Nafeez Ahmed’s investigation reveals that the Government’s new proposal is inspired by attempts to suppress free speech about racism
The Education Secretary’s proposal to regulate free speech at universities by appointing a national ‘free speech champion’ at the Office for Students (OfS) came from an academic defender of white identity politics who has argued that ethnic diversity in itself increases “white threat perceptions”.
Professor Eric Kaufmann, of Birkbeck College, is an advisor to the Free Speech Union run by Toby Young – the disgraced former OfS appointee who resigned from the role after critics highlighted his history of bigoted tweets.
Kaufmann first proposed the idea of a “national academic freedom champion” at the OfS to investigate alleged breaches of free speech rights in a co-authored report published by the Policy Exchange think tank in November 2019. Kaufmann joined the advisory board of the Free Speech Union when it launched in February 2020, when Young publicly endorsed Kaufmann’s proposal.
Young’s influence on the Government’s latest proposals raises questions, given his own role in defending scientific racism and biological theories of racial and gender inequalities.
Byline Times has previously exposed his defence of pseudoscience funded by the Pioneer Fund – a neo-Nazi eugenics foundation established in 1937. Among other things, the Fund’s affiliated authors – several of whom Young has openly supported – claim that black people have lower IQs than white people.
Toby Young is also the man behind a free speech students network with the same name as the new OfS role – Free Speech Champions – launched in February. Although it claims to be “led by young people”, Byline Times can reveal that the project is, in reality, a Toby Young front trying to suppress free speech on equalities among university students.
Documents and email communications obtained by Byline Times, as well as interviews with students, confirm that Free Speech Champions’ network is actually controlled by its funders – the Free Speech Union and the Battle of Ideas, which is part of a network sponsored by the Charles Koch Foundation.
Under the guise of promoting ‘free speech’, Toby Young’s Free Speech Champions promoted alt-right figures such as Jordan Peterson, defended the alleged speech rights of Nazis in universities, fed students an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, and discouraged students from using words such as ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’.
That the Government’s new role was inspired by an academic advising Young suggests that, far from defending ‘free speech’, Gavin Williamson is attempting to shut it down to defend ‘alt-right’ speech.
The Department for Education did not respond to a request for comment.
Promoting Free Speech for Nazis
In January, the Guardian exposed the role of the Free Speech Union in the Free Speech Champions project, interviewing a range of students who had been involved. The students eventually resigned over concerns they were “censured if they disagreed with the group’s right-of-centre orthodoxy” and described Free Speech Champions as an ‘astroturfed’ front for Young’s Free Speech Union.
However, the Guardian story only scratched the surface of what the Free Speech Champions project represents.
The project was not conceived by any of the students described as ‘founding champions’. Instead, Inaya Folarin Iman – who sits on the board of directors of the Free Speech Union – sent unsolicited emails to students at different universities early in 2020 asking them if they wanted to join the project. Students who agreed to get involved were then enrolled in a series of meetings and workshops to receive training on free speech and to help develop the project.
On 9 November, Iman emailed the participants links to online videos on free speech, including one titled ‘Would Today’s ACLU Defend the Speech Rights of Nazis’, published by Reason magazine. The video calls for Nazis to be able to freely express their views.
Other videos recommended by Iman included one by the controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson and another by Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked magazine. Peterson – described by The Times as an “alt-right darling” – has been widely criticised for claiming that gender and class hierarchies are a function of the natural order. According to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Peterson has a track record of promoting revisionist falsehoods about Hitler, the Holocaust and Nazism.
Iman’s interest in defending the free speech rights of Nazis was in contrast to the opposition to students talking freely about the idea of ‘punching a Nazi’. In an email to participant Harry Walker, president of the Bristol University Free Speech Society, Iman appeared to oppose the freedom of speech to advocate punching Nazis, while simultaneously defending the right of Nazis to advocate genocide: “One thing I hope for this project is to see whether it’s possible to engage with the most reprehensible ideas in a way that is in the spirit of intellectual ambition, bravery and curiosity.”
Shutting Down Speech about ‘Sexism’ and ‘Racism’
The Free Speech Union’s education and events director Dr Jan Macvarish was involved in steering discussions with the students from the beginning.
According to Harry Walker, Macvarish “inexplicably sat-in on all of the meetings” despite the students being told that the project would function independently of the Free Speech Union.
WhatsApp logs reveal that, early on, she actively discouraged students from challenging racist and homophobic attitudes, describing doing so as an affront to free speech. Macvarish told the students: “I don’t think racism is irrational, it’s not a phobia. Neither is an objection to homosexuality.”
Macvarish described words such as “racism”, “sexism” and “transphobia” as “phobia” words which, if used, would undermine free speech. She also dismissed the idea of Islamophobia: “If you look at who gets accused of ‘Islamophobia’ it really isn’t people who are actually oppressing and abusing Muslims though is it?”
In several meetings, Walker said that Macvarish “was railing against the notion that ‘the personal is political’, suggesting this is the issue with the discourse around gender, race and so on. She also encouraged us not to use terms like sexism, racism, transphobia, arguing that doing so was making concessions to the anti-free speech camp”.
In other words, in the name of free speech, the Free Speech Union was trying to convince the students that certain words around racial, sexual and gender equality should be expunged from discourse – while words opposing racial, sexual and gender equality should be protected.
Macvarish, a visiting research fellow at the University of Kent, did not respond to Byline Times‘ request for comment.
‘Cultural Marxism’ Conspiracy Theory
In WhatsApp conversations, the Free Speech Union’s Inaya Folarin Iman also went on to endorse fears of ‘cultural marxism’, which she incorrectly defined as “rooted in a critique of the Marxist critique of capitalism”, supposedly in which certain “post-modernist thinkers” moved on from Marxism to focus on identity politics such as “white = oppressor, non-white = oppressed (again, simple explanation)”.
Her reference point was a book by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose called Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity. Apart from the book offering a systematically flawed analysis of ‘critical theory’, Lindsay is funded by the conservative Christian nationalist Michael O’Fallon, who co-created a statement branding ‘social justice’ a threat to the gospel. O’Fallon is founder of Sovereign Nations, the entire remit of which is based on an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about George Soros.
Iman’s attempt to promote fear of ‘cultural marxism’ to the students is of particular concern as the term actually designates a far-right anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, thoroughly debunked by historians and quantitative analysis of academic research.
Last year, the Board of Deputies criticised Conservative MP Suella Braverman for using this “anti-Semitic trope”. She refused to apologise and was instead made the Government’s Attorney General.
As Jason Wilson has observed in the Guardian, the theory is “blatantly anti-Semitic, drawing on the idea of Jews as a fifth column bringing down western civilisation from within, a racist trope that has a longer history than Marxism. Like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the theory was fabricated to order, for a special purpose: the institution and perpetuation of culture war”.
The theory of ‘cultural marxism’ is