“Truth is not hate speech”

When the world is upside down, satire becomes too real for the powers that be. The Babylon Bee—the Christian satirical website—discovered this when Twitter suspended its account for praising Dr. Rachel Levine as its “Man of the Year.” Dr. Levine is a male who identifies as a woman and serves in the Biden administration as assistant secretary for health. The Bee was reacting to USA Today recently naming the first openly transgender presidential appointee confirmed by the U.S. Senate as one of its “Women of the Year.”

Within a few days, Twitter also suspended the account of Michael Young, a popular commentator and one of my colleagues at the Center for Renewing America, for referring to University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas as a male.

Twitter flagged the Bee and Young for engaging in “hateful conduct” because they violated its policy against “misgendering”—an Orwellian speech rule whereby one uses a pronoun or identifier other than the person’s preferred way of identification. Twitter suspended the accounts temporarily.

At one level, this is sadly unnewsworthy. Whether it be its campaign against alternative COVID treatments, suppressing the news and consequences of Hunter Biden’s laptop during an election year, or banning a president of the United States while he was in office, Twitter continues to aggressively censor as “disinformation” a host of voices in this country. It refuses to accept that it is no longer just a company, but a platform for today’s information exchange. But there is something interesting about this particular example of censorship. It reveals how great a threat truth, if broadly voiced, poses to the secular regime itself—not just the government institutions in power but the cultural and corporate enforcers of the dominant narrative.

From the left’s perspective, “misgendering” through satire is hateful because it fails to provide the trauma-preventing societal recognition of an individual’s self-constructed identity required for them to feel authentic. In other words, individuals might be confronted with ideas they do not want to hear but may need to hear, which is one of the main reasons freedom of speech is so sacrosanct. That might explain a standard warning attached to a particular tweet but not the more aggressive action of suspending a user from the platform. In this case, the threat is more dangerous because the truth is so clear.

Take Lia Thomas. Thomas looks like a male, is as big as a male, and dominates a female sport as a man likely would. Thomas did not just compete at a high level but claimed a national collegiate swimming title. No honest observer, no matter their politics, can look at Lia Thomas and think anything other than: That is a male, and it is deeply unfair to let him compete against women. We all know this is true because as Paul says in Romans, God gives us the powers of perception and reason to know certain truths about nature. We can choose to suppress it, but we do notice the difference.

Under our current secular elites, that truth simply must be silenced. It must be silenced because the consequences of allowing it to stand and spread will unravel the preferred narrative of the cultural revolutionaries. It risks pushing them off the precipice into a sea of doubt of all their other unchallenged lies.

Lies are the mortar in tyranny’s wall. Alexander Solzhenitsyn told us this in his famous essay “Live Not by Lies.” “It is not every day and not on every shoulder that violence brings down its heavy hand,” he wrote. “It demands of us only submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty.” Submitting to lies means millions of individuals self-censoring their tweets and words because they are afraid of being suspended. It is extending the logic into every dimension of our everyday lives, diligently repeating whatever identity has been constructed and claimed by the other person. It is the presence of stifling fear flowing from the knowledge of what will get you canceled. That is the submission envisioned by these Twitter suspensions. It is soft totalitarianism, but totalitarianism all the same.

Thankfully, Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon modeled the proper response. “Truth is not hate speech,” he declared. “If the cost of telling the truth is the loss of our Twitter, then so be it.”

A commitment to speak the truth, come what may, is the only path ahead—a refusal to let the mortar harden in the suffocating and ever-enclosing wall of secular, coercive narratives that envelop us in our current age. Because, thanks be to God, the truth cannot be silenced forever.