Free Speech is an idea ingrained in much of the democratic world, or at least it should be. The problem with free speech is that it is defined by those in power. Those in power are almost always white men, who find reasons to define any activism that might threaten their power as terrorism.

The most poignant and recent example is of a woman standing up to ICE in Minnesota, then as she drove away she was gunned down by an ICE agent. With no ICE agent in her forward view she was murdered, then called a domestic terrorist. Donald Trump, the current President, called her a professional agitator , as if she was just in the area to create problems.

Renee Good lived in the neighbourhood. She was on the way home from dropping her child off at school. She had every right to be there, but because the murder of a US Citizen looks bad for Trump and ICE they work to define her as a domestic terrorist and agitator in the hopes that their misinformation will muddy the waters enough that we start to question if some part of it might be true. Anne Applebaum calls this tactic the fire hose of falsehoods¹.

The autocrat uses the fire hose to get so many falsehoods out there that you give up attempting to understand where the truth lies and fall into nihilism. Many will suggest that the role of fact-checking should stop the false hoods, but checked facts are never as interesting as the original false hood² and people that believe the false hood are rarely susceptible to the truth as it’s presented by someone they view as a high-handed personality showing them the truth.

Loreto tackles the idea that activism is defined by those in power in a very similar way to Desmond Cole does in The Skin We’re In. Cole contends that a central responsibility of the police has been to discipline Black and Indigenous lives when they don’t conform to the quiet rules that the ruling class want enforced³. This means that a Black or Indigenous person protesting is viewed as contravening the system, almost no matter what their actions actually are. They are much more likely to be arrested for the same actions a white person would be ignored for.

For Loreto in this month’s book, free speech means allowing ideas that bring harm to power. That could strip powerful people of some of their power. If the ideas don’t have the possibility to strip power, then are they really radical?

We need to ask ourselves, if individual action is a myth and social media asks us to do nothing and feel good about it then maybe we need to take ourselves to the street in a way that does threaten those in power. Yes we’re going to see police response, because as soon as we exert free speech in a way that challenges power, the institutions of power are brought to bear to crush the opposition.

1. Autocracy Inc Pg 79 ↩︎
2. The Twittering Machine (Chapter 5) ↩︎
3. The Skin We’re In Pg 4 ↩︎