Book Review: Is Free Speech Racist? by Gavin Titley

 

Gavin Titley’s Is Free Speech Racist? is not a book. It is a pamphlet, thin on logic, heavy on jargon, and bloated with ideological venom. Its central claim is as dangerous as it is absurd: that defending free speech is somehow a cover for racial domination. Welcome to the postmodern circus, where Orwellian doublethink is not a warning, but a playbook. Let’s be clear: this is not a serious work of scholarship. It’s an ideological cudgel masquerading as critical theory, aimed at bulldozing one of the West’s most sacred principles, freedom of expression. Titley, like so many academics infected with the Marxist virus, starts with his conclusion (“free speech is bad”) and works backwards, cherry-picking anecdotes and sociological mumbo-jumbo to prop it up. The result is an incoherent screed that reads like it was written by a committee of Twitter activists armed with thesauruses and a grudge. The book’s title alone is a masterclass in rhetorical dishonesty. Is Free Speech Racist? No, Gavin. Free speech is the mechanism by which oppressed voices rise, truth is tested, and civilization progresses. Without it, the Enlightenment never happens, civil rights are never won, and Western liberalism, the very system that allows you to publish drivel like this, never exists. Only someone who enjoys the fruits of liberty without understanding its roots could write something so self-destructive. Titley complains that invoking free speech “often functions as a weapon” for the powerful. That’s the core thesis. But what he fails to grasp is that power cuts both ways. Today’s institutional power lies not with “reactionary racists,” but with the very ideology he peddles: critical race theory, identity politics, and progressive orthodoxy. The modern heretic is not the radical Leftist, but the man who says there are only two sexes, who dares to question mass immigration, or who defends the West without apology. Titley’s true target isn’t racism, it’s dissent. His project is to delegitimize the principle that allows ordinary people to question elite dogmas. By labeling free speech “racist,” he hopes to smuggle authoritarianism in under the banner of “anti-racism.” This is not about justice; it’s about control. More insidiously, Is Free Speech Racist? is an attack on masculinity. Why? Because the freedom to speak your mind is the hallmark of the free man. It is a masculine virtue, stoic, courageous, unbending. And that, more than anything, is what the modern Left cannot tolerate: a man who refuses to kneel, refuses to be re-educated, and refuses to be silenced. The Gentleman Scholar Beast says this: if free speech is racist, then so is Socrates. So is Frederick Douglass. So is Orwell. So is every man who ever stood up and said, “I will not be told what I may think.” If that’s racism, then the word has no meaning left and neither does this book. Gavin Titley’s book belongs where all weak ideas go to die: the faculty lounge, the Twitter echo chamber, and the memory hole. As for the rest of us, real men, free thinkers, defenders of the West, we will not be silenced. Verdict: Is Free Speech Racist? is an intellectual Trojan horse stuffed with postmodern termites. Burn it, then read Locke.