Media Storm - S5E9 Free Speech: Is it all talk?

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

Join us for the Media Storm LIVE SHOW! Tuesday 20th May 7pm @ the Business Design Centre in Islington. Tickets are available at 10am today via AEG Presents HERE! Paid Patreon subscribers get access to tickets ONE HOUR EARLIER at 9am What’s the bigger threat to free speech: the ‘woke mob’, or the MAGA word police? Where’s the line between free speech and hate speech? How can you have free market of ideas - when most of the media is owned by political suck-ups? Is free speech actually free if some people have more free speech than others? And with ‘free speech crusaders’ censoring anyone whose views they dislike… WHAT DOES ‘FREE SPEECH’ EVEN MEAN ANYMORE? Journalist and political activist Femi Oluwole joins Helena Wadia and Mathilda Mallinson to put the mainstream media’s ‘free speech’ debates under the microscope: from the arresting of keyboard criminals, to the abduction of students calling attention to Palestine, to the hypocrisy of MAGA leaders, and the social media algorithms shaping public discourse. The episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia) The music is by @soundofsamfire Support us on Patreon! Follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and TikTok Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Just before we begin, we want to tell listeners that we are bringing you a Media Storm live show. We will be walking through the three biggest media shit storms of the past year and we would really love to have you in the room with us. We'll be joined by some special guests. It's on Tuesday, the 20th of May, 7pm at the Business Design Centre in Islington. Tickets will be out today at 10 a.m. and the link is in the show notes below. see you there you there. Helena, guess what time it is?

Quiz time. Oh my God, it's been so long. It has been so long. Okay, I think it was our first ever episode. I did the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire theme tune. Can I do it again? I will cry if you don't.

Okay, here we go. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. I'm going to play a news clip and I want you to tell me if it's from the left-wing media or the right. Okay. There is a very fine line. Of course, we believe in free speech,

but when your free speech is actually inciting violence and causing other individuals to cause destruction and harm to others, that is no longer acceptable. Okay, so she's saying free speech has its limits when it causes harm to other people. Pretty much. Left-wing?

Gotcha. Oh, you set me up. What a surprise. This is a Fox News segment about... Okay, can I guess? I actually think it's about the student protests for Palestine. Exactly. Okay.

But remember the January 6th capital riots, or better yet, the UK's violent riots against mass migration last summer. Guessing the right-wing media didn't feel the same way then? Not really. Megan Kelly is one of the firmest conservative, voices in U.S. media backing the penalization of student protesters, even those who don't personally get involved in violent behaviors. She's defended this in the case of Mahmoud Khalil,

the Columbia University student activist currently in ICE detention for his role in pro-Palestine protests. You could charge conspiracy. You could charge extortion. Whether it's been done or not is irrelevant. He violated the terms of his permission slip to be here. And he, he can be deported for that alone. But here's what she thought about the UK government's crackdown on people who incited racist violence on social media during the riots. People like Lucy Connolly, who has been jailed for calling on protesters to set fire to asylum seeker hotels on X, who we talked about on yesterday's News Watch.

If you haven't listened, please go back and listen because it's very relevant to this upcoming conversation. Yeah, exactly. Here's Megan Kelly. There is a crisis enveloping the West at this moment, and perhaps nowhere is it more evident than in the UK. British authorities are warning via X. Anyone. Anyone who incites violence or hatred, even exclusively online, could be prosecuted.

And prosecuted they have been. More than 120 of them have had their court cases fast-tracked and are already getting lengthy jail sentences. Among them a man who, yes, posted something vile. but did not even take part in any violence. Okay, so back then, the prosecution of people for things they tweeted was a crisis in the West because they were attacking racial minorities instead of defending them? No, that can't be it. This takes us pretty neatly on to today's topic, free speech.

Now, if we were going to do this episode during season one, given that Media Storm's priority is platforming groups who don't get right of reply in the mainstream media, this episode would have had probably quite a clear angle on the free speech debate, right? Sure, like how to protect free speech without allowing hate speech, how to make sure everyone gets as much freedom of speech as each other. Right, we'd probably have looked at the left's so-called council culture, whether it was fair, whether it was effective. Whether it's a thing at all.

