Free speech
Facebook is right. Twitter is wrong
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey opened up a Pandora’s box two days ago by dropping a fact-check on a tweet by…
America has turned into a bad joke
Gstaad Rumours about the virus are flying around this village. First there was talk of a hotel being temporarily…
How far should we go to defend free speech?
This week sees the official launch of the Free Speech Union — an organisation that stands up for the speech…
Why do monsters make such good writers?
Did any of you know that most of the 20th-century monsters — Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Ceausescu, Duvalier, and even the…
Campus free speech is a thing of the past
Not that long ago, the sorts of views that were verboten on a university campus were genuinely out-there and nasty:…
The best response to hate speech is free speech
There’s a broad mainstream consensus on both sides of the Atlantic: Trump’s tweet telling four hard-left minority Congresswomen to ‘go…
Free speech is officially dead in British universities
When I first read about plans for a new academic periodical called The Journal of Controversial Ideas, I got the…
The neo-Marxist takeover of our universities
According to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, America’s universities have succumbed to ‘safetyism’, whereby students are protected from anything that…
Millennials aren’t taking offence. They’re hunting for victims
In a recent column, I vowed to return to a point made in passing. To refresh your memory, the American…
Conservatives are wrong about free speech
‘There. I said it.’ That phrase, and the attitude it strikes, says something pretty specific. It doesn’t just say: here’s…
Peter Hitchens: Why I climbed on my soapbox after refusing to sign a university’s ‘free speech’ contract
Where better to be than in Liverpool on a crisp autumn evening, haranguing an open-air meeting of students? I hadn’t…
Letters
The great divider Sir: Niall Ferguson (‘Tech vs Trump’, 14 October) draws a parallel between the Reformation — powered by the…
The hormone that makes you a liberal halfwit
People who feel unkindly disposed towards economic migrants are chemically imbalanced, according to a study from the University of Bonn.…
How The Satanic Verses failed to burn
This is a book which, as one eyes its lavish illustrations and dips into its elegant prose, looks as if…
The internet’s war on free speech
The web was meant to empower us all. Right now, it’s empowering censors
Send us your entries for our ‘President Erdogan Insulting Poetry Competition’
Pen a foul verse in honour of the Turkish leader and be in the running for a £1,000 poetry prize!
A timely reminder of what junior doctors actually do – and it's not pleasant
All this week Radio Five Live has been giving us an insight into what it is like not just to…
Stepford students’ new target: other Stepford students
Politically correct students are now falling victim to the censorious climate they helped create
There’s a right way to lose at the Oxford Union. I did the wrong way
The way not to win a debate at the Oxford Union, I’ve just discovered, is to start your speech with…
What Scottish professors have to fear from Nicola Sturgeon’s power grab
What Scotland’s professors have to fear from the SNP’s latest bright idea
David Cameron has a very strange idea of freedom
Last Sunday, David Cameron marched through Paris in solidarity, so it seemed, with those who stand up for free speech.…
Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’
Free speech is so last century. Today’s undergraduates demand the ‘right to be comfortable’
So now we know – the BBC is more scared of offending Muslims than gay people
Are there enough black and minority ethnic people on our television screens? The comedian Lenny Henry thinks not and has…
Sorry, but internet trolling will be with us forever
This is not to be a column about Twitter. Can’t abide columns about Twitter. I’ve written a few, I know,…
