Free Speech Union's Podcast Free Speech Union

Paul Thistoll is a dedicated trans-rights activist and outspoken opponent of the Free Speech Union. But he was willing to sit down with Jonathan Ayling, the Chief Executive of the Union, to discuss hate speech, trans-rights, preferred pronouns, professional deregistration, and more. 

There are two very different views on free speech on display in this podcast. So rarely do we have the opportunity to hear two so very different perspectives engage respectfully. And in the end, it's you who gets to decide which view is right. 
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More than any other one thing, COVID-19 has defined our past 3 years. But are we starting to thinking about it, or talk about it in fresh ways? 

Our lives have been impacted in unprecedented ways by COVID-19; but this virus has also been weaponised by our would-be-censors to corral us into one position on this issue, and a host of others. 

In this episode, Jonathan Ayling sits down with the director of River of Freedom, a recently released documentary film on the 2022 occupation of Parliament. 
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Speaking to the recently published Addressing the Challenges to Social Cohesion, Sir Peter Gluckman (former Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister and Director of Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures) sits down with Jonathan Ayling to discuss what's happening to fraying public discourse, and what we can do to address it.  
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Free speech across our universities is under fire- but many academics are also working to address this. After 3 years, a working group established at the University of Auckland to consider how to preserve academic freedom and free speech has reported back, making a bold stand in a hostile environment. Free Speech Union member and UoA Professor, Kendall Clements, sits down with Jonathan to give an insider's view to why free speech is under fire, and what needs to be done about it.   
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"Most important thinking I've written", this is how Prof. Grimes describes his recent research on who benefits from free speech. Spoiler alert- it's not who you might think. 

We're often told that the marginalised, oppressed and poor need protection from free speech, probably provided by the State, to ensure that free speech doesn't oppress them. But in reality, free speech enables the powerless to undermine the powerful by insisting that ideas and speech should be challenged with dialogue and reason, not force. 

Jonathan Ayling and Adam Young from the Free Speech Union sit down with Prof. Arther Grimes to consider this important research, and look at why it is the poorer in society, the uneducated, and the vulnerable who benefit from the radical idea that even they should be free to speak.    
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Academic freedom and free speech can appear to be nebulous subjects at times, which wonky intellectuals pontificate on. Yet the real world implications for a university that fails to preserve academic freedom are far-reaching. In this episode, Jonathan Ayling sits down with Dr. James Kierstead and Dr. Michael Johnston to discuss the opposition we’ve faced to our academic freedom research, why certain arguments have been made, and what this tells us about the debate for free thought and belief in general. Let’s just say, the stakes are fairly high for all of us. 
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