Because back then, you had the anti-wokes, the Magan movement, the right to offend diehards parading around as free speech crusaders and the dangers they posed were less to do with loss of freedom of speech and more to do with the harm that could come from saying hateful, corrosive and untrue things. Which is where one person's freedom of speech can infringe on another person's freedom to not face discrimination, for example. Exactly. As many on the left typically point out in this political climate, right,

The threats to freedom of speech, at least in the mainstream narrative, were generally seen as coming from the left in the form of political correctness and the so-called woke mob. Right. But today the waters are much muddier. Yes. The threats to free speech, the crusading of free speech, it's all suddenly coming from unexpected directions,

which has ultimately meant that our job putting this episode together has been an absolute friggin' nightmare. Hence the massive bags under our eyes. Oh my God, I am so tired. I think I might be dead. Okay, well, to wake you up, here is a mix of maga maniacs criticizing the left for coming after free speech. Free speech is under siege in this country.

Bullies on the left aiming to silence conservatives. No one is saved from the left's ward police. The leftists, they've become the thought police. They basically declare themselves God and judge us for our thoughts. We are declaring ourselves gods. We are basically gods, it's true. And look, this is a very simplistic narrative, and it's pretty flattering to the right.

I would personally argue that the biggest threat to freedom of speech in our adult life in the UK came from the Conservative Government's police crime sentencing in Courts Act in 2023, which tried to criminalise protests for being noisy and annoying, and issued a 10-year prison sentence for anyone vandalising statues of slave owners, and the likes. But I hear you, superficially, this has been a basic divide. The left is more likely to advocate for restrictions on speech

that is deemed harmful or discriminatory, while the right is more likely to defend protecting all speech, even if it's hateful or offensive. Right. In recent months, though, there's been a redrawing of the lines in the freedom of speech debate. Thanks, in large part, to the tariff-wielding, pussy-grabbing leader of the... the free world. Trump. Trump has literally banned everything from researching diversity to

acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ plus people to criticizing Israel, to not calling the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America. He's actually banned the Associated Press from the White House for this. Government agencies have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid. Words like DEI, Bipak, anti-racism, Latin X, Native American, black, women. seemingly random words like expression, at risk, political, and even mental health and sex. Surprise, surprise then. For all their parading as free speech warriors, they turned out to have zero tolerance of perspectives and words they disagree with. So who are the libertarians now?

Who are the thought police now? God, I feel like I'm having a bit of an identity crisis. Yeah, you joke. But to be honest, I do think that there are questions for people. the media commentariat on both sides of the political divide. On the one hand, about the importance of tolerating different views in the name of free speech. On the other, the importance of recognizing the limits of tolerance in the name of safety from violence. There should be a time for introspection in the political media.

It's also a test of integrity for the news media, especially in the US, as those who comply with the official line are rewarded and those who do not. are punished. I believe that CNN and MSDNC, what they do is illegal. I think CBS should lose its license, but I think ABC should lose its license also because of what they've done. The Trump administration has given a whole new meaning to cancel culture. But this time, it isn't coming from a mob.

It's coming from the man at the top. We have saved free speech in America. It's a little bit different when we talk about free speech. you're an American versus when you are here on a visa. Starmer poses, I think, the biggest threat to free speech we've seen in our history. George Orwell was right. The thought police come next to punish thought crime. Be very, very scared.

Welcome to Media Storm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Matilda Mallinson. And I'm Helena Wadia. This week's Media Storm. Free speech, hate speech and the new dividing lines. Welcome to the Media Storms studio. Our guest today is a British journalist and political activist who is no stranger to being attacked for his views

and even removed from spaces for his views. He's an outspoken human rights analyst, co-founder of the pro-EU youth group Our Future Our Choice and has written for news outlets such as the Independent, Guardian and Metro. Welcome to the studio, Femi Oluwale. Hey, guys, how you do? Hey, Femmy, so nice to see you again. You too.

So, freedom of speech, that's what we're talking about today. It has always been a major political battleground, but in today's world it's considered a core human right, a pillar of democracy. It's enshrined in the US's First Amendment. It's also enshrined in the UK's 1998 Human Rights Act, but it is not without controversy. And some argue that free speech absolutism is its own kind of tyranny. Femi. In theory, where do you stand on this spectrum? Should free speech have a limit?

I think the limit in terms of what should be legally punished is it can't go up to the level of implied incitements to violence. So if you tell somebody to hurt somebody else, I think that crosses the line because it's like a mob hit. You're telling them go hurt this person. If your language implies that that person is less than human and therefore is worthy of being taken out, for example, calling people vermin, that sort of language, I believe that crosses the line. However, I do believe that in terms of how society functions, in terms of what the law should punish, I think the line should be drawn in implied incitements to violence. That's interesting, OK, because a lot of people would say you should never be criminalized for something you've said, only for something you've done.

