When the Window Opened
The dangerous rhetoric of Jacinda Ardern, Starmer, Carney, Macron and other political figures.
When Jacinda Ardern — former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Davos luminary, and global emblem of empathetic governance — described free speech as a potential “weapon of war,” she did not stumble.
She revealed something.
In that phrase, the mask slipped just enough for us to glimpse the instinct beneath it: the belief that speech is not a liberty to be defended but a force to be managed. That citizens are not sovereign thinkers but variables in need of calibration. That stability requires supervision.
For that clarity, we should be almost grateful.
Because moments like this illuminate more than policy; they illuminate temperament. They show us how today’s political class — not just in Wellington, but in Ottawa, Paris, London, Washington — increasingly thinks.
They believe they are stewards of order. They believe they are curators of truth. They believe society is safer when filtered through their judgment.
It is revealing. It is instructive.
Thank you, Jacinda.
She warned that online speech can shape reality. That misinformation may persuade citizens that a war is “legal and noble.” That climate change might be denied. That “hateful and dangerous rhetoric” may erode human rights. Such forces, she argued, “cause chaos” and weaken the collective strength of nations.
The tone is calm. The vocabulary is responsible.
But the framing is radical.
The threat she describes is not violence. It is a belief.
If citizens conclude that a war is just when leaders insist it is not, that becomes “destabilising.” If they question the urgency or framing of climate policy, that too is branded as destabilising. If they scrutinise prevailing human rights doctrines, destabilising once more.
And yet the deeper instability does not arise from disagreement. It arises from the certainty that disagreement itself is intolerable.
The “weapon” is persuasion that contradicts leadership.
And once speech is framed as weaponry, regulation becomes defence.
She admits she cannot yet define the precise solution — but speaks with “complete certainty” that the problem cannot be ignored.
Complete certainty.
That is what should alarm us. Certainty is a dangerous register for a politician. It implies finality. It implies authority over truth. It implies that dissent is not merely disagreement but a defect.
Let us assume sincerity. Let us grant that she believes misinformation corrodes democracy. That she believes social cohesion is fragile. That she believes she is acting in good faith.
That is precisely the problem.
Because once a leader concludes that dissent weakens society's collective strength, free speech ceases to be foundational. It becomes conditional. It becomes subordinate to policy.
In a free society, error is corrected by argument. Falsehood is defeated by evidence. Citizens persuade one another. The public square is turbulent because liberty is turbulent.
The managerial instinct distrusts turbulence.
If citizens can be persuaded of the “wrong” interpretation of a war, perhaps such persuasion must be limited. If citizens can be persuaded that climate policy is misguided, perhaps such narratives require filtering. If citizens question emerging social doctrines, perhaps that rhetoric requires supervision.
She speaks of research. Of tools. Understanding how information is curated. Of defending collective strength.
The premise is clear: society is safer when information flows are managed by people like her — people who believe they possess a clearer, more responsible understanding than the general public.
And that is not a new idea. It echoes an older, more dangerous claim: that a morally enlightened class has access to truths the ordinary citizen cannot grasp. The revolutionary vanguard once called it class consciousness — a higher awareness that justified directing, correcting, and, when necessary, silencing the masses for their own good.
The language today is softer. It speaks of “curation,” “harm reduction,” and “collective strength.” But the structure is familiar. An elite defines reality. The public is deemed susceptible. Dissent becomes destabilisation.
The difference is rhetorical, not structural.
Then it was the Party that knew best.
Now it is the managerial class.
In both cases, the assumption is the same: that society is safer when filtered through those who consider themselves more enlightened than the people they govern.
This instinct is not hers alone. Leaders across the ideological spectrum share it. They differ in tone, not in impulse. Each believes certain narratives are too destabilising to circulate freely. Each believes stability requires guardrails.
They are not villains.
They are certain.
“Misinformation.”
“Disinformation.”
“Harmful rhetoric.”
These words sound clinical. They are elastic. They depend entirely on authority.
Who decides what is false?
Who decides what is harmful?
Who decides when scepticism becomes sabotage?
The bridge from certainty to policing speech is short. The bridge from policing speech to eroding other freedoms is shorter still. Once speech is conditional, every other liberty rests on administrative discretion.
Free speech is not one value among many.
It is foundational. It sits at the bottom of the structure. It protects the right to criticise climate policy, to defend a war, to question human rights doctrine, and to challenge leadership itself.
If you weaken the foundation because you distrust the occupants, the house does not stand stronger. It collapses.
Politicians will always believe they are acting for the common good. They will always believe they see dangers more clearly than the crowd. They will always be tempted to substitute their judgment for public contestation.
What should alarm us is not conspiracy. It is language that carries the confidence of the final truth. It is the inappropriate certainty of those who wield power.
When Jacinda Ardern called free speech a “weapon of war,” she did not announce a policy of censorship.
She exposed a governing instinct: that liberty is admirable until it interferes with consensus.
And that instinct is not theoretical to me.
I have watched a senior academic administrator — the Vice Provost of the University of Guelph-Humber, Melanie Spencer-Ariemma — suspend me, shut down my communication with staff, faculty, and students, and imply that my words were too dangerous to be heard.
No open debate. No meaningful examination. Just a presumption: this speech is harmful; therefore, it must be contained.
At the same time, a man who publicly described Jews as filth, subhuman, satanic, devil worshippers — thousands of posts — was treated as a credible moral authority in the process that ended my career. When I described Hamas as Nazis, referencing their historical ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and documented ideological sympathies with National Socialism, it was labelled misinformation.
Not investigated. Not debated. Simply declared false.
That is what certainty does when it is fused with institutional power. It does not argue. It asserts. It does not test claims. It presumes bad faith.
And the larger danger is not personal.
I am, at most, a canary in a coal mine. What happened to me affects very few people. But the logic behind it — the conviction that certain speech is too destabilising to permit — scales easily.
Universities are granted wide discretion. Governments defer. Legislatures consider expanding categories of prohibited expression. Each step is justified as protection.
The bridge from certainty to policing speech is short.
The bridge from policing speech to weakening every other foundational liberty is shorter still.
Free speech is not protected because it produces tidy outcomes. It is protected precisely because leaders are fallible. However compassionate, however intelligent, however certain — no one is entitled to curate reality for everyone else.
That is why it is called foundational.
You can debate policy. You can criticise governments. You can defend or oppose wars. But if the foundation is pulled out because those in power distrust the conclusions citizens might reach, the structure above it does not become safer.
It collapses.
And when it does, it will not be because of chaos from below.
It will be because of certainty from above.
Pull out the foundation, and the house falls — no matter how benevolent the architect.
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