When I was growing up, the so-called "creative class" of artists, comedians, writers, and the like all agreed that free speech—even offensive speech—was a supreme value.
We were subjected to endless diatribes about the Red Scare and the Hollywood blacklist, and the most celebrated comic was Lenny Bruce, not because of his performances, but because he was harassed by the police in Boston because he used dirty words or something.
I'm pretty sure I never heard a Lenny Bruce performance, but I sure knew all about him. Then there were the "7 Dirty Words" that were ridiculed, and all the fights about taxpayer funding of crucifixes in urine and men's buttholes. Stripping was a form of artistic expression, and Nazis marching in Illinois were defended by the ACLU.
OUR FREE-SPEECH DOCUMENTARY HAS BEEN CANCELLED
— spiked (@spikedonline) November 19, 2025
THE RICH MIX CINEMA HAS BANNED OUR PREMIERE, BECAUSE OUR FILM DOES NOT ALIGN WITH ITS ‘VALUES’.
You would think that banning a documentary about free speech would be a bad look for a cultural institution. But that’s precisely what… pic.twitter.com/GZQGqLpIY3
I'm pretty sure that a lot of those defenses by the left were not based on principle, but rather on offending the normies, but at least on some of them, they had a real point.
Watch the documentary they don’t want you to watch: https://t.co/pnT32IlBtX
— spiked (@spikedonline) November 19, 2025
How times have changed. As the left has become the Establishment, its true colors have been revealed. It's not that they liked free speech or expression at all. What they wanted was the power to actually control what could be said by everybody, and defending "free speech" was all about normalizing leftist speech first, and then seizing control through the "long march through the institutions" so they could follow the path that every leftist has ever trodden to suppress dissent.
I recall a conversation with a good liberal friend of mine about Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. I argued that it was a major triumph in the fight for free expression, and he was appalled. He didn't want free expression because so much offended him. "Misinformation," which just means speech he didn't like, would spread.
Such as on COVID! People will die!
Yeah, well, that sure was prescient. Old Twitter never had "misinformation," right?
Spiked's documentary on speech suppression being suppressed is, of course, the natural conclusion of this line of thinking.
"This doesn't align with our values." From a theatre!
Now I could understand this response if the documentary were about the virtues of Nazism. I honestly do believe that private businesses should be able to refuse service to people and things that offend them. So it's not so much that they refused to serve somebody that offends me, as what this particular refusal says about the cultural elite.
What offends them is free expression itself. They want censorship, just not censorship against them. These are the same sort of people who scream about BANNED BOOKS when a school decides not to educate kids about how to sign up for Grindr or practice coprophagia. They get all high and mighty when drag queens are not fondling children or men are prevented from urinating on each other in public.
But advocate for free debate on these issues? No way!
That violates our values.
Well, I have news for them: what they practice violates most people's values, and the only thing that prevents an avalanche of people with pitchforks shutting them down is that we still believe in free expression, even when it includes advocacy for evil things.
That won't last forever.
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