Goldstein addresses "doublethink," a phenomenon that's prominent in today's world. In America the "tolerant" leftists shout down viewpoints that differ from their own. And yet they'll insist that they hold the moral high ground since they're so tolerant. They're able to hold contradicting thoughts without noticing the contradiction...doublethink.

Free speech is Scott Morrison’s chance to lead like Menzies
By STEPHEN CHAVURA
AUGUST 31, 2018
Now that we have a Liberal leadership that tends more towards the conservative-liberal tradition of Sir Robert Menzies, can we expect the protections of freedom of speech that were promised during the same-sex marriage debate?

If Scott Morrison has any hope of rebuilding the support base of the Liberal Party then he needs to recover Menzies’ liberal-conservative approach. The Prime Minister would do well to honour the deeply conservative instincts of many voters and the historic party membership base by opposing the increasingly authoritarian political correctness characterising so much of the Left. A good place to begin is freedom of speech.

Now that the new Left has ensconced itself in our culture-forming institutions — universities, schools, public service sector, corporations — it sees freedom of speech as a pernicious force that must be eradicated.

Ironically, conservatism has become the new radicalism and the cultural Marxists are worried.

The right to free speech, to the cultural Marxist, is like property rights to the classical Marxist — a mere pretext for those in power to maintain their privilege. The identity-politics Left dreams of a cultural revolution in which people no longer think in LGBTQ-phobic, racist and patriarchal ways. Of course, by LGBTQ-phobic they mean belief in traditional marriage or criticism of transgender ideology. By racist they mean being critical of multiculturalism. And by patriarchal they mean anything that questions feminism.

Political correctness, cultural Marxism, identity politics — call it what you like — can never embrace freedom of speech, because it ultimately seeks to shape and control culture, which cannot be shaped and controlled so long as one of the greatest shapers of ­culture — speech — is beyond its control.

Doctors who question transgender ideology will be harassed, activists and intellectuals who question multiculturalism will be demonised, conservative intellectuals will be no-platformed, all with the co-operation of the police, universities, and human rights and anti-discrimination commissions.

Take the case of David van Gend, a Queensland GP who has come under scrutiny by the Medical Board of Australia for tweeting against transgender ideology.

The board received a complaint against van Gend’s views and is demanding he explain how his views promote the health of members of the LGBTQ community.

The board has gone from a committee that scrutinises the credentials of doctors to one that scrutinises their thought and speech on public issues. In other words, criticism of transgender ideology falls foul of the diversity revolution and therefore must be stamped out by destroying the livelihoods of outspoken opponents.

The University of Western Australia refused to allow a talk by a prominent critic of transgender ideology on the grounds that the event could result in violence perpetrated by leftist protesters.

Just as Marxist revolutions pushed forward regardless of whether or not they were good for the poor, so the diversity revolution seeks to silence its critics despite the fact that gender-confused children can only benefit from ­robust debate regarding treatment within the medical community.

The same sort of thugs’ veto that was allowed at UWA has been imposed by Victoria Police on the organisers of the recent Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux speaking tour. The organisers were presented with a bill for $67,842.50 for the police personnel required to subdue Antifa. That’s right, the organisers, not the violent mob, were pursued for the costs imposed on the police budget. Victim blaming, anyone?

These cases are not, strictly speaking, examples of speech rights being abrogated, but they are examples of speech rights being heavily taxed to the point of being nearly impossible to enjoy without significant cost to career and livelihood. Conservatives have the right to free speech just as long as they are prepared to be bankrupt or unemployed. As long as the identity-left sees the great problem of modern society in terms of oppressive thoughts and speech directed at a class of victims, then the Left will see freedom of speech as nothing more than mere pretext for continued white heterosexual male oppression.

For conservatives, freedom of speech promises governmental accountability, robust public debate for sound public policy, and a more rational civic culture where a true diversity of views may be expressed for the sake of a considered and informed public. And yet just as communism needed to eradicate property rights to bring about its economic uniformity, so the new Left needs to eradicate freedom of speech to bring about the thought uniformity that, ironically, constitutes its diversity utopia. Freedom of speech and thought conformity coexist no more easily than property rights and economic equality.

