Where Did All Those Brave Free Speech Warriors Go?

Since the start of the Trump administration, many of our biggest concerns about how MAGA would attack free speech have not only proven true, but have turned out to be understated. Nearly all parts of the administration are seeking to silence critical speech. Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed “free speech warriors” who signed the infamous Harper’s Letter five years ago have gone mysteriously quiet. They were absolutely frantic about “cancel culture” for years, but when actual government censorship comes along? Crickets.

A (seriously incomplete) list of current attacks on speech includes the FCC’s Brendan Carr’s multiple investigations over protected speech, the FTC’s Andrew Ferguson’s attempts to punish speech, interim US Attorney for DC Ed Martin’s series of increasingly unhinged letters to people and organizations over their speech, and, of course, the attacks on foreign college students for things like writing an anodyne op-ed the administration disliked.

And I won’t even get into Donald Trump’s habit of directly threatening people for their speech like some dollar store dictator, including his weird threat to Bruce Springsteen late last week, in which he tells Springsteen he “ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country” and “then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

In this context of actual attacks on free speech, you’d expect the self-appointed Free Speech Brigade to be manning the barricades and sounding every alarm. But where are they? Probably busy drafting another letter about how someone was mean to them on the site formerly known as Twitter.

Five years ago, Harper’s Magazine published a fluffy, mostly content-free “letter on justice and open debate.” As someone who has spent decades fighting for and writing about free speech, I found the letter to be beyond useless. While there were legitimate attacks on free speech at the time, the letter did basically nothing to grapple with them. Instead, it used vague language to create a false equivalency between actual attacks on free speech with people just facing some consequences (mainly social opprobrium), mostly allowing people facing the latter to act as though they were facing the former.

In short, it allowed a group of overly sensitive writers who were upset about the criticism they faced to hide behind the few actual cases of attacks on free speech while pretending they were one and the same. Harper’s asked me to write (a very short) response to the letter, and this was what I churned out at the time.

After days of debate involving every conceivable perspective on the open letter—on social media, on blogs, on podcasts, in other publications, and in private conversations—I have concluded that the letter’s concern that “the free exchange of information and ideas . . . is daily becoming more constricted” is unfounded and frankly confusing.

Clearly there is robust debate on a variety of subjects, including many that not long ago were considered to be outside the boundaries of public discourse. “The free exchange of information and ideas” is perhaps stronger and more widely accessible today than ever before.

Oddly, the letter ignores more distinct threats to free speech: libel lawsuits that block legitimate criticism, abuse of copyright laws to hamper commentary and culture, and legal threats that intimidate speakers into silence.

Instead, the letter alludes to examples of publications exercising their editorial discretion, and speakers facing social consequences driven by vigorous counter-speech, while omitting the details. If any of these examples deserves serious debate and consideration, the letter fails to foster or even enable it, and certainly does not engage in it.

I also, as a pointless thought exercise, tried to write an alternative letter for what the Harper’s Letter could have said if it actually wanted to be useful. I still think that was pretty good, highlighting how, thanks to the internet, the world had become actually more free and more open to debate, but with that there was “a changing societal consensus on what is, and what is not, appropriate” and at times, this possibly went too far, mainly in that when people tripped over certain lines, some were too quick to assume malice. As I wrote then:

At the same time, in our ongoing and righteous zeal to revisit areas that were previously overlooked and underexplored, there are times when people may go too far. There are times when the nuance and details and context are not initially clear, and some people — including ourselves — may overreact. That overreaction often leads to consequences which, when the full situation is explored and understood, seem unfair. We should seek to be aware that this may happen, and try to avoid it. Furthermore, we should recognize that as fallible as humans are, we will sometimes discover this too late, and should seek to rectify it when we do.

The details will always matter. We should not assume simplistic narratives all of the time, when often there are mixed motivations and complex factors and variables involved. There may be situations that appear similar on the surface, but upon deeper exploration turn out to be quite different. We should be willing to explore those details and to recognize that, sometimes, people we like will face consequences for their speech for an extended pattern of truly reprehensible behavior.

However, we should leave space open for people to learn and to grow. We should recognize that a single misdeed may be innocent and should treat it as such. We should see how people respond to such feedback. At the same time, we should also recognize that a pattern and practice of questionable and hurtful behavior may suggest a person who is deliberately, and in bad faith, seeking to game the system.

The biggest problem I had with the original letter was simply that many of the signatories were clearly using it, deliberately and in bad faith, to game the system to their own advantage. That is, they wished to stake out ridiculous (and, at times, harmful) positions and not be challenged or criticized for those positions. In many ways, the Harper’s Letter itself was way more censorial than anything it claimed to criticize. “How dare you criticize my speech with your speech!” is essentially what it boiled down to for many signers. Free speech for me, but not for thee.

This wasn’t true of all signers, some of whom had legitimate grievances. But the list of signers was full of faux speech martyrs who were effectively standing on the shoulders of the very few people legitimately concerned with these issues, screaming “look how canceled I am!”

In the years since, little has caused me to change my opinion of the letter and its signers. A couple of years ago, I called out some of the signatories for cosplaying as free speech martyrs, and that seems to still be true.

So you might think that now that the attacks on free speech have moved even beyond the ones I had raised at the time of the Harper’s Letter (censorial defamation lawsuits, abuse of intellectual property law) and certainly beyond the perceived threats the signers crowed about (“cancel culture”) that they might speak up a bit? At least a little?

But, nope.

David Klion over at The Nation notes that the vast majority of the signers of the Harper’s Letter have stayed entirely silent regarding pretty much everything that’s going on. He points to a piece from In These Times from last month which even created a spreadsheet looking at all the signatories. It turns out that when actual attacks on free speech happen, many of them go silent:

… high-profile ​“free speech” advocates such as Bari Weiss, Jonathan Haidt, David Brooks, David Frum, John McWhorter, and Malcolm Gladwell have either remained silent or championed the arrests. A review of the signatories of the now-infamous 2020 Harper’s Letter shows that of those who could issue statements (those who are still alive and not retired from public life), only 24 percent who put their name on the letter defending ​“Open Debate” have come out in opposition to Trump’s war on campus free speech. Some, like Harvard’s Steven Pinker, have aggressively spoken out about Trump’s withdrawing of funding from higher education, but have been notably quiet on the kidnapping of international students for the supposed crime of political speech.

If you find this shocking, I have an exciting, if slightly scratched, bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The letter was never about protecting free speech — it was about insulating certain people from criticism. “Free speech” was just the sneaky little facade they put on it to make their argument look respectable.

This weekend, we saw yet another absolutely perfect example of this kind of free speech hypocrisy in action. Many of the signatories to the Harper’s letter were also big fans of the unaccredited, hilariously pretentious “University of Austin,” which got a lot of attention for claiming that it would be a university that supported “free speech” (in the misleading sense of the Harper’s Letter), “academic freedom,” and “heterodox” thinking. Really, the only qualifications for being associated with the University of Austin seemed to be that you had to have been criticized for taking a stupid position on something. A university run by the perpetually aggrieved doesn’t seem all that interesting, but it’s a home for some folks.

Bari Weiss both signed the Harper’s letter and helped to create UATX and remains a trustee of the organization. Jonathan Haidt signed the letter and is on the advisory board. Coleman Hughes signed the letter and is listed as a visiting professor at UATX. There are others as well. The Venn diagram of Harper’s Letter signatories and UATX affiliates isn’t quite a circle, but you might need a microscope to find the differences.

Again, as with the Harper’s Letter, it was obvious from the beginning that the people behind the University of Austin never actually believed in actual free speech. They just wanted a “university” (very much in sarcasm quotes) where their beliefs wouldn’t be regularly challenged and mocked as unserious.

This weekend, there was a hilarious piece in Quillette, which is basically the far-too-serious publication of the perpetually silly faux speech martyr, in which Ellie Avishai wrote about how she was drummed out of the University of Austin for posting a very bland LinkedIn post that quoted Yale Psychologist Michael Strambler’s article suggesting that both sides on the debate over DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) were going too far.

Whether you feel that’s a reasonable argument or not, it’s obviously trying to create some middle ground. And for that, Avishai — who has apparently been whining about Harvard (where she received her doctorate) being too woke because they… asked students to “reflect” on how to be more inclusive (the horror) — was told her services were no longer needed at the University of Austin:

My colleague told me that we needed to talk about a social-media post of mine that “had become a big problem.” I rarely post anything online, so I was confused about what he meant. Apparently, it had something to do with DEI, and had angered a major funder. “We’re trying to slow things down,” my colleague told me. I got the impression that he was upset about the message he was delivering.  

[….]

By 5pm on 3 March—the same day I first heard that my LinkedIn post was a “problem”—my team of five and I were all on our way to being pushed out of UATX. I got the news from a junior dean whom I barely knew. He told me bluntly, “the trustees and the management have decided that we’d like to wind up Mill, and I’m calling to let you know that we’re letting you go.”

So much for “academic freedom,” huh? Who could have possibly predicted that the Free Speech University would cancel someone for expressing a moderate opinion? I mean, besides literally everyone?

The University’s response was pretty much exactly what you would expect: Why would we let someone say something nice about DEI when DEI is bad?

When a Quillette editor contacted UATX for comment in regard to the events and issues discussed in this article, we received the following response: UATX is unapologetically opposed to DEI. We believe these programs institutionalize ideological orthodoxy, lower academic standards, and promote a view of human identity that undermines individual dignity. That position is central to our mission.

Of course, that’s exactly what they whined about at other universities, screaming their silly little heads off about how it was against the “pursuit of knowledge” and “academic freedom” for students and faculty to dare suggest that some topics were beyond the pale.

But, apparently, the only subject that is beyond the pale is: DEI.

And, like, you can take that position (as silly and backwards as it is), but it’s way worse than anything any university has done to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the first place.

It was never about free speech, academic freedom, or heterodoxy. It’s about being free to say whatever offensive thing you want and never, ever having to face criticism for it. It’s “heterodox” in the same way North Korea is a “People’s Democratic Republic.” It is, in many ways, way more censorial, more against academic freedom, and more rigidly orthodox than anything any actual university is doing.

We’ve pointed out for a while now how many of the people who described themselves as “free speech warriors” over the last decade were not just cosplaying, but were actually using the language of free speech to justify the suppression of speech. This is just one more example to throw on the pile.