But I guess what you acknowledge there is, well, speech can be an action. The line between speech and action is always blurred. And if what you were saying incites a criminal action, then it should be criminal. It would be insane if we said that if I pay somebody, to murder somebody else, then because I haven't actually done it myself, I'm not liable for the crime itself. If I tell somebody, go out and burn down a hotel with the refugees inside, I should be liable for that as well. And there are those on the left who would go further than I do in terms of saying that saying racist things should be criminalized. But I personally don't think so.

I think one of the reasons why I'd like to be in a position where we say free speech should include things that we fundamentally disagree with is because if we had a proper democracy, then I believe most people are generally good. Unfortunately, in this voting system where majority of votes effectively don't count, that our voting system continuously skews politics towards the right and against marginalized groups, it's because of that that people often feel, well, if the system isn't fair, we have to clamp down on the stuff that endangers us. Yeah, okay.

I mean, I think that that's what I would have expected your answer to be. We will get on to the challenges to the sort of traditional left, right, logic on the free speech debate, but let's bring it into current affairs. Yeah, free speech has basically been in every current affair story recently. And the first one we want to look at looks at the pulling of fact checkers from social media, apparently in the name of free speech. In January, meta-CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook and Instagram would ditch independent fact-checkers in the name of restoring free expression, though many argue it was to please Trump.

If so, it worked. Mark Zuckerberg came to the White House, who I like much better now. Elon Musk also pledged to turn X into a free speech forum by sacking 80% of engineers dedicated to trust and safety on the platform. Instead, he now uses it as his personal propaganda playground and is literally at the top of my notifications every day, even though I neither follow him nor engage with any of his content ever. Twitter, now they call it X.

It's great that Elon bought that. He's done us all a big favor. Elon Musk, for example, banned the account at Elon Jet, which tracked his private jet using public data, but promoted fake news stories about an asylum seeker being behind the stabbing of three little girls in the UK last summer. In fact, before the killer, the real killer, went on his stabbing spree, we have since learned that he watched a graphic video of a stabbing in Sydney on X

that the company had refused to take down. There is a clear algorithmic. bias to the so-called free speech forum. Studies by the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and academic organizations have found that the site forced political content on users. That content was almost invariably pro-Trump, pro-Republican, and pro-Musk. Social media was once heralded as a way of circumventing media gatekeepers and giving a voice to the people.

But the algorithm favors clickbait and breeds fake news and bots. Femi, do we have to rethink. our ideas about free speech in an era of social media? I think the reason why you're seeing this clamp down on fact-checking, this buying up of social media platforms by the billionaires, is because they realize that if they don't do that, they will lose. Given that our generations, millennials, Gen Z, have a kind of politics that is very different from everything that's gone before.

In fact, the Financial Times actually worked out that at the age of 35, your average boomer, your average person from the silent generation, and Gen X was five points less conservative than the national average. But by the time they reached the age of 70, there were five points more conservative, which is the general trend of you get more conservative as you get older. But millennials at the age of 35 are 15 points less conservative than the national average. So we've fundamentally broken that trend. If you don't support equality, our generations don't want to hear from you. And so in the face of that, people like Trump, people like Farage, like your Jacob Rees-Mogg's, I see them as the dying gasp of an ideology that's never going to see the light of day again.

And the other reason why people are turning against the right is because we can see the right's agenda play out. We can see that right now in America. Things aren't going so well with Trump's tariffs and crashing the economy. I think the UK has an advantage in terms of Brexit in terms of the fact that the far right has already tied their flag to the mast of Brexit for 27 years saying, this is going to help working class people. and now even Brexit voters by a ratio of 45 to 9 believe that Brexit has made us poorer, you can't make that argument based on facts anymore. So you have to push out fake news.

You have to push out misinformation. You have to buy out media platforms and control the conversation because they have no choice, otherwise they will lose. So you say you can't make that argument in facts anymore. Okay, so you make it in emotions. That's something that really carries currency in the social media space. And this is, I think, the tricky thing with social media and free speech. It changes the rules, right?

