Michael Cook: Jacinda Ardern’s war on free speech always deserved to fail. Now researchers have showed why.

She pressed for vigorous censorship of the internet because “prolific misinformation” is a new weapon of war.

In October last year, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, told the United Nations General Assembly that what the world needs is less free speech.

Well, not exactly that, but close enough. She pressed for vigorous censorship of the internet because “prolific misinformation” is a new weapon of war.

Brendan O'Neill: Jacinda Ardern and the woke war on free speech

Tyranny has had a makeover. It’s no longer a boot stamping on a human face forever. It isn’t a gruff cop dragging you into a cell for thinking or expressing a ‘dangerous’ idea. It isn’t a priest strapping you to a breaking wheel. No, authoritarianism is well-dressed now. It’s polite. It has a broad smile and speaks in a soft voice. It is delivered not via a soldier’s boot to the cranium but with a caring liberal head-tilt. And its name is Jacinda Ardern.

New Zealand’s PM, every online liberal’s favourite world leader, has gone viral over the past 24 hours following the circulation of the shocking speech she gave at the UN last Friday. Before the assembled leaders of both the free world and the unfree world, Ms Ardern raised the alarm about a new ‘weapon of war’. It’s a ‘dangerous’ one, she said. It poses a grave ‘threat’ to humankind. It threatens to drag us headlong into ‘chaos’. We must act now, she pleaded with the powerful, so that we might disarm this weapon and ‘bring [the world] back to order’.

What is this terrible weapon, this menacing munition, that Ms Ardern so passionately wants to decommission? It’s freedom of speech.