Free-speech battles mask crackdowns on Gaza and dissent

Across the US and UK, governments and political movements that claim they are defending “free speech” are also using power to silence protests, punish academics, restrict press access, and escalate harassment—especially around Gaza, Palestine Action, and issue

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.” Days later. students were being taken off the streets by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) patrols and deported because they had been protesting about Gaza.

The same “free speech” framing—so confident in public—sat beside a different set of actions: 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.

The turn toward punishment also carried a darker theatricality. 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. 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.

Then came the pressure campaign that followed dissent into the digital dark. Having seemingly forgotten his European lecture tour, the VP encouraged US citizens to engage in the mass “doxing” of anyone who didn’t quite see eye-to-eye with Kirk.

Across the Atlantic. the right in the UK runs the same slogan: free speech is under threat from an overbearing state. policing speech on behalf of a “woke” elite keen to suppress “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. said a word about the proscription of Palestine Action in June 2025. and the arrest of more than 2. 000 people protesting this.

Farage’s stance also collides with his own posture in court. While he 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”—should be treated as protected speech (one hotel was. in fact. torched). he has himself testified in court on behalf of a prosecution against threatening social media posts directed at him. And while 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.

The piece argues that this pattern is not a misunderstanding of principle. It points the other way: the “free speech” language—repeated until it becomes a kind of cultural reflex—has been used as leverage. The bigger story. it says. begins in the early 1980s. when US conservatives first began to weaponise “free speech” as part of a deliberate political strategy to re-establish social and political hierarchies rocked by the civil rights and second-wave feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

Those earlier movements. the article notes. understood that the languages of racism and sexism were as responsible for reproducing hierarchies as everyday discrimination and patriarchal subordination. So the struggle was cultural as well as institutional: challenging representations circulating through culture and the media. insisting that such forms of representation be treated as unacceptable. and creating room for racialised minorities and women to participate in public life on equal terms.

Universities, it says, were among the first to respond. They developed campus speech codes, prohibiting racist or sexist language in order to create a safe and welcoming environment. Outside academe, workplaces and institutions followed. But in parallel. a new understanding of “free speech” hardened in the US through First Amendment jurisprudence and decisions of the US Supreme Court from the 1920s onwards. Drawing on John Stuart Mill. it argues that “speech” should be as unrestricted as possible. letting all ideas compete within a “marketplace of ideas.” It invokes Mill’s “infinite and perpetual openness. ” including his insistence that even false ideas should never be ruled out. because they might later prove true.

In that framing, the article says, conservatives found a way to push back against egalitarian gains. First Amendment arguments could be used to challenge campus speech codes as unconstitutional—creating space for racist or sexist speech to return. even if explicit discrimination was constrained by the Fifteenth Amendment.

The piece describes this as the beginnings of what we call today the culture wars: a political strategy increasingly geared toward rehabilitation and normalization—of racism. misogyny. homophobia and other inegalitarian ideologies—inside mainstream political discourse. It lays out three interconnecting objectives: allowing racist tropes. images. motifs. ideas and beliefs to circulate as widely as possible by insisting on “infinite and perpetual openness”; suggesting that racism and anti-racism are politically and morally equivalent; and discrediting anti-racism. feminism and other egalitarian movements by framing them as totalitarian censors intent on policing language and eroding “free speech.”.

Once the “sluice gates” open. it says. tropes and ideas once confined to a far-right niche enter the political mainstream. with mainstream parties drawn in and amplifying their significance. It links the timing to the internet and social media—arguing that older gatekeepers that might have protected public discourse from being poisoned were removed as social platforms approximated the marketplace-of-ideas model. It also argues that emotions—anxieties. anger and fear—have become a key fuel. even as the model claims to rest on truth and reason. And it points to how contemporary racist rhetorics have shifted toward emotional mobilization and coded language. making it harder for a rationalist notion of “free speech” to expose what’s happening.

There’s a final insistence threaded through all of it: “woke” becomes. in the right’s hands. an empty signifier—something that can mean anything precisely because it doesn’t refer to anything stable. The article treats that as a way to discredit social justice and equality without openly arguing for inequality. a tactic it says depends on insinuation rather than argument.

The piece ends where the title’s tension begins: calling out a “free speech charade” and describing it as a weapon wielded against socially subordinated groups. aiming to reconstitute a hierarchical order in 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.

This article first appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Index on Censorship.

free speech Gaza protests ICE deportations Palestine Action Charlie Kirk Jimmy Kimmel Disney Nigel Farage Lucy Connolly Graham Linehan Tommy Robinson culture wars DEI universities campus speech codes Index on Censorship