The looming crisis of freedom of speech in Australia — nay, the liberal-democratic West — is a tremendous opportunity for Morrison or any leader of the Coalition who wishes to recapture the conservative support base that carried John Howard through four election victories. Political correctness is a form of leftist puritanism very much at odds with a still lingering Australian antipathy to wowser authoritarianism.

Although Morrison cannot necessarily intervene in the medical board or in universities, he can send a strong message to the nation that the trend of suspicion ­towards free speech is both pernicious and unacceptable.

A good start would be to speak out for the liberal right to religious freedom once the Ruddock review is released. Furthermore, taking the next opportunity to either amend or abolish 18C would send a strong message to the historic Liberal support base that the party is no longer happy to stand by and watch traditional liberal-conservative values such as freedom of speech be trashed by an increasingly authoritarian Left.

If Morrison can move the Liberal Party in such a direction then he has every right to place his leadership firmly within the best legacy of Menzies.

Stephen Chavura is an author and lecturer teaching history at Campion College, Sydney.

Orwell includes parts of Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism in Ch. 19. Goldstein's lecturing tone is intrusive, breaks up the flow of the story, but why not, 2/3rds of the way through? Why not look at the world through another character's eyes for a while, before starting the nightmare ride through part 3?

Goldstein addresses "doublethink," a phenomenon that's prominent in today's world. In America the "tolerant" leftists shout down viewpoints that differ from their own. And yet they'll insist that they hold the moral high ground since they're so tolerant. They're able to hold contradicting thoughts without noticing the contradiction...doublethink.

EDIT: 1984 deals with historical revisionism. In the news today:

Robert B. Reich: Can we get an annulment instead of an impeachment?
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinio ... story.html

I'll engage in some whataboutism here. How should we look at the millions of evangelical voters who preferred Donald Trump? Was it for his devotion to biblical values like showing charity to all, loving his enemies, welcoming strangers, speaking the truth, and being faithful to his wives? Trump embodies none of those values upheld by evangelicals, yet they support him as strongly as any other voting group....

...You'll have to say what point you intended with the Balt Sun link. It isn't clear to me.

Evangelicals are forgiving. Trump says he's changed, and they're giving him a chance. It's what Jesus would have done. Also, Trump espouses personal responsibility, and Evangelicals like that.

Robert Reich (the writer of the Baltimore Sun piece) essentially wants to "unperson" Trump, as they do to people in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Reich used to be fairly levelheaded. It's a shame to see him lose his mind.

So many articles and videos make me think of Nineteen Eighty-Four now. The video below is good. At about 3:15 is something that reminded me of the Eurasia/Eastasia war switch. Comey of the FBI was hated by Hillary supporters, but then Trump fired him and Hillary supporters had to be re-educated to think of him as their friend. An excellent example of brainwashing using mass media:

Australia has just had a change of Prime Minister from Malcolm Turnbull to Scott Morrison, with conservatives hoping that Morrison will be more active in support of agendas such as freedom of speech, in view of this Orwellian syndrome of political correctness becoming a method of thought control.

By STEPHEN CHAVURA can we expect the protections of freedom of speech that were promised during the same-sex marriage debate?

The Prime Minister would do well to honour the deeply conservative instincts of many voters and the historic party membership base by opposing the increasingly authoritarian political correctness characterising so much of the Left.

The right to free speech, to the cultural Marxist, is like property rights to the classical Marxist — a mere pretext for those in power to maintain their privilege.

The identity-politics Left dreams of a cultural revolution in which people no longer think in LGBTQ-phobic, racist and patriarchal ways. Of course, by LGBTQ-phobic they mean belief in traditional marriage or criticism of transgender ideology. By racist they mean being critical of multiculturalism. And by patriarchal they mean anything that questions feminism.

Political correctness, cultural Marxism, identity politics — call it what you like — can never embrace freedom of speech, because it ultimately seeks to shape and control culture, which cannot be shaped and controlled so long as one of the greatest shapers of ­culture — speech — is beyond its control.

