Graham Norton Is Wrong About Free Speech

And a lot of other things...

Graham Norton has once again dipped a clumsy toe into the culture war, telling the mighty John Cleese off for talking about cancel culture.

It seems the latest development in cancel culture is that we’re not even allowed to talk about it. Is this the first rule of cancel culture club?

Norton previously had his rather stupid say on JK Rowling, in an odd interview where he decided it was overall better to have Rowling on his show, whilst clearly condemning her views and virtue signalling to the violent trans activist left.

In the same interview he bizarrely claimed ‘It’s very hard to find a Right-wing guest and, if you do, the audience probably don’t want to see them’, and admitted to having ‘a liberal agenda’.

Now he has offered his thoughts on the free speech debate, and it has gone about as well as you’d expect for someone who made his name talking about dildos.

He says of Cleese, ‘It must be very hard to be a man of a certain age who's been able to say whatever he likes for years, and now suddenly there’s some accountability.’

To those who follow this stuff, the word ‘accountability’ is already a mild red flag, as it is one of many once solid and respectable words and phrases that have now been hollowed of all meaning and turned into empty signals that you are adhering to the prevailing ideology (see also ‘learning’, ‘educating myself’, ‘the science’ etc).

Another is ‘consequences’, which he uses in the very next sentence: ‘It’s free speech, but not consequence free.  I’m aware of the things I say.’

Are you though, Graham? Because if you were, you’d be aware that what you are saying is both trite and pernicious.

Note he also uses the classic ‘free speech BUT’. Anyone who uses that formulation, or the phrase ‘free speech has consequences’ is only doing one thing: trying to reduce or destroy free speech.

That is because our conception of free speech already has restraints built into it, as does America’s First Amendment.

For example the latter already excludes ‘fighting words’, which the U.S. Supreme Court has defined as words which ‘by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.’

What people like Norton actually mean, therefore, is that they want to add further restrictions of their own. Restrictions that are very unlikely to be as wise or nuanced as the ones we already have.

I will go with the rich English tradition of civil liberties, or the wisdom of America’s Founding Fathers, over a wildly overpaid BBC stooge whose biggest achievement is making Hollywood celebrities appear slightly less mentally ill than they are.

Though to be fair Norton has also said, in a reference to the trans furore, ‘My voice adds absolutely nothing to that discussion.’

If only he would extend this insight to other matters.