It seems like every few days there’s another incident involving no platforming or censorship, where a prominent journalist or public figure is unable to talk at a university because of some kind of vicious, violent, student-led protest.
Here at The Stepford Student, we chuckle as we go about our daily lives in our protective cotton cocoons, glad that with every fresh clamping down on robust intellectual inquiry our utopia of silent reverence to the Hivemind grows nearer.
As such, it takes us by surprise that after every incident comes a seemingly inevitable backlash. There’s always some kind of indignant reaction, and the whole thing balloons into a hypertoxic, thoroughly tedious and draining controversy quicker than you can say ‘thinkpiece’.
With each increasingly draining and exhausting incident, you know what these people bring up in their arguments, again and again and again?
‘Freedom of speech’. Freedom of god damn fucking Speech.
So, we at The Stepford Student say: Enough is enough. We’re sick to death of people complaining about their ‘freedom of speech’ being eroded. It’s boring, it’s repetitive, and it has to stop.
Today we launch our campaign to lead the fightback. Our demands are simple, and our voices are strong (though, crucially, not free):
Nobody should ever mention or talk about freedom of speech ever, ever again. Ever.
Magazines like Spiked and pundits like Brendan O’Neill need to be shut down, fined, and un-freedom-of-speeched.
Boycott the Spectator – articles like their original one on students being censorious should be eradicated from the internet, printed out and shredded, ritually.
We want fresh-faced freshers to come to university with no conception of their ability to ever say anything, ever.
It should be a criminal offence to quote Voltaire.
We appeal to all our readers to sign our petition now, to make uttering the phrase ‘freedom of speech’ in print, in a public space, or in a debating chamber illegal.
Please – share the petition with the hashtags #GloriousCensorious and #BanFreedomOfSpeech (although actually maybe don’t use that last one as it contains the phrase ‘freedom of speech’)
When the petition reaches enough signatures we hope to present it to the reconvened House of Commons so that whoever is in charge following the election can begin to write and then pass laws which follow our demands.
The Laws should:
- Ban anyone from writing articles or papers about the concept ‘freedom of speech’.
- Ban anyone from writing articles complaining that they’ve been denied a platform, censored, or boycotted in any way.
- Ban anyone from commenting on a Facebook post with a ‘freedom of speech’ argument.
- Ban anyone from tweeting about ‘freedom of speech’.
- Ban anyone from drunkenly arguing in their local pub about ‘freedom of speech’.
- Ban anyone from writing, talking or tweeting about this law once it has been passed, because it relates to ‘freedom of speech’.
No more, we say. No more will we suffer through the ignominious tedium of having to argue with anyone about why we don’t want to argue with them about an issue.
We are faceless, we are many, we cannot think, we cannot be reasoned with, and if you ever even whisper ‘freedom of speech’ quietly under your breath in the shower of your private home ever again, then we are coming for you.
Our petition can be found here.