Take the case of David van Gend, a Queensland GP who has come under scrutiny by the Medical Board of Australia for tweeting against transgender ideology.

The board received a complaint against van Gend’s views and is demanding he explain how his views promote the health of members of the LGBTQ community.

The board has gone from a committee that scrutinises the credentials of doctors to one that scrutinises their thought and speech on public issues. In other words, criticism of transgender ideology falls foul of the diversity revolution and therefore must be stamped out by destroying the livelihoods of outspoken opponents.

The University of Western Australia refused to allow a talk by a prominent critic of transgender ideology on the grounds that the event could result in violence perpetrated by leftist protesters.

the diversity revolution seeks to silence its critics despite the fact that gender-confused children can only benefit from ­robust debate regarding treatment within the medical community.

The same sort of thugs’ veto that was allowed at UWA has been imposed by Victoria Police on the organisers of the recent Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux speaking tour. The organisers were presented with a bill for $67,842.50 for the police personnel required to subdue Antifa. That’s right, the organisers, not the violent mob, were pursued for the costs imposed on the police budget. Victim blaming, anyone?

These cases are not, strictly speaking, examples of speech rights being abrogated, but they are examples of speech rights being heavily taxed to the point of being nearly impossible to enjoy without significant cost to career and livelihood. Conservatives have the right to free speech just as long as they are prepared to be bankrupt or unemployed.

As long as the identity-left sees the great problem of modern society in terms of oppressive thoughts and speech directed at a class of victims, then the Left will see freedom of speech as nothing more than mere pretext for continued white heterosexual male oppression.

And yet just as communism needed to eradicate property rights to bring about its economic uniformity, so the new Left needs to eradicate freedom of speech to bring about the thought uniformity that, ironically, constitutes its diversity utopia. Freedom of speech and thought conformity coexist no more easily than property rights and economic equality.

Enforced political correctness and one voice advocating annulling Trump's presidency are small stuff compared to LIES, which are the very heart of the uber-totalitarian system of 1984. I'd refer anyone else to the Wash. Post's tally of lies Trump has told, but know you'd claim that was a lie itself.

There was an article on Jeff Sessions, liberal hero. The hero moniker seemed to be tongue-in-cheek, but it's true that some folks--and whole departments--that formerly got no liberal love now receive liberal sympathy and even admiration.

Moral censure is hardly "Orwellian". Most proponents of free speech believe that the more people are exposed to different opinions, the more they will reflect and decide. But if we somehow rule out any opinion which censures other views, have we not closed the door against that possibility?

Of course people may think a thing even without hearing it as an opinion from others, but a good part of current leftist analysis is critiquing unconscious bias, and asking people to reflect about it. That would be precisely the type of views that are much less likely to spontaneously arise without hearing someone else say it.

There was a movement, for awhile, to morally censure Masters and Johnson for asking people about their sex lives. If people didn't know that others engaged in behavior that violates norms, then they would be less likely to engage in it themselves. That isn't Orwellian. In fact it has been the default for millennia. It does oppose free speech, of a certain kind. Most of us can recognize it as advocating censorship. Yet where were the advocates of "religious liberty" when that proposal came down the line.

The right to free speech, to the cultural Marxist, is like property rights to the classical Marxist — a mere pretext for those in power to maintain their privilege.

sometimes the right to free speech is just used as a pretext for privilege. The real test is whether a "side" is just as open to permitting ideas they disagree with as they are to permitting their views to be heard.

I am certainly not up on the state of free speech in Australia, but I would argue for "de-platforming" segregationists and white supremacists in the U.S., but not for preventing them from publishing their hate speech. We are not obligated to support stupidity or oppression, but that doesn't mean we prevent their advocates from expressing their views.

Marriage is a good thing - why would it have to be "traditional" to be good?

Are there no questions about feminism that don't support patriarchy? Last I heard feminists were criticizing each other. Isn't that "questioning feminism"? Does this person really believe that people don't do their own thinking on racism and multiculturalism, independent of claims by a few academics that you have to be for one or the other?

