Freedom Dies When Facts Become Offence
A society that censors reality to spare feelings trades liberty for a hollow, intolerant orthodoxy.
In today’s cultural moment, we’ve reached the strange point where stating biological facts can get you branded as hateful. Consider the controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling, who has said, quite uncontroversially until 10 minutes ago, that if you’re born male, you cannot become a woman. For this, she has been vilified by activists and politicians alike, including Labour MP Carolyn Harris, who conceded Rowling is “biologically correct,” but warned that introducing such truths “with this level of hate” makes rational debate impossible.
This is where we should pause and reflect. Any ideology that treats a factual observation about the world as an expression of hatred is, by definition, irrational. Throughout human history, people have held beliefs that transcend empirical evidence; religious beliefs, moral convictions, philosophical ideals. But until now, those were generally understood as belonging to a separate domain from empirical science.
The new twist in today’s ideological battles is that progressive activists don’t present their movement as one of faith, but as one rooted in reason, evidence, and science. Yet they routinely dismiss or deny biological realities when those realities conflict with their political commitments. You cannot credibly claim to be both the champion of scientific rationality and the force that insists biology be subordinated to identity narratives.
What we’re witnessing is not just a political movement, it’s the emergence of a proto-religion. Wokeism, as it’s usually called, is not merely a set of political demands about justice and inclusion. It functions as a substitute religion in a secularised West that has been steadily draining traditional sources of meaning and belonging from public life. But human beings, as social animals, don’t simply abandon the need for moral frameworks when they leave organised religion behind. They redirect that hunger into new forms, and increasingly, those forms are political.
This helps explain why the culture around identity politics has taken on such unmistakably religious characteristics. There are heretics (people who dissent), blasphemies (speech that violates the orthodoxy), rituals of penance (public apologies and cancellations), and sacred texts (the ever-shifting vocabulary of gender identity and privilege). Critically, there’s also a pursuit of moral purity, where disagreement isn’t met with debate, but with condemnation, shame, and excommunication.
This would be merely a cultural oddity, if it weren’t being fused with institutional power. Individuals are free to hold whatever beliefs they like. But when those beliefs are backed by the machinery of the state, media, and corporate policy, they become a threat to individual liberty. We now see this in attempts to regulate speech on social media, compel certain forms of language under law, and embed ideological curricula in public education.
This matters because the defence of biological truth is not, as critics claim, a form of cruelty or bigotry. It’s a defence of intellectual honesty, the precondition for meaningful debate and freedom of thought. If a society loses the ability to distinguish between factual statements and moral insults, it does not just risk adopting bad policies, it risks hollowing out the very foundation of a free and open society.
The rise of woke ideology is not a passing cultural fad; it is the latest iteration of humanity’s enduring religious impulse, now dressed up in the language of liberation and inclusion. But its danger lies precisely in its unwillingness to recognise itself as a faith, and in its attempt to occupy both the throne of scientific authority and the pulpit of moral absolutism.
A free society can tolerate competing worldviews, including those that reject biological essentialism. But it cannot survive when its public square is governed by a secular orthodoxy that demands the suppression of fact in service of faith.