In traditional news media space, things have to be fact check or they can't pass. But in the social media space, emotion carries more currency than fact. I say that's slightly idealizing the traditional news media, but, you know, you get my funny. Also on social media, unlike in the marketplace of ideas in face-to-face conversation, we can be anonymous. And so people can put out any speech. and they don't have to tie their identity to it. And that also changes the rules. And so these ideals that we have about free speech, right,

they're grounded in this logic of a marketplace of ideas. People can say bad things, people can say good things, and the good things will win out in this free forum of speech. But on social media, it plays into and rewards the worst tendencies of human nature. It doesn't reward reasoned, evidence-based conversation. That's not the speech that wins out on social media. it rewards a totally different type of speech. And that's why I'm like, do we have to rethink our idea about free speech

in a social media climate where it's a mob rule of a wholly different thing we've seen before? So I believe that if social media was essentially fair, if every voice had an equal weighting, things would end up in the right direction. I mean, there's a reason why the right hates and demonizes academia because they know that academics, the more you study society, the more you're aware of the injustices, and then by definition, you become the definition of woke. That's why I believe that TikTok is potentially such a huge tool, because in that marketplace of ideas, it's actually a free market in theory. Because people are telling their

own stories, you get a different perspective on different groups of people. For example, my favorite TikTok was from a Muslim woman in the States who said that one of her colleagues said that the only Muslims she'd ever come into contact with were on TikTok, not from Fox News, not from Hollywood demonizing Muslims as terrorists. It was exclusively from Muslims saying this is who we are. And it's a lot harder to convince somebody that you should bomb or invade another country if the day before you saw somebody from that country

do a make-up tutorial. That perception of people comes from having an actual free marketplace of ideas. The problem is that the people that are running these companies, they are trying to not make it a people-marketplace of ideas precisely in order to skew things against marginalised groups and in favor of the right. You can't have a free market of ideas and a free market of media ownership.

It doesn't work. Because if you have a free market of media ownership, eventually it'll be owned by those who have the most money. They will create a monopoly. And eventually you'll only have certain views being able to dominate. It defeats the right concept of a free market of ideas. So how could we regulate freedom of ownership to improve freedom of speech? I think you'd want to set a limit on the percentage of the market share

of all media, mainstream media, like TV, radio, et cetera, but any one individual can have to make sure that nobody can essentially control the narrative of an entire country or the West in general. And I think you should also have rules on social media platforms that prevent them from being owned by one specific individual. If it could be democratized in some way, I'd like that. And also, I don't think we should be at the mercy of this idea of, or whichever post gets the most interaction, that's the one that should get promoted,

because we should be able to have AI that can tell what kind of interactions are happening. Is this post being flooded with thousands of comments saying, no, that's a lie, in which case, then no, that's not a good post to promote. We have the power to make this better. That is interesting because social media, you know, from that perspective, it can be a key to better free speech. Media gatekeeping is a huge issue. I think it's three quarters of newspaper circulation in the UK.

is owned and controlled by just four very, very wealthy families. MediaStorm, we literally started this podcast because we recognize that not everyone has an equal voice. How free is free speech when some people have more free speech than others? Social media could change that. However, to take it back to the Zuckerberg Facebook story, well, Zuckerberg said in the name of free speech, he was removing regulation. He was removing fact checkers. And this was widely reported in our media, right, as a story about U.S. domestic politics, democracy and crisis.

But outside of the U.S. and beyond a lot of the mainstream media's watch, many of Facebook's fact-checking bodies were set up in response to genocidal propaganda spreading on the site. For example, against the Rohingya in Myanmar or against Muslims in India. An open letter signed to Zuckerberg by over 100 fact-checking organizations from all over the world warned after his announcement that some of these countries are highly vulnerable to misinformation that spurs political instability, election interference, mob violence and even genocide. If matter decides to stop the program worldwide, it is almost certain to result in a real world harm in many places. This story, it shouldn't have just raised alarm of. about U.S. democracy, it should have raised questions about minority safety all over the

world. I think that points to a sort of hierarchy of rights in this debate about free speech. Some people's free speech come before other people's right to not face discrimination or not face violence. How big a role does race, ethnicity play in the free speech debate and does our media sufficiently recognize this? I think that's a perfect example because We saw, like, here at home with the riots last summer, and let's call them what they are. They were white supremacist terrorism. People were being targeted in the streets. People were trying to burn down hotels because of the either ethnic minority status or immigration status of the people in those hotels.

