The Right Is Dismantling Free Speech. It's Time For All Of Us Push Back

The fundamental right to speak your mind is under attack, and its supposed champions are leading the charge against it. This is how we lose democracy, and freedom.

*some conditions apply* Photo by Rob Coates on Unsplash

Well, the worm has really turned hasn’t it? Or is it that the cat is among the pigeons? Perhaps it’s neither. Maybe there’s no turn of phrase that captures the utter hypocrisy on the right, whose members have gleefully shed any pretense of caring about free speech in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder. Rather, the right has launched campaigns to harass critics — some of whom said dreadful and reproachable things — to track them down, to mob them online, and to even have them terminated from their jobs.

The federal government in the United States has gone so far as to pressure a network, ABC, by way of the Federal Communications Commission to pull a comedian off the air, away from his late night show, because he failed to observe the official pieties stipulated by the administration in the approved manner. The message is clear: wrongspeak will be punished swiftly and severely by the side that purports to care about free speech and the preservation of the American First Amendment. That moves well beyond “cancel culture” and into the realm of state censorship. And if one should point out the irony, the inconsistency, the rank hypocrisy? Well, see above.

The censorious instincts of the right are not unique to it. The left participates in the ritual, too. But the right tends to embrace a pantomime of devotion to freedom in such a way that makes their attacks on political expression more than a bit much. We’ve been here before. In the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, the Bush administration and its supporters were all too keen to build out a mass surveillance state, to use “free speech zones” to corral free thinkers into pens, to cancel comedian Bill Maher (from ABC, as it happens), after he said on his show Politically Incorrect “We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly.”

One could also go back further still to recall the McCarthy era and its witch hunts and blacklists. Or one might think of the more recent attack on Budweiser and Dylan Mulvaney for daring to feature a trans person drinking their beer, and one that produced actual threats of violence, which go well beyond the limits of free expression. The censorious instinct is ever present, even if it may go dormant when it’s convenient for one’s side.

Attacks on speech, including utterances any reasonable person would find abhorrent, offensive, or even blasphemous, stem from insecurities about core personal beliefs, the need to preserve in-groups, and the urge to exercise power. Typically, these assaults are expressions of anger and outrage that the beliefs or sacral necessities of one or one’s group have been questioned, dismissed, or mocked. How dare they. For this, there must be consequences, and fast. The offended will deploy whatever means to exercise power they can — tracking down employers, shaming and dog-piling on the internet, confronting people offline, even resorting to physical violence — to restore order and their sense of what they deem to be right and just. They will do what they must to reassert the status of respect and deference they believe due to them, their worldview, and their community.

The word-game that fake proponents of free speech will play is to deny that their attacks on the speaker amount to a heckler’s veto, even if that’s precisely what they are. Instead, they’ll assert that speech carries “social consequences” and that one has no right to a platform, as many have already said of Jimmy Kimmel and his television program. But the attacks on what’s deemed to be blasphemous speech aren’t designed to be salutary or corrective, they’re designed to silence and punish, to preclude the possibility of future exchange and to prevent critique and any surfacing of hypocrisy. The irony is…a lot to process. But humans are experts at inconsistency, and ignoring it when it suits them. I’ve been there and have been as guilty as others. I’ve fallen short of my own standards in the past. But I’m owning it and working on being consistent. I welcome others to join me, now more than ever.

The attacks I describe are designed to kill free speech and to bury the speaker rather than to send the message that their speech is incorrect or socially out of bounds. The latter implies a mission of redemption. The former of utter and total erasure. In the 19th century, as liberal rights, values, and states were beginning to take hold, John Stuart Mill made the case for free speech as being good for both the speaker and the listener. Mill argued that not only should one have the right to speak, the listener ought to have a right to hear that speech since: 1) they might change their mind or 2) they will at least come to further appreciate and know how to defend their existing beliefs. It’s hard to detect much support for Mill and this core tenet of liberal speech values, ostensibly cherished by the right wing, in the vengeful mobbings we see now.

Some on the right won’t even try to dress up their attacks on speech rights. They’ll say turnabout is fair play, that the left has been censoring and cancelling speech for years. In some cases, that’s true. But “they did it first,” whether true or not, is as much a pathetic, unprincipled non-argument as it is the starter’s pistol going off to initiate a race to the bottom.

Moments like the one we’re in right now call for a cross-partisan, cross-ideological, and culturally ecumenical commitment to fundamental speech and expression rights, as well as a calrification of their limits — the point at which speech tips over to incitement to violence or yields to literal violence. In an age dominated by social media platforms and algorithms that generate profit from inducing people to become their worst selves, the solidification of toxic partisan identities, rising reactionary prudishness, and unchecked money driving shady agendas, the work of committing to free speech and expression is crucial, even if it requires a coalition of principled believers who would otherwise have little in common and may not share anything else ever again.