Something new every day. Now it is the turn of Spartacus Pupo, professor of History of Political Doctrines at the University of Calabria and member of the Machiavelli's scientific council, who has been officially intimated by his university to distance himself from none other than... David Hume. This was the incriminated sentence, posted as a reflection on March 8 by the academic on his social media:

Pupo, however, is not taking kindly to the media pillory and cancel culture, and has responded in spades:

The lynching against Pupo is just yet another case of ideological aggression against a lecturer or intellectual in the space of just one week. There is a problem with freedom of expression, then, in our country, and in general throughout the West. This problem is called the "double standard." An Orwellian doublethink whereby democracies would grant freedom of speech but only to those on the "good" side of the slate. If you get enrolled on the other side, you are screwed. And you have to keep quiet.

To play favourites

Thus, Donatella Di Cesare, professor of theoretical philosophy at Rome's "La Sapienza" University, is being defended to the hilt (complete with red star-decorated posters) for a post on X she made on March 5, 2024 to celebrate red terrorist Barbara Balzerani, who died the previous day: "Your revolution was also mine. Different paths do not erase ideas. With melancholy a farewell to Comrade Luna." In the case of this outright apologia of a terrorist, the Magnifico of "Sapienza" did nothing more than distance himself, but no reprimand was undertaken as was the case at Unical against Pupo, a Hume scholar quoting Hume.

And the ill wind continues to blow always and only on the side of the "bad guys": thus another professor of Political Doctrines, Marco Bassani (Statale di Milano) also received a few days ago the judicial sanction to the reprisal inflicted on him by the university for having posted a "sexist and highly offensive content towards not only the person directly concerned but the entire female gender." The content was a satirical meme about the bedroom dating (very true, by the way) of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. Bassani lost the case, and the court found to confirm that freedom of speech in Italy is there for everyone, but for some less than for others.

"He said Jehovah!"

A schizophrenic attitude reminiscent of the Monty Python gag about stoning the blasphemer who had said "Jehovah" in "Life of Brian", when ideological short-circuits are then created in the camp of the "good guys." This is the case of David Parenzo, who was contested at the "Sapienza" by leftist collectives last March 8, who, shouting "Fascist!" and "you are Zionist, you must not speak" prevented him from attending a conference in the university.

And despite the solidarity with the anchorman, it remains the bitterness of a university where protesters can decide who should speak and who should not, an infamous tradition that has had in the past as its victim none other than Pope Benedict XVI (but with much less solidarity collected than Cruciani's comic sidekick).

Finally, in these days, we come to find out that the anti-feminist blogs "La Fionda" and "Stalker sarai tu" have been made the subject of no less than a Senate question in which they are asking that their owners and columnists-activists in defense of men's rights and in particular of separated fathers-be arbitrarily silenced on social media. The question is from 2022 (as if we haven't had enough of that year of regime oppression), but the news was only released a few days ago.

Turning the table over

The constant in these affairs is that the left maintains its hegemonic power unchanged, whether it sits on the "decent" side or the "punkish" side. The right, on the other hand, succeeds in demonstrating impotence, both in the almost total absence of solidarity with its professors and intellectuals put over the coals, and in stooping to do "like the left" but to no avail, as in the case of the clumsily failed attempt to call for Di Cesare's removal.

In short, the right totally lacks a strategic vision of the problem, both from the point of view of political struggle but also from that of founding values. Because the conservative political arc has to decide whether it wants to leave the battle for freedom of expression to the left -- which then obviously declines it on the double standard and gives it back on its head with multiplied power -- or take it back in hand, under the banner of those many area intellectuals who wielded the torch of freedom, from Thomas Jefferson to Ezra Pound, from Giuseppe Mazzini to Giovanni Guareschi. A freedom that cannot be conditioned by party sectarianism, much less by sleazy tactics.

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Turn the table, therefore. Instead of wearily calling for more censorship and "serious measures "even for those of the other faction, proclaim the "free all." Affirm that for the state the right to express one's thoughts is a superior and constitutional good while there is no right to prevent anyone from lecturing. This is a point that Centro Studi Machiavelli has made by advancing a policy proposal to make it a crime to conculcate the freedom of public expression of thought. At this time, in fact, disturbing the right of assembly and public expression falls under the offence of "private violence," a residual offense whose punishability is very much left to the discretionary interpretation of the judge. Machiavelli, on the other hand, proposed creating a special case: "Violence or threat to prevent public meetings or meetings open to the public."

Breaking the weapons of the Wokeist Left

And this would already be a good starting point. Then there is the need to counter cancel culture by sanctioning that threats, demotions, disciplinary measures and firing because of the free expression of one's thoughts are a form of discrimination exactly like those for sex, race, language, religion, personal and social conditions. Factors that in fact in Article 3 of the Italian Constitution are listed along with "political opinions."

But mind you, we are not just talking about waging idealistic battles here. To carry the torch of freedom of expression is to strike at the liberal front by breaking its spearhead: political correctness. The left today maintains its cultural hegemony thanks to a weapon of indiscriminate destruction such as cancel culture. The card of indignation, of "appropriate language" (where of course what is "appropriate" is decided by the double standard of the left), of "you offend me."

So the strategy is that of guerrilla warfare: right now the wokeist front has most of the cultural weapons in hand and has demonstrated this with the cases listed in this article. Invoking more censorship is like challenging a nuclear superpower on the level of atomic weapons while holding a firecracker. On the contrary, from the perspective of asymmetrical warfare, forcing the enemy to confront them on the slippery slope of free expression (what they fear most) is to expose them to intolerable losses, not least because their arguments are ridiculous, dissonant with reality, insubstantial: only censorship can hold them up. The strength of the Wokeist front is based on the gagging of others' opinions and the triumph of "indignation" as an extra-legal (or para-legal, as seen in Bassani's case) means of punishing those who criticize and pointing the finger says "the king is naked." Taking away these arrows from the liberals' bow with the crime of violence against freedom of expression, the abolition of crimes of opinion and with the equating of ideological censorship with bullying on grounds of sex, religion, race or social status, means disarming them, literally removing the fuse from every bomb in their arsenal. In a free-for-all, where there is no sellout referee to silence their intellectuals for being "offensive" or "inappropriate," the left will prove impotent and show itself for what it is: a paper tiger.

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Editor of the Machiavelli Study Center's blog "Belfablog," Emanuele Mastrangelo has been editor-in-chief of "Storia in Rete" since 2006. A military-historical cartographer, he is the author of several books (with Enrico Petrucci, Iconoclastia. La pazzia contagiosa della cancel culture che sta distruggendo la nostra storia e Wikipedia. L'enciclopedia libera e l'egemonia dell'informazione).