And it was being fueled by misinformation online. It was being fueled by the misinformation that the killer in Southport was a Muslim refugee, blah, blah, blah. In fact, he was a boy called Axel, born to immigrant parents, who was born in Cardiff. and that misinformation directly put millions of ethnic minority people across the country in danger. I remember personally waking up from a nightmare during those riots with my fists clenched looking around the room because I genuinely believed that was about to be pulled from my car like happened to that man in Hull. This put genuine fear in the minds of ethnic minority people across the country. And your right to say let's go burn down that refugee hotel isn't exactly as important as my right to know that I

can cross the street without being attacked for the color of my skin. Yeah, and I can, you know, speak to that as well. I think what was missing in the media, especially at that time, getting caught up in that free speech debate, was the real life experiences of ethnic minorities, like you, like me, and the fact that we were scared to go outside even. And I think we spoke about it on a media storm episode when there was a feed that came through that said,

oh, there's going to be a potential riot in West London where a lot of my family are. You know, it was genuinely scary, and I don't think that that narrative was put across. And now we have articles calling the person who has been found guilty for inciting racial violence. A mother. A mother, but also a political prisoner. Yeah, and I have a friend of mine who lives in the Northeast, and he and his wife are the only non-white people on that street. and he now has to go around with a object in his car because he's too scared.

And when you put it like that, you know, even though we are not big fans of custodial sentences and Lucy Connolly, just in general, Lucy Connolly, the woman who wrote this got a, you know, what some would see as a disproportionately heavy custodial sentence. Well, that's a sentence too, the sentence of living in fear in your own city, in your own home for God knows how long, that is a sentence too. Yeah, exactly. Femi, you have personally spoken out about one particular incident where you felt your freedom of speech was taken from you

by a party who self-brand as being pro-free speech. Can you tell us what happened and why this was an affront to free speech in your eyes? So the Reform Party's attacks on my free speech. Go back a fair way. It goes back to 2019 when I tweeted that Richard Tice had set out, an overtly anti-Jewish organization, because he was one of the founders of leave. .EU, which has been regularly tweeting pictures of George Soros, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, holding puppet strings controlling politicians such as Tony Blair, which is such an overt,

anti-Semitic trope, it doesn't even need to be defended. And so he then sent an email to me from his lawyers, telling me to take down the post, apologize, and pay 10,000 pounds to a charity of his choosing. I had two grand in the bank and I showed him my bank balance in the video that I put up saying, hey, come at me. I've got nothing to lose. You're the one who looks silly as a champion of free speech and standing up for the little guy while sending an army of London lawyers after a student activist for a tweet. And then fast forward, I tried to go to their rally in Stafford. I showed them my press pass to let me in. I managed to interview several of their candidates and I got them to say on camera that Brexit had made people poor.

and the quote, sometimes you have to take a little pain for things to work in the future. They're not going to want you interviewing their candidates again, are they? Exactly. So they kicked me out of the venue because of that. Then fast forward to 2024, when I showed up, I bought a ticket, and I was just waiting in the queue quietly. I had nothing on me. I just had my press pass and a selfie stick with my camera on it. And then they single me out from the queue, said, your ticket's been revoked, you need to leave. And I said, why? They said, we haven't got a reason. and they physically pushed me and pulled me to get me out of the venue.

How much do you think race in itself played a part in that? I would be interested to know if there are any white journalists who've been kicked out of four consecutive Reform Party rallies. You point out as well that one of the founders of Reform Party has said that black men are inherently violent. This is a party that supposedly believes in free. speech and is refusing to be challenged by a journalist and removing a journalist, a black male journalist, without given reason, denying themselves of accountability for that view to

that demographic, and also just generally denying your ability to challenge their ideas in the free marketplace of ideas that any free speech advocate should believe in. Yeah, they fundamentally are not in favor of free speech. It has always been a lie. Thing is I feel like these individuals, a lot of them, I think they do believe that they believe in free speech and don't necessarily see the hypocrisy of their in actions. I think it's always really important to make a distinction between the politicians and those who follow them. I do believe that a lot of reform party voters do believe in some of the stuff that's being spewed by the people at the top. But if you are working in politics full time, you cannot be stupid enough to, A, not be aware that Brexit is damaging the people. country be not be aware that suing student activists for tweets isn't compatible with being

the champions of free speech it's not possible so they're either literally brain dead or they're liars this episode is brought to you by square you're not just running a restaurant you're building something big and square's there for all of it giving your customers more ways to order whether that's in-person with Square kiosk or online. Instant access to your sales, plus the funding you need to go even bigger. And real-time insights so you know what's working, what's not, and what's next. Because when you're doing big things, your tools should to. Visit square.ca to get started.

