Tyranny 360

Since 2020, the Free Speech Union (FSU) has been protecting ordinary people from being cancelled for their lawful beliefs. As a Director of the FSU, Dr Ben Jones has been involved in helping thousands of members, including students, feminists, liberal academics, mainstream conservatives, advocates for Palestine, pro-Israelis, physicists, supermarket workers, army officers, nurses, teachers, businessmen, authors, cleaners... people from every conceivable walk of life, who would agree with each other about little. Britain is unfree. The decline of Christianity, attempts to fill that void, the state's mismanagement of multiculturalism, and the arrival of American identity and equity politics have created a perfect storm of hostile conditions to freedom of speech. The resulting censorship trilemma is not like the censorship of old. It is far more insidious, intractable and unsettling. It is a 360-degree authoritarianism, not only imposed from the top, but by the private sector, across social media, and in the breakdown of divisions between public and private. Tyranny 360 explores what happens when a bewildered society loses its orienting mission and ideology - its religion, or more accurately its religare - leading to ratcheting, neo-blasphemy laws as new social norms rapidly emerge, stifling freedom of speech as people fear falling foul of disorienting new orthodoxies. This isn't a book about any one element of this crisis: the demise of the old religare, woke, Islamist extremism, the policing of multiculturalism. But about how all of these factors have come together to create a perfect storm. This is not a fleeting, merely topical book about a passing crisis: the structural forces which have produced this crisis are locked in, and the question of how to preserve liberalism and its attendant freedoms will be the challenge of a generation.