So there are no people in these categories who have faith in persuasion?

Wait, this is implying there are no medical issue involved.

If a person speaks out against vaccinations, claiming there are studies linking them to pernicious effects, a medical board would be doing its job to ask the person to back it up. I don't know what van Gend said or whether there were medical issues involved, but the complaining opinion piece doesn't bother to say.

This is just an illustration, in the author's mind, of "honouring the deeply-held conservative instincts of many voters." In the author's view, it doesn't matter if there was a medical issue involved, what matters is that the medical board is taking a view that many people disagree with. Call me elitist, but my default is to trust the experts.

This point about the relation between political correctness, moral censure and Orwellian trends is not so simple. Conservatives are not trying to deny freedom of speech to the politically correct new puritans, only to counter how those puritanical views exercise a chilling effect on free thought, how the bullying by the politically correct shuts down the public square in its effort to prevent exposure to different opinions. It is the politically correct who most prominently try to shame others for thoughtcrime.

Sure, but this line about unconscious bias easily bleeds over into policing of thought, into an active distortion of events in line with a political agenda, as seen in the vigorous defence of Serena Williams at the US Tennis Open.

Religious Liberty is used in politics in relation to moral opposition to abortion, gay marriage and euthanasia, and support for the moral primacy of the traditional nuclear family as a social ideal. It is about the defence of traditional Christianity, not an open slather for any wacky new polyamorous religion to be treated as equal.

People simply don’t want their conservative opinions treated as morally repugnant and beneath contempt, or to have their children indoctrinated at school with liberal ideology with no comeback.

Indeed, and doesn’t that show the moral vacuity of Marxism?

I don’t think cultural Marxism provides a useful framework for reform advocacy, since it whips up two minute hatred in ways that can be dangerous.

The US First Amendment gives far more protection to free speech than our laws in Australia, where government has been unable to repeal laws that criminalise statements just for giving offence.

The value system at play is the claim that for parents to raise their own children is a social ideal. The problem is that when a wide range of alternative household structures are presented as equally admirable, the ability to teach the value of raising your own children is compromised. Orwell puts this nicely in his description of children as spies for the state.

There was a controversy on this in Australia with the head of our Human Rights Commission expressing sorrow that people are free to say what they like in their own homes. No wonder people see human rights as a stalking horse for state intrusion by Big Brother.

The entire point is that rational persuasion is subordinated to the strategy of the long march through the institutions, the indoctrination of children with a worldview that demonises traditional values and achievements. The risks in this subversive strategy involve the loss of understanding of genuinely valuable principles, and a general undermining of the legitimacy of cultural principles such as merit.

This is not about anti-vaccination kooks, but a medical doctor and by implication a prominent politician banned from discussing evidence that gender transition hormone therapy could nearly double the risk of heart attack or stroke.

It absolutely does matter that there is a medical issue, that children are encouraged to experiment with gender fluidity at an age where they do not understand the risks. The “experts” in this case are revolutionary Marxists like Roz Ward who has used an anti-bullying program as cover to introduce compulsory radical gay indoctrination for primary school children.

a Jewish primary school was threatened with closure by a state organ because it refused the demand of the Orwellian-named OFSTED to teach that gender reassignment is a morally equal lifestyle. The organ backed down after world outcry, but it shows the agenda.

I'll engage in some whataboutism here. How should we look at the millions of evangelical voters who preferred Donald Trump? Was it for his devotion to biblical values like showing charity to all, loving his enemies, welcoming strangers, speaking the truth, and being faithful to his wives? Trump embodies none of those values upheld by evangelicals, yet they support him as strongly as any other voting group.

What we have here and with your example is the cognitive dissonance that Noah Yuval Harari identifies as an inherent part of human cognition, essential, in fact, to the dynamism of our culture. I don't know that I agree with that last part, but it's certain that the appearance of hypocrisy is as old as our species. Orwell takes this capacity and fashions a specific tool used by totalitarians to control reality, called doublethink.

we have to watch out that our freedoms are not stolen by either of the polar factions.