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ancestor's name in the UK and Ireland nursing register. Don't miss out. Free access ends August 24th. Visit Ancestry.ca for more details. Terms apply. Our next current affair story is the censorship of critics of Israel and its allies in the West.

Probably one of the most terrifying attacks on free speech in our listeners societies today is happening in the US where student activists calling out genocidal actions against Palestinians, actions that have been described as genocide by some of the world's most respected bodies, are being literally abducted off the streets and detained without judicial process. This is not just an issue in the US, Much of the so-called free press around the liberal world have conformed to official narratives in their coverage of the war

and the occupation and the downplaying of crimes against humanity wherever Western governments are complicit. One analysis by Intercept last year compared over a thousand articles from the New York Times, The Washington Post, the LA Times, found a gross imbalance with highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like slaughter or massacre or homicide or horrific, which were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis

who were killed by Palestinians rather than the other way around. For example, the term slaughter and massacre were used to describe the killing of Israelis 60 times more than for Palestinians. The list goes on. We've talked about this on Media Storm many times and we've talked about the indirect censorship driving this, such as the conflation of Palestinians with terrorists as a way of denouncing anyone who humanises and mourns them as terrorist sympathizers,

or the conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism as a way of censoring legitimate criticisms of the Israeli state under hate speech protections. What does the state of debate and coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tell us about free speech in the West? That it's fundamentally broken, that those in charge of how our discourse runs are incredibly hypocritical. My favorite, if I can use that term, example of this, is genuinely Richard Tice. Because Richard Tice has been, for the past year and a half,

accusing anybody who goes on those protests against the genocide in Gaza of being anti-Semitic. And this is the same person who tried to sue me for a tweet where I called his organization anti-Semitic. That is a really pointed comparison. I called having a cartoon of a Jewish Holocaust survivor holding puppet strings, controlling politicians, anti-Semitic. He's calling complaining about the genocide of thousands of innocent people anti-Semitic. The hypocrisy is off the scale. I think something interesting about this topic in the context of the free speech debate is that with anti-Semitism, which is a real and nasty form of racism,

and the valid protections that are in place against anti-Semitism, those have been used to censor a legitimate form of criticism and free speech that is not to do with Judaism, but to do with the actions of an Israeli state. And I think that that's very interesting in the free speech debate, because, you know, in the past, it would be the left talking about protections against hate speech, and some people on the right would say that the line has been blurred between, hate speech and legitimate speech, at least it's a very, very hard line to draw. So there's issues sort of seen as switching of hands of the free speech banner from the right

to the left. And some on the right might say, oh, you know, the lefty mump have no right now to demand free speech after their use of council culture. So I wonder if there is any truth to this and whether there is any cause for introspection right now on the left about how to demarcate the territory of legitimate free speech, even if it may not always be likable, and the territory of speech that can and should be criminalized. So if we're talking about anti-Semitism in this context, I do believe that the left and those who generally stand up for the people of Palestine should be more self-policing in terms of what words we use

because ultimately the biggest weakness in our campaign, the thing that's most used against us is the accusation of anti-Semitism. So if you genuinely care about the people of Palestine, you should be trying to make sure that that weakness is not used against us. And I think that we have been too liberal with our use of the word Zionist. I would prefer if people you would use descriptors when they talk about Zionism, i.e. military Zionism, colonial Zionism, expansionist Zionism, to distinguish it from Zionism as a core concept of,

should Jewish people have a homeland of some description in some demarcated area? There are many Jewish people who have been on those marches who are fundamentally called themselves Zionists in the belief that there should be a Jewish homeland, but fundamentally oppose everything the Netanyahu is doing. And I think if you use the word Zionist as a catch-all, it gets used in very dangerous ways. Right.

And if the left is sensitive to everything they've been saying about policing language, then they should enact that among themselves. Exactly. Because every time I see a tweet along the lines of, yeah, and they won't let this be said on the Zionist control media. I'm like, come on. Right, yeah.

