"God save the Queen," a cheery bloke named Johnny Rotten and his fellow musicians sang during my teen years, "and the fascist regime!" At the time, I tossed back my ascot while testing out a new polo mallet (as was my wont in high school) and thought, Dear fellow, that seems just a mite harsh. Bloody good hook, though!

Well, perhaps I owe Mr. Rotten a small apology after all. Frightfully sorry, old chap! 

As it turns out, the grandson of that queen and his wife have decided to share their thoughts on Facebook and free speech today, and it amounts to something out of the Dennis the Peasant sketch from Holy Grail. The Sussexes, who have made a lucrative career in self-promoting media projects while insisting that they want to left alone, want everyone to know how dangerous free speech can be for, um, free speech. 

Speaking only when permitted is the freest form of speech, they write in a statement on their website, the very concept that Harry and Meghan claimed to be fleeing when rebelling against Their Family Inc:

It doesn’t matter whether your views are left, right or somewhere in between—the latest news from Meta about changes to their policies directly undermines free speech. 

This should deeply concern us all. 

Contrary to the company’s talking points, allowing more abuse and normalizing hate speech serves to silence speech and expression, not foster it. 

In an already confusing and, in many instances, intentionally disruptive information environment, Meta has shown their words and commitments have very little meaning or integrity. As they announce these changes undoubtedly responding to political winds, they once again abandon public safety in favor of profit, chaos, and control. The company’s decision to rollback protections is so far away from its stated values and commitments to its users—including the parents and families calling for change around the globe—that it’s now deeply deceptive. 

All of this basically regurgitates the tired arguments of censors throughout time. George Orwell wrote 1984 in part as anticipation, and in part as a review of censorship and official language manipulation that had already taken place, most notably in the Soviet Union but also in Western communist circles. Only in Orwellian Newspeak could censorship and thought suppression be argued as a facilitation of "free speech," but that is precisely what the royals, or royal-adjacent Sussexes, now want to argue.

And of course, it's entirely wrong-headed, which seems to be on-brand for Harry and Meghan. 

I don't mean to pick on the Sussexes -- well, not much, anyway -- except to highlight the sneering elitism of this point of view, especially as it relates to Meta. Harry and Meghan provide the apotheosis of an intellectually bankrupt elite sneering at the hoi polloi for having Ungood Opinions and Opposition To The Enlightened Elite Agenda. The two never had an original thought in their heads, which Meghan is presently proving with her unintentionally hilarious trailer for an HGTV knockoff show on Netflix. The Sussexes are doing nothing more than copying these claims from the elitist cliques to which they wish to cling like barnacles, but only on their own terms.

Calling censorship free speech and free speech censorship is bad enough, but it's even more absurd on social media, especially Facebook. Even on Twitter/X (or ex-Twitter!), it's relatively easy to curate your own experience, but Facebook structures its platform to enforce personal curation. You have to friend people and have them friend you back to get significant access to their posts. Public-person pages (one of which I operate) generally require Facebook users to find you first and then subscribe. If Meghan or Harry find an opinion they don't like or a claim they feel is false, they can simply ignore it or argue against it. 

Maybe Harry and Meghan realize that they're only half-armed for a battle of wits?

Free speech is a market of ideas of varying qualities, just like the goods and services in any market. That includes the markets in which the Sussexes operate by exploiting their royal connections while repudiating them at the same time. People can choose for themselves what works and what doesn't, and poor products get pushed out of the markets by better products. Just in the last few years, we've seen plenty of examples of the distortions that censorship brings into political debate, where the same sneering elites insisted on silencing debate on:

• Hunter's laptop as a Russian disinformation operation
• COVID originated in a wet market rather than the biolab in the same city
• Masks and six-foot distancing work to prevent transmission and reception of COVID
• Vaccine mandates stop the spread
• Schools should remain closed
• Cheap fakes explain Joe Biden's cognitive missteps in public
• IT'S A STUTTER, DARN IT! AND HE RUNS RINGS AROUND HIS AIDES!

This is not an exhaustive list, of course, but it's certainly enough to make the point. When governments censor speech, and even when private-sector censors operate with government pressure through orgs like the "Global Engagement Center" and the "Global Alliance for Responsible Media," the effect always -- always -- is to limit and suppress dissent from the current establishment's positions and agendas. And because these need censorship to protect them from the accountability that free speech and dissent provide, they're usually lies and cover-ups rather than "facts."

That is precisely what Zuckerberg has revealed in the past week, too. The "fact check" operation at Facebook got hijacked by the elites and the Biden administration to suppress dissent and punish those who oppose them. It eventually became clear that this went beyond checking facts into an Orwellian exercise of speech suppression. "It was something out of 1984," Zuckerberg recalled. "It really was a slippery slope":

NOW - Zuckerberg describes his experience with third-party "fact-checkers" as "something out of 1984."pic.twitter.com/7zpEIygN5K

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) January 10, 2025

As predictably bad as the outcome was, one could perhaps still think that this is only a failure of the current elite. That's the excuse that Marxists have made for failure since before Orwell even wrote his two seminal works about it (Animal Farm being the other); F.A. Hayek made that point plain in The Road to Serfdom too, which is that the first excuse for failed Marxism is "we didn't do Marxism hard enough." And the only solution to that is to do Marxism harder with progressively dumber and more brutish elites. 

Perhaps we can declare that process at the final terminus with Harry and Meghan's lecture on the need to 1984 harder? At the very least, it reminds us of Hayek's prophecy about authoritarians and the absolute necessity of free speech as the only way to prevent the stultification of public intellect through the authoritarian nature of a dissipate elite.

See you on the pitch, fellas. Do not forget that it's morning coats and tails at the brunch!

Update: Part of a sentence didn't get completed properly, so I have edited it for clarity.  

Update: I forgot that her name is spelled Meghan rather than Megan. I have since corrected that throughout.