Speak no Evil
Free speech and rape gangs
There were two important news items out of the UK last week. First, the government announced a ban on all social media platforms for those under 16. That was greeted as a good thing by people like social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has argued that social media is the cause of rising depression and anxiety in young people around the world. Other people, including the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, claimed that the law has little to do with the well-being of children and that the real purpose is to require all UK citizens to use government ID in order to sign-up for social media accounts (which they will now have to do). If you were not aware, the UK currently leads the free world in arresting people for internet speech violations, at around 30 a day. In 2023, there were over 12,000 arrests made in the UK for internet posts that were either “grossly offensive” or “indecent, obscene or menacing character.” This law would obviously make arresting people much easier, as well as frighten most people from posting anything remotely controversial.
I highly recommend watching Pavel Durov’s speech on the topic:
These crackdowns on free speech seem to be mostly related to immigration. Anger over mass migration and demographic change led to the Brexit vote in 2016, and now, ten years later, two new right-wing parties have risen to power on that rising tide of anger. One of the parties, Restore UK, has the explicit goal of remigration - forcing many immigrants in the UK to return home. Part of the rise of these parties was the lifting of speech restrictions on Twitter/X. According to Elon Musk, when he bought Twitter he was offered a secret deal by the UK government to censor certain content in exchange for not having to meet other UK speech regulations, which he refused.
The second news item is the release of the Rape Gang Inquiry Report by MP Rupert Lowe. This report, while politically partisan, documents in great detail the victim statements from the girls (who are almost all white) raped by mostly (80-95% of cases) Pakistani immigrants in so-called grooming gangs. These crimes were already documented by other official government reports, but the witness statements give credence to the claim that much of the sexual abuse was racially and religiously motivated, and often incredibly malicious (sometimes involving torture). Also, the report shows the inaction by the authorities due to fear of being called racist or islamophobic was both reprehensible and cowardly.
This event (going by the official government reports of a several thousand raped) is certainly one of, if not the worst, mass rape events in the developed world since WW2. You might wonder why there was essentially no mainstream news coverage of the new report (even though it has been a popular topic on social media), and why most people in the United States have never even heard of the grooming gangs scandal. Or why, when it was mentioned in the past, we were told by sources such as Wikipedia that it was a moral panic, only for government reports (in June 2025) to later verify the awful truth.
The intelligentsia tend to exist in a certain moral universe - the foundation of which is modern ideals about equality. They see equality as the natural state of humans and inequality in society as being primarily caused by past or present oppression, usually in the form of racism, sexism, or colonialism. In this worldview, some groups of people are oppressors and others are oppressed. This is how the world is portrayed in academia, the news media, and the entertainment industry. Stories like this one challenge those foundations. How would the news media explain how members of an underprivileged minority community raped thousands of girls from the privileged white community for years without anyone stopping them? It calls into question the very foundation of their moral universe and so it must be dismissed.
I often think back to a short opinion piece written several years ago by someone in Hungary, who was trying to explain to people in “the West” why they were so skeptical of mass migration. You would think that people who were raised in an atheistic socialist society would embrace modern liberal ideals. But the opposite is true. The author claims that because they lived in a system where people in authority could not be trusted, they learned to understand reality through their experiences and those of others rather than through the news media. Based on their experiences living under communism, they can see how reality is being “interpreted” by the news media in the West in order to support certain values.
Boris Kalnoky explains:
Since people in the East always assumed that they were being misinformed by politics and the media, they got information in a different way: Neighbors, friends, friends of friends. People in the East talk to each other about what happens to people they know much more than in the West, and they draw conclusions about reality. We understand the world according to what is happening in our environment and do not accept interpretive narratives from “those up there.”
If someone’s children are bullied by migrants in the schoolyard, if women are sexually harassed without this being recorded as a crime, here in the “East“ the news spreads quickly, even if it does not appear in the media at all. And we usually have a very clear opinion; namely that it is not us who are the problem, but the respective migrants, and the politicians who let them into the country. That is true even when most migrants are quite nice, normal people.
Westerners, on the other hand, see the world through the ideals taught to them by teachers, politicians and the media. It is not about reality, but about “values” as a belated consequence of the 1968 movement, which had a lasting impact on the West‘s world of ideas. All people are equal. Misgivings about people from other countries is called racism. Religion is a problem. Pride and love for one’s own country is nationalism.
In the East we see it differently: People are not equal, and the peoples of the world are not “brothers.” Politics is never about “solidarity,” but fights for power and interests. We know these phrases from the communist dictatorship’s slogans. We know that they are hollow. People in the East are interested in reality, those in the West want to adapt reality to their “values” and therefore often do not recognize them at all.
The last sentence of that quote is something that we need to remember. We have gotten so used to having reality filtered through certain values that we often don’t even recognize the values as separate from reality anymore. We just assume that reality happens to match those values. When it doesn’t, our first instinct is to ignore it and our next instinct is to censor people who discuss it.