I think that that's actually a really, really fair point. Do you think cancel culture exists? I don't think cancel culture is a real thing. I think there's consequence culture. And as I said before, because younger people are much more hard line in terms of if you don't support equality, at least in principle, we don't want to hear from you, I think they're realizing that there's a much more hard line

that will mean that you won't have this audience anymore. It's so hypocritical for the right to complain about cancel culture. and ultimately, it's called the free market. If you have a product, you as a person, you as a celebrity, you are a product that we no longer want to buy because you've shown yourself to be a terrible human being, that's the market economy. And you're complaining about it as a supposed capitalist. Right.

When I think of cancel culture, right? I think of moaning and attacks from people like JK Rowling who got hate for spreading hate and then complaining about being cancelled whilst continuing to have a far bigger platform than any of the minorities that she was using it to spread hate about. And there is a difference between wanting freedom of expression and wanting freedom from consequences of what you say. And, yeah, I think the left has the upper hand on that because the ardent defenders of free speech on the right,

like Nigel Farage as another example, don't use their platforms to criticize authoritarians so much as to punch down at persecuted minorities. Always. And in terms of the way they view cancel culture as a, oh, you've taken this platform from me, I always make the point that I don't own my platform. I had 400,000 followers on Twitter, 100,000 followers elsewhere. It doesn't belong to me. It was given to me by my followers who make the decision. If I do some horrendous stuff, if I say some horrendous stuff, I will lose followers and I should not start complaining that I've been cancelled. I've done bad stuff and I deserve to be punished for it. That's how consequence culture works. Yeah. Also, the frustration I feel about taking J.K. Rowling as an example and saying, I've been cancelled and, you know, nobody's listening to me. Whereas, ironically, I think we've been talking about her way more than we have when she wrote the Harry Potter books, you know? I don't disagree with what either of you saying. Sometimes I do think the attacks from the left against people who say things they disagree with do go too far. But that is not the same as locking people. up for their views. That is consequence culture. I agree with that. Something I've been thinking about reflecting on as I've tried to make sense of the free speech debate in today's politics

is at least an opportunity for finding common ground across the political divide. Free speech within the law. That is something that serves everyone, whatever your political view, unless your political view is extremist. I think for me that might sometimes mean swallowing the legality of views I really don't like. Not views like Lucy Connolly, which, when expressed, incite criminal violence, but views that I don't want to see aired. I think for me that has meant accepting the airing of those views is actually probably not a bad thing ultimately as long as the marketplace of free speech exists on an even enough playing field for it to be challenged. And yeah, I

guess I would say that I want to see on this topic some alliance between people who stand at different places of the left-right divide in their shared value of free speech within the law. So on that sense, I would definitely agree that there's definitely some toxicity on the left that seems to be intolerant of other ways of achieving the same objective. And I do think we need to improve on that, especially given this the next point, the voting system we're in, we have to work together if we're going to actually achieve any change. on the issue of the voting system, I think most people would want a proportional voting system, knowing that it would mean that there be more seats in Parliament for Farage, because ultimately, if we have a population where 12% of our population wants to vote for reform, or even 25% wants to vote for reform, we shouldn't use an unfair voting system to silence those people because that's who we actually are. Often because we have a voting system that silences those groups, they end up feeling disenfranchised, they have their conversations away from the eyes of parliament, they have them in the and back alley Facebook groups where nobody can really challenge them.

And that's how you get things like Brexit because their ideas weren't challenged for 20 years. Then we got to 2016 and nobody had actually challenged them for 20 years. And here we got. Next, we want to talk about the MAGA 180 on free speech. Donald Trump and his inner circle have gone from parading as free speech absolutists to barring access to media organizations that criticize them, sanctioning law firms that represent political opponents,

rigging social media algorithms to push party propaganda, pulling federal grants that include language they oppose, publishing a literal list of banned words, and detaining critics for non-violent protest activities without any judicial protest. Their hypocrisy is so blatant that when John Stewart was talking about it on The Daily Show, I think he finally cracked.

These guys don't give a fuck about. free speech. They care about their speech. Here's Donald Trump on those who would criticize judges that he has appointed. A lot of the judges that I had, if you look at them, they take tremendous abuse, and it's truly interference, in my opinion, and it should be illegal, and it probably is illegal in some form. Yes, criticizing judges. It is interference. It should be illegal. Tremendous abuse. Four days later, not four... days later, not a full French work week later. President Donald Trump just took the truth social

and deemed this judge responding to this decision here, calling him a radical left lunatic of a judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama. He says this judge should be impeached. For hypocrisy, it burns. And are we really still doing the barragee? doing the Barack Hussein Obama thing? Oh, free harambe. Come on, people.

