The "free speech" crowd sure is quiet about GOP efforts to ban books and criminalize dissent.
Who could have predicted this would happen? Me, for one.
Last June, in one of my first newsletters, I wrote about free speech. Specifically, I wrote about Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, and his assault on it. (The piece was initially sent out as a paid-only newsletter, but I’ve removed the paywall. Still, please consider supporting my work by purchasing a paid subscription if possible.) At the time, DeSantis had just signed a bill requiring state colleges and universities to annually survey students and faculty about their political beliefs, another bill mandating that the state’s K-12 schools adopt a jingoistic “pro-America” history curriculum that emphasizes the evils of communism, and called on the state board of education to ban the teaching of critical race theory
in classrooms.
“Don't expect the people who've been shouting about ‘free speech’ to fight back against Republican attacks on open discussion,” I wrote at the time.
Among other things, I was referencing Harper’s Magazine’s July 2020 “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.”
The Harper’s letter (The Letter™) was a three-paragraph admonishment of “the forces of illiberalism,” focusing almost entirely on threats to “the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society” from the left. The examples listed in the piece (“Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes”) were purposely vague, intended to give readers a sense of a reasonable, if inaccurate, argument that few could disagree with if taken at face value.
As for why the purposely vague examples shouldn’t be taken at face value, I’ll just direct you to this brilliant Michael Hobbes piece:
Fast-forward to 2022, and hey, it turns out that I was right. Go figure.
As predicted, the far-right has used the endless discourse about “the illiberal left” as cover for its agenda of restricting speech and banning books. And as predicted, many of the people who signed onto The Letter™, are either suspiciously quiet
on the topic or are making excuses for why it’s not actually a bad thing or not actually worse than a handful of people on Twitter saying they thought a book was racist or sexist (i.e. “cancel culture”).Meanwhile, Republican legislators are lining up a bevy of “anti-Critical Race Theory” bills that dictate what schools are allowed to teach or “promote,” while also being filled with unrelated stuff like this Virginia bill, which would make it effectively illegal for trans students in K-12 schools to use restrooms that match their gender identity.
Last year, Matt Yglesias went on a long-winded defense of Republican activists using opposition to “critical race theory” (despite being an obvious bastardization of what “critical race theory” means") to ban the teaching of certain ideas and concepts in schools (like me, he deletes his old tweets after a while, but I was able to dig this one up. There’s more context in this piece linked here).
Now, keep in mind that the “anti-CRT” Republican bills tend to include things like this (from a Missouri bill), specifically prohibiting use of certain texts and concepts:
Yglesias was one of the Harper’s letter signatories. But after the “anti-CRT”/”campus speech wars” monster he (and others) helped create, which is now being used to ban everything from the teaching of “divisive concepts” to “negative” portrayals of US history to (as highlighted by Jeffrey Sachs below) “promoting” any position “that is in opposition to closely held religious beliefs of students” (i.e. to make it legally risky to hire an LGBTQ teacher, which is what these laws have tended to do when implemented internationally)…
…he’s now asking what it really means to “ban” a book.
Writer Adam Serwer has a running bit where he’ll tweet, “This left wing political correctness is getting out of control” in response to stories about right-wing efforts to ban speech. There are now 118 of these tweets.
As he explains in one tweet from 2019, the bit boils down to political correctness being “treated as an exclusively left-wing phenomenon, even though the loudest complainers are typically censorious when it comes to views they find offensive.”
While a number of the examples he cites are people doing and saying things that would get someone on the left slammed for “cancel culture”…
…many of them (especially during the Trump era) were about leaders in government using their offices to silence or prosecute dissenters.
I’ve written a lot about this in the past, as well.
All I really want is for the people who’ve spent the past several years chiding the left about “cancel culture” to admit they were wrong. You can criticize someone’s outrage, anger, or criticism without pretending that someone’s tweet or blog post about how a certain children’s author is anti-trans is in any way equal to (or worse than) what is currently happening on the right. That’s all I want. Just a simple, “In hindsight, I should have listened to those who tried to sound the alarm about the actual censorship happening on the right.” Unfortunately, I feel like I may be waiting for a while.
Critical race theory is a framework to think about the way facially neutral laws can be discriminatory against minority groups in their implementation. One example of a law that does this is the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which treated possession of crack cocaine as a more serious offense than possession of powder cocaine. While facially neutral, there’s no actual mention of race in this portion of the law, Black Americans were much more likely to be convicted of possession of crack cocaine compared to white Americans, who were much more likely to be convicted of possession of powder cocaine. These are the same drug, and there’s really no justification for making crack punishable by a harsher sentence than powder — unless your justification is based on who gets caught with which version.
I’m sure that some have said something, but as a general theme, it’s been a lot of silence.
They’ll argue that “cancel culture” is either worse than state-enforced efforts to silence speech or will argue that it’s not actually a “ban”/”cancellation”/etc. These are thoroughly disingenuous arguments that expose the “anti-cancel culture” crew as massive hypocrites — not that they particularly care.
I really don't understand people on the left who think "cancel culture" is in any way a bad thing. It all started as far as I know as a fad of people on social media seeing a celebrity behaving badly and saying, "This celebrity is now canceled." I assumed it was a way of taking the power back from Hollywood producers who kept canceling our favorite shows while the worst dreck would linger on for a decade or longer.
I found this annoying at first as I do with most fads, but this form of "cancel culture" is actually great. There should be consequences for celebrities who do bad things but are viewed as too bankable or powerful to force off our screens. They should be made to fear the popular will of the people. All they were really losing is their popularity. It was only a true threat to their livelihood if they continued to live like assholes. Why would any leftist think it's a bad idea to subject the popularity of celebrities to the will of the people?
The form of "cancel culture" weaponized by the right, which is really just an extension of the bullying/harassing/doxxing playbook, is a scourge, but it has nothing to do with how the term "canceled" was originally used.
As an aside, I'm glad I lost track of Matt Yglesias after he disappeared behind a paywall. I'll always remember him fondly for his satirical take, "The optimal economic growth policy isn’t to slash Social Security or Medicare benefits, it’s to euthanize 70 year-olds and harvest their organs for auction." But that was at least 10 years ago.
Parker, this is an excellent piece and I think it ties in well to your recent tweets on pundit-credibility. I'm thinking specifically about your points on Steve Hayes of The Dispatch and his book on 9/11. Hopefully I'm paraphrasing your point appropriately as being - when a pundit gets a big issue so completely wrong as Steve did vis a vis al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, their credibility should be forever damaged and, as a result, their job as a pundit effectively over. The job of a pundit, to continue this paraphrase, is all reward and no risk.
Full disclosure, I'm a paid subscriