti-government and have a very large viewership [Editor’s note: the RSF describes Viktor Orbán as a predator of press freedom with 80% of the media controlled through Orbán’s Fidesz party and their supporters]. You have a situation where the opposition has got a far greater presence on the social media, in social media platforms, than the government has. You go to Budapest, and you go to newspaper shops, you’ll find that there are plenty of newspapers, not one, two or three, but a lot of newspapers hostile and critical to government, so I don’t see it the way it’s represented. I don’t think is unusual… You look at Germany and the way that free speech is being encroached upon fairly systematically, the kind of laws that they have there. You look at France, you look at even Britain, just the way in which people get done for their social media posts. So unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any government, there’s any European country that I can think of that comes out as white knights in relation to the whole area of free speech. I don’t think Hungary is any worse than many of the other countries, but it gets criticised as unique in that respect, a kind of a double standard, which I think misses the point about what’s going on there.
Index: I don’t speak Hungarian. But you know, in the reports that I read Orbán himself does describe himself in semi-authoritarian terms.
Furedi: Illiberal democracy.
Index: Now, obviously part of that is teasing liberals, right? But again, please help me understand what you understand by that, because it sounds quite sinister to me.
Furedi: Well, if you actually look at the speech where he used the term “illiberal democracy”, what he is really saying is that he, he sees democracy as being logically prior to liberalism. As you know, there’s always a big debate between freedom and democracy in all kinds of different environments… He basically argues that his illiberal thing is part of his critique of what he sees liberalism as being. But he doesn’t mean that that freedoms are taken away, or freedoms are encroached in a way that you might imagine. It’s his attempt to be provocative, very successfully, as it happens, in relation to the kind of prevailing consensus. Hungary, and Orbán, is invariably accused of democratic backsliding time and again – I just don’t see that. If there was democratic backsliding, then the opposition wouldn’t win the election in Budapest last time we had local elections…
Index: You are largely funded by the Hungarian government?
Furedi: We are funded by two companies, the oil company, MOL, and Gedeon Richter, the pharmaceutical company. Now you could argue that MCC Hungary has got a close association with the government and it empathises with the government’s politics. Our particular organisation is entirely autonomous. That was the condition on which I took the job or set it up… We decide what issues are important and what issues are not important… Obviously, on many issues, we are very sympathetic to what they’re doing. But we don’t just simply, like in the Soviet Union or in any kind of dictatorial system, tick the boxes. We’re not asked to tick the boxes, but even if we were, [we] wouldn’t tick the boxes unless we agree with it.
Index: So why is it in the interest of the oil company and the pharmaceutical company to back you?
Furedi: Well, that’s an interesting question. I think that these companies, like anywhere else, when you have funders, either for philanthropic or for political reasons, do it for our idea. I think it’s their way of demonstrating their social connection or responsibility. I’ve never met anybody from either one of these two companies, so I don’t really know. But I would imagine it’s because they think that what MCC is doing is really important, because we do a lot of educational work. Part of our job is to, is to raise the intellectual game that Hungary plays. And I think that what we also do through hopefully the interesting and inspirational work that we do, we give Hungary a good name, even though we’re not a Hungarian thinktank. Because most people that work for MCC Brussels are not Hungarian. They come from Europe. But that’s probably the reason why. But you’d have to ask them. I’ve never actually met any of them.
Index: That would seem strange to me, but that’s, I don’t know whether you made a conscious decision not to meet them. But if I were in your position, I would want to meet them and find out what their motivations were.
Furedi: Why? The point is that you’re assuming that he who pays the piper… that we’re somehow kind of internally corrupt, and if somebody sort of gives us money, then we just simply sing from their song sheet. But that’s never happened. If it did, I think not only me, but almost all the key people here would leave, because the whole buzz about doing what we’re doing is we got this real capacity to be independent, and we’re not accountable. We don’t have to play somebody else’s game.
Index: There have been suggestions of a Russian connection. What do you say to the allegations that you are Russian funded?
Furedi: It’s not true. But also, if anybody cared to read a book I wrote a few years ago on the Ukraine War, which has been published by a legitimate Western publisher, I’m totally critical of Russia, and I support Ukraine’s struggle for national independence 120 percent. I stood up at the time against pro-Russian speakers, and I debated them. So I think it’s a weird fantasy to suggest that there is anything to do with a Russian connection. Plus, given my family’s background in ‘56, we are not exactly going to the defense of Russia, given our historical connections.
The interview was conducted by our editor at large Martin Bright
Battle for the Soul of Europe is taking place on 3 and 4 December. Click here for more information
7 Oct 2025 | Europe and Central Asia, News, United Kingdom
Two names have rung through the halls of the Labour Party Conference last week – Nigel Farage, who was given a kicking – and Owen Jones, who was literally kicked out. The Guardian columnist had been vox-popping politicians and delegates for his YouTube channel. His style is confrontational. But did he cross a line? Apparently so. On Tuesday his conference pass was revoked over “safeguarding issues”. He was told: “After careful consideration, we’ve concluded that we cannot continue your attendance while ensuring we meet our safeguarding obligations to all attendees.” Jones has cried foul. He called it “Trumpian behaviour” and believes it was because of his “attempt to question Cabinet members and MPs about Britain facilitating Israel’s genocide”.
It was a similar story for Rivkah Brown from Novara Media, who had her pass revoked, safeguarding cited, and asked whether Labour was “purging journalists it doesn’t like”.
Whether their free speech rights were violated or not is hard to tell (of Owen’s behaviour specifically we spoke to some conference attendees who said it was aggressive and others who’ve said it wasn’t). If the safeguarding concerns were genuine then there isn’t much of a story here, for us at least. A free speech defence can’t be used to excuse bad behaviour. But Labour would do well to be open and transparent, to provide details of what specifically they think he did wrong. Otherwise, we’re left to draw the worst conclusions.
Labour is not the only party expunging its conference of critics. Reform and the Conservatives (whose conference started on Sunday) have banned reporters without explanation. One was Byline Times journalist Adam Bienkov, who has attended and reported from Conversative Party conferences for years now. Last year the Byline Times published an embarrassing story about Conservative party councillors pretending to be ordinary folk during a televised election campaign event. A year later, Bienkov is suddenly off the invite list.
A reminder – both parties are led by people who position themselves as guardians of free speech. It’s pretty revealing of the vacuity of such claims.
Meanwhile, the Green Party’s conference opened last friday. A few weeks ago a curious email came into my inbox. It was from an esteemed doctor who was organising a fringe event about medically unnecessary penile circumcision in children. It got cancelled. They’ve also not been given a reason and their suspicion is that it’s to avoid wading into something that might offend Jewish people and Muslims, and attract adverse media publicity as a result.
Party conferences are revenue-raising events yes, and the press are shipped in to capture the hot takes. But conferences are also places where policy is debated and agendas set. Journalists come to ask the tough questions and challenge politicians and even party members on inconsistencies or shortfalls. Fill the marquees with “yes” people and democracy is bound to suffer.