Bemi, help us out, if you can. How the hell do we make sense of the MAGA 180 on free speech? I think it's a really good example of how free speech operates in terms of power. When Trump didn't have power, he wanted free speech to be absolute so he could say whatever he wanted without being punished for it so that he could win the election. and then now he's in power, he needs to make sure that only his narrative is allowed to thrive and therefore he wants to completely silence anybody else. So free speech works for you if you don't have power

and speech speaks works against you if you do have power. And that's why free speech is so essential so that people in power can actually be held to account. That's actually a really simple explanation. It makes total sense. Okay, great. Well, then we can take that story to its next step, which is that this week,

Trump and co, had the nerve to threaten the UK over what it called our lack of free speech. On Sunday, the US State Department released a statement saying it was monitoring the UK case of Livia Torsici Bolt, a woman who was charged for protesting outside an abortion centre and breaching the buffer zone. Peaceful protesting, but this buffer zone is designed specifically to psychologically protect people going for abortions. Now, the US right has expressed outrage.

They've called this an affront to free speech and the Trump administration has reportedly told Kirstama there will be no free trade without free speech. Now, we like to think in the UK that we have a little bit more sense than the Americans or we're more down to earth than the Americans' apologies to any US listeners. But pundits across the UK's right-wing media have spent the week celebrating Trump's attempt to weigh in on our domestic politics. Kelvin McKenzie on GB News said, I thank Donald Trump for his free speech

ultimatum to Britain. A free speech ultimatum from a president who has literally banned words he doesn't like from publication. Andrew Tetonbourne in The Spectator wrote, Donald Trump is right about the UK's backsliding on freedom of expression. This government is not simply indifferent to free speech, it is deeply suspicious of it. And he states with total obliviousness to the irony of this statement, the US position at least comes across as liberal and principled. What? Why are they just not seeing what we're seeing?

It just shows the fundamental bias in how they view things. And so when Trump sees people being kidnapped and black-bagged for criticizing the policies on Palestine, he doesn't see that as a suppression of free speech. He sees that as just standing up for America. When he sees attacks on people who are trying to harass people going for abortions, he sees that as an attack on free speech. I also think there's so much irony in this media

that have branded their shade of conservatism as liberalism, pro-freedom, that they are now celebrating a foreign government trying to weigh in on domestic politics, so much for national sovereignty, right? Like, we leave the EU because we don't want foreign parliaments controlling our policies. Oh, but actually, you know what, if it's magazines,

and if they're really our political allies, then great, bring them in. Yeah, you should have seen the conversation that I had on the BBC a few days ago with Paula London from G.B. News. She actually said that it was a good thing that Trump was punishing Starmer with this tariff because of the free speech issue. So we've got to the point where Brexiteers are ignoring the fact that they've damaged the country mathematically, celebrating when a foreign power punishes us with tariffs, and she said America is a huge ally

and sometimes that means we're just going to have to do what Trump says. You sold this country down the river tore apart British society for a decade on the principle that sovereignty matters more than anything and now in the face of clear economic damage you are saying we have to do what big daddy Trump says.

Oh my God. The hypocrisy, the irrationality. It's so, so blatant. And this is why I really really, think, like, particularly in this topic of free speech, reasonable people need to stand together and start calling out even those of their own political tribe who are weaponising values like free speech to push something totally different. No one say Big Daddy Trump my day.

That's ruined my day. Big Daddy Trump. My apologies. Okay. We definitely have reached our time limit. So before we get kicked out of the studio, Femi, can you tell people where they can follow you and if you have anything to plug? I am on YouTube as Femi underscore sorry. I'm on everywhere as Femmy underscore sorry.

And make sure that you are having a conversation with everybody in your friendship group about how the UK is not a democracy. Because if the majority of votes have no effect on policymaking, we're not a democracy. So Stamer needs to change that. Homework. Thank you for listening. If you want to support Media Storm, you can do so on Patreon for less than a cup of coffee a month. The link is in the show notes and a special shout-outs to everyone in our Patreon community already. We appreciate you so much.

And if you enjoyed this episode, please send it to someone. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow a podcast, so please do tell your friends. You can follow us on social media at Matilda Mal, at Helena Wadia, and follow the show at MediaStorm Pod MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helen Awadier and Matilda Mallinson. The music is by Samfire.