The Great Unravelling

How We’re All Losing Our Voices (And Our Minds)

On free speech, moral panics, and the curious way we’ve convinced ourselves that silencing people makes us safer

There’s something darkly comic about the state of free speech in 2025. We’ve managed to create a world where a comedian gets arrested for making jokes, whilst actual criminals run entire disinformation campaigns with impunity. We’ve built systems so sophisticated they can spy on our WhatsApp messages, yet so brittle they collapse the moment someone says something awkward at a dinner party.

It’s as if we’ve collectively decided that the solution to bad speech is no speech at all, and then we act surprised when democracy starts making strange rattling noises.

When Comedy Becomes Criminal

Let’s start with the obvious lunacy: Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, getting arrested over trans rights discourse. Now, I’m not here to litigate Linehan’s particular brand of obsession; frankly, anyone who spends that much time on Twitter needs better hobbies. But the moment we decided that being obnoxious online warranted handcuffs, we crossed a line that should have had warning tape wrapped around it.

The problem isn’t that hate speech laws exist. The problem is that we’ve forgotten the difference between speech that genuinely incites violence and speech that simply makes us uncomfortable. There’s a Grand Canyon of difference between shouting “let’s burn down the mosque” and saying something crass about gender identity. Yet our legal system seems to treat them with roughly the same severity.

This isn’t about protecting anyone; it’s about protecting ourselves from the messy reality that people sometimes say things we don’t like. And that protection is costing us dearly. The Campus Canaries

If you want to see where society is heading, look at university campuses. They’re the canaries in the coal mine of free expression, and right now, they’re looking distinctly peaky.

Columbia and Barnard hitting rock bottom in free speech rankings tells us everything we need to know about how we’re raising the next generation. These aren’t backwater institutions run by authoritarians—these are supposedly elite centres of learning, places where bright young minds should be wrestling with difficult ideas and emerging stronger for it.

Instead, we’ve created intellectual safe spaces that are about as safe as a paper boat in a hurricane. Students arrive expecting to be challenged and leave having learned that the most dangerous thing you can do is think out loud.

The cruel irony is that this generation will inherit a world that desperately needs people capable of having difficult conversations. Climate change, inequality, and technological disruption none of these problems will be solved by people who’ve been trained to shut down the moment someone says something they find problematic.

Digital Dystopia, Served Fresh Daily

Online, things are even more surreal. We’ve created platforms that can detect “problematic” content faster than you can say “algorithmic bias,” yet somehow miss actual terrorist recruitment videos for months at a time. We’ve built surveillance systems that would make Orwell weep, then handed the keys to governments who promise they’ll only use them for good.

The result? A digital landscape where journalists get monitored, activists get throttled, and ordinary people self-censor because they’re never quite sure where the line is. Meanwhile, the people actually causing harm, the grifters, the genuine extremists, the foreign interference campaigns, adapt faster than the systems designed to catch them.

It’s like trying to stop a flood with a sieve whilst wondering why the water keeps getting through.

The Protest Problem

Then there’s the right to protest, which has become a masterclass in selective enforcement. Palestine protests? That’s incitement. Environmental activism? Domestic terrorism. Tommy Robinson rallies? Well, that’s complicated, isn’t it?

The pattern is depressingly predictable: governments invoke “public order” and “security” to shut down causes they don’t like, whilst wrapping themselves in free speech rhetoric when it suits them. The criteria isn’t what’s being said, it’s who’s saying it and whether their message threatens the status quo.

This isn’t how free societies are supposed to work. The right to protest isn’t meant to be conditional on having the “correct” opinions. It’s meant to be the pressure valve that stops societies from exploding. Remove it, and you don’t get peace; you get powder kegs.

The Ideological Pincer Movement

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of our current predicament is how free speech has become a political football. The right invokes it to defend genuinely awful positions, then abandons it the moment someone criticises them. The left champions it for progressive causes, then supports restrictions when conservatives start talking.

Neither side actually believes in free speech as a principle; they believe in free speech for people who agree with them. The result is a race to the bottom where everyone’s civil liberties get sacrificed on the altar of partisan point-scoring.

This isn’t sustainable. Rights that only apply to people you like aren’t rights at all, they’re privileges. And privileges can be revoked.

The Misinformation Muddle

The cherry on top of this whole mess is the “disinformation” panic. Yes, false information can cause harm. Yes, foreign interference is real. But we’ve somehow convinced ourselves that the solution is to appoint governments and tech companies as the arbiters of truth.

This is a spectacularly bad idea for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who’s lived through the last few years. Remember “lab leak theory”? Remember “natural immunity”? Remember any number of things that were “misinformation” until they suddenly weren’t?

The problem with giving anyone the power to decide what’s true is that they’ll inevitably get it wrong. And when they do, the correction mechanism, open debate, alternative viewpoints, the messy process of democratic discourse has already been shut down.

Where We Stand

So here we are in 2025, having successfully created a world where everyone’s afraid to speak their mind, yet somehow we’re all angrier and more divided than ever. We’ve built the most sophisticated information systems in human history, then used them primarily to silence each other.

The result isn’t safety, it’s fragility. A society that can’t handle disagreement isn’t strong; it’s brittle. And brittle things break when pressure is applied.

The tragedy is that free speech was never meant to be comfortable. It was meant to be necessary. The point wasn’t to protect popular opinions; those don’t need protection. The point was to ensure that when societies were getting things wrong, someone would be allowed to say so.

We’ve forgotten that discomfort isn’t harm, that being offended isn’t being oppressed, and that the cure for bad speech has always been more speech, not less.

The Road Back

The way forward isn’t complicated, though it is difficult. We need to remember that free expression isn’t a luxury for good times; it’s essential infrastructure for navigating bad ones. We need to stop treating hurt feelings as human rights violations. We need to rebuild our tolerance for disagreement and our capacity for nuanced thinking.

Most importantly, we need to stop pretending that silencing people makes problems go away. It doesn’t. It just drives them underground, where they fester and mutate into something far worse.

The choice isn’t between free speech and safety, it’s between free speech and the illusion of safety. And illusions, however comforting, have a nasty habit of collapsing when you need them most.

We’re running out of time to remember this. The question is whether we’ll figure it out before we lose our voices entirely.

This is the messy, uncomfortable truth about where we stand. The only question is whether we’re brave enough to face it.

Until Next Time