In 2018, Steve Bannon, the embattled Trump aide with close ties to the most heinous corners of the reactionary right, gave a speech at the Oxford University debate union.
His welcome from the crowd was, to say the least, mixed. But the barrage of boos and heckles from a rowdy audience was nothing compared to the mass demonstrations outside. At the front gate of the union building, protestors gathered in the hundreds and unrepentantly stopped Bannon from coming in the front entrance. He had to be “smuggled” through the back.
The reaction to this was interesting. Not only were there the usual right-wing cries of cancel culture, but prominent liberal voices—including the now-ubiquitous commentator Alex O’Connor—took aim as well. O’Connor livestreamed the protest in full and recorded demonstrators’ half-witted excuses for their actions, before attacking them in a video essay a few days later.
Bannon’s speech marked a particularly fiery example in a long history of conservative “skeptics” calling out the left for their supposed violations of free speech. It’s especially common online, and has become a central part of the ethos of the Daily Wire, a right-wing commentary organization.
Maybe the most annoying element to critics of the censorial left is that they are, in some ways, right. Bannon has the same right to be heard that I do. Mark Twain should not be banned for using gross language in dialogue and narration to expose his time’s prejudices. And it’s absurd to change Roald Dahl novels that use—God help us—problematic language.
Still, insufferable as it is, the censorship-heavy brand of progressivism’s prevalence and impact are wildly overstated. Both of those initiatives have been rejected by leading intellectual voices on the left, and their moment in the public eye was scornful.
And even if it were more popular, not all defenses of “free speech” on the right have been as clear-cut as those. No, a stand-up comic facing backlash for offensive jokes is not being silenced. No, a social media company moderating content is not the same thing as the Gestapo tracking down and decimating a secret newspaper. Consequences cannot be confused with oppression.
This isn’t to say that there can’t be debate about what those consequences should be. And don’t get me wrong: screaming at people is no way to foster credibility. The campus protestors who called the right-wing organizer Charlie Kirk a “fascist” had about fifteen seconds of measly gratification as they helped make their movement into the pseudointellectual right’s punching bag. But they weren’t breaking any laws, and certainly no constitutional amendments.
Through this misunderstanding of basic civics, conservatives the world over have managed to brand themselves as plucky underdogs against an onslaught of suppression from the establishment left.
“You want to be a rebel?” reactionary posterboy Vivek Ramaswamy asked at the 2024 RNC. “You want to be a hippie? You want to stick it to the man? Show up on your college campus and try calling yourself a conservative.”
If conservatives are willing to exaggerate the slightest misplaced anger on the left, then, it’d follow that an actual affront to free speech would be attacked as if the hammer of the Lord himself had come down on it. No such luck.
One of President Donald Trump’s central campaign promises was deporting “pro-Hamas radicals” (Gaza protestors) studying in the US, and on March 8, ICE helped him bring this covenant to life.
The attempted deportation of Mahmoud Khalil—a green card–holder and husband to an American—as an isolated incident would be disgraceful enough. It’s the conjoined announcement, though, that makes the move not so much scandalous as authoritarian. When posting about Khalil’s detention online, Trump said: “This is the first arrest of many to come.”
The fear alone achieves Trump’s goal. With one order and some manpower behind it, by the stroke of a Tweet from the Resolute Desk, Trump created a culture of fear and self-censorship that insults the scholars and thinkers who helped bring about the American greatness Trump claims to be restoring.
Where are the anti–social justice warriors? Where are the free speech absolutists? Where are the “compassionate conservatives”?
The first answer is easy: after spending years attacking the left for their supposed hypocrisy, they too only defend free speech when it agrees with them.
Philosophy has always had something to do with commerce, but now, ideas aren’t debated so much as bought. The “marketplace of ideas” is, literally, a marketplace. It’s about revenue. Principled stances are made when there is an incentive to make them.
Jeff Bezos’s control of the Washington Post’s opinion page to only write in support of “individual liberties” and “free markets” should come as no surprise, then. He knows that every dollar he loses from an unsubscription is matched with a gain of ten from a deregulation-driven paycheck.
I could end the article with that. But there’s something else at work here.
When conservatives cried “woke” at every minute progressive overreaction, they managed to convince the public of a liberal conspiracy to undermine free expression. Years of this messaging clobbering moderates didn’t inspire fury, though, so much as resignation.
The final form of anti-woke rhetoric isn’t “the left violates the First Amendment.” There’s not enough fuel for that fire. The goal is to flood the news cycle with shouts and murmurs of microscopic liberal infringements, so that when Republicans launch a massive assault on free speech, they can fall back on a defense as old as time: both sides are at fault.
It’s not so hard to believe that Bannon, one of the modern GOP’s architects, got blocked from a hub of the intelligentsia.
