Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? Audiobook (Free)

With this blistering polemic, veteran journalist Mick Hume presents an uncompromising defence of freedom of expression, which he argues is threatened in the West, not by jackbooted censorship but by a creeping culture of conformism and You-Can’t-Say-That.

The cold-blooded murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in January 2015 brought a deadly focus to the issue of free talk. Leaders from the free-thinking globe united in condemning the killings, proclaiming ‘Je suis Charlie’. But it about Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech? wasn’t a long time before many commentators were arguing that this massacre showed the necessity to apply limitations to free talk also to restrict the right to become offensive.

It is becoming fashionable not merely to declare yourself offended with what someone else says, but to use the ‘offence card’ to demand that they end up being prevented from saying it. Social media websites such as Twitter have become the scene of ‘twitch hunts’ where on the web mobs look for trolls and other heretics who express the ‘incorrect’ opinion. And Result in Warnings and additional measures to ‘guard’ sensitive college students from potentially offensive material have got spread from American colleges over the Atlantic and the internet.

Hume argues that without independence of appearance, our various other liberties wouldn’t normally be possible. Against the background of the historical fight free of charge speech, Trigger Caution identifies the new threats facing it today and spells out how unfettered freedom of expression, regardless of the pain and the problems it entails, remains the main liberty of most.