Europe wants to ‘pre-bunk’ you Wokeness is over. Censorship isn't

The legacy of the culture war might be best summed up by the German term “legitimationsprobleme”. Coined as the title of a 1973 book by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, the phrase is usually translated as “legitimation crisis” and describes a general degradation of trust in figures of authority. While the woke movement has never enjoyed popular support, its stranglehold nonetheless persisted because of journalists, academics and those in positions of political power who continually deceived the public in service of the ideology. As its influence wanes, we are left with the task of repairing this damage.

Anyone who has been paying attention will have noticed that those who complain of “misinformation” (unintentional misrepresentation) and “disinformation” (intentional deception) are typically those who have been most responsible for it. The BBC is currently facing a crisis over its airing of a supposedly impartial documentary about Gaza fronted by the son of a Hamas official. One interviewee was heard praising the deceased terrorist leader Yahya Sinwar for his “jihad against the Jews”, while the BBC’s subtitles mistranslated her phrase as “fighting and resisting Israeli forces”.

Then there is the mainstream media’s continual attempts at historical revisionism. Last month, we heard CBS’s Margaret Brennan claiming that the Holocaust was caused not by rabid and genocidal antisemitism, but by the weaponisation of free speech. Around the same time, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was trying to eliminate gay men and women from their own history by insisting that the Stonewall uprising in June 1969 was “a riot by trans people”. The Guardian made the similarly fraudulent claim that the riots were “led by trans women of colour” and that a black trans woman called Marsha P. Johnson “threw the first brick”. By his own admission, Johnson was a drag queen who did not identify as female and was not even present when the riots began. This isn’t journalism; it’s propaganda.

This kind of truth-twisting is an inevitable feature of human discourse, which is why a reliable press is an essential feature of a functioning democracy. Yet just a few weeks ago BBC News was observing the “preferred pronouns” of a rapist of children as young as three years old. In September 2023, Joan Smith wrote a piece for UnHerd about how editors at the Financial Times had instructed her to insert a deliberate untruth into a review to promote the tenets of genderism. The reason for this became clear last March, when whistleblowers at the Financial Times exposed the extent to which the publication is ideologically captured, leaking its “Diversity and Inclusion Toolkit” to writer James Esses. There are few mainstream publications operating today that do not prioritise fealty to this dying ideology over accurate reporting.

The problem of academia is even more pronounced. In the most comprehensive recent survey of academics, the University and Colleges Union found that 56% of its members believed that freedom of speech in higher education was in decline and that “self-censorship is very common”, and 19.1% of respondents in European Union countries admitted to censoring themselves at work, as compared to 35.5% of teaching staff in the United Kingdom. The report outlined how “many staff have had their academic freedom abrogated and thereby been subjected to cruel and degrading treatment by their peers, on account of their academic views” and that the practice of self-censorship was the major factor in preventing “the incidence of bullying, psychology pressure and other unconscionable behaviour from being even higher”.

The conclusion was harrowing: “self-censorship at this level appears to make a mockery of any pretence by universities of being paragons of free speech and that of being advocates of unhindered discourse in the pursuit of knowledge and academic freedom.” In his new book Bad Education, Matt Goodwin calls this the “secret code of silence” in academia — which he compares to the Mafia concept of omertá — by which “no matter how glaringly obvious the crisis becomes, no matter how visibly these once great institutions are failing our young people, you just never, ever tell people on the outside”.

The humanities are not immune either. Recently, I had my own brush with the entrenched ideological thinking of art historians. I had written a piece for the Washington Post about Leonardo da Vinci’s lost masterpiece The Battle of Anghiari, a painting which might possibly still exist behind a fresco in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. For years, experts have been claiming that Leonardo never painted it in the first place, and yet I was able to quote numerous historical accounts from 16th-century writers who claimed to have seen it. Rather than address the evidence, the experts who responded simply restated their flawed hypothesis, as though asserting something multiple times will magically make it true.

A letter to the Washington Post from Francesca Fiorani, professor of art history at the University of Virginia, exemplifies the problem. She telepathically asserts that my argument is based on “obsession”, as though one article in a two-decade writing career qualifies as monomania. Fiorani either could not, or would not, deign to address any aspects of the evidence I presented. I would have welcomed arguments against the authenticity of these sources, but none were forthcoming. She should have heeded Aldous Huxley’s observation that “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored”.

While we might assume that academics would be more objective, there are good reasons why the opposite is often the case. Those working in higher education are particularly susceptible to groupthink. Their work is based on the notion of superior knowledge, and so egos are easily bruised when they are proven wrong.

Moreover, the cleverest among us are also those who are able to rationalise and justify the most improbable of theories. Consider the claim by the Scientific American that the “inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports”. So the reason why men run faster than women has nothing to do with muscle mass, heart size, lung capacity or longer strides, but is attributable to sexist stereotyping. Even a child could explain the flaw in this reasoning.

And while the suggestion that the Covid pandemic was the result of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is now widely accepted as credible, it was not so long ago that it was dismissed by leading experts as a “racist conspiracy theory”. When molecular biologist Alica Chan and writer Matt Ridley published a defence of this theory in their book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times claimed that the authors were placing “a conspiracy theory between hardcovers to masquerade as sober scientific inquiry”. Hiltzik’s certainty was premature. In December 2024, the United States government’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its final report confirming that the lab-leak theory was most likely true.

According to many members of the political class, the solution to the problem of a public that will not accept these fabricated narratives is censorship. Last May, the unelected president of the European Commission – Ursula von der Leyen – announced her intention to create a “European Democracy Shield” to protect EU citizens from online “disinformation”. Speaking at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit, she compared free speech to a virus: “As technology evolves we need to build up societal immunity around information manipulation. Because research has shown that pre-bunking is much more successful than debunking. Pre-bunking is basically the opposite of debunking.” She then added: “In short, prevention is preferable to cure. Perhaps if you think of information manipulation as a virus. Instead of treating an infection, once it has taken hold, that is debunking. It is much better to vaccinate so that the body is inoculated. Pre-bunking is the same approach.”

As a new synonym for “censorship”, “pre-bunking” is up there with “pre-crime”, “thoughtcrime” and “public safety” in the dystopian lexicon. It is precisely this paternalistic attitude among European leaders that vice president J. D. Vance condemned at his speech last month at the Munich Security Conference. The unanswerable retort to state censorship was written by the Roman poet Juvenal almost 2000 ago: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (“who watches the watchmen?”). The authority of the censor presupposes a kind of omniscience. As John Milton put it in his Areopagitica: “How shall the licencers themselves be confided in, unless we can confer upon them, or they assume to themselves above all others in the land, the grace of infallibility and uncorruptedness?”

Most of us have grown weary of those who seem to believe that the “argument from authority” fallacy is a persuasive way to settle a debate. I for one do not trust von der Leyen or any of her ilk to arbitrate on the difference between reality and fiction. I no longer trust academics, the mainstream media or politicians to prioritise facts over convenient falsehoods. As we move into the post-woke era, we are going to have to find a way to rebuild the reputations of our captured institutions. I do not claim to know how this legitimation crisis can be rectified, but it will only be possible once those in authority overcome their contempt for the public and rekindle their respect for the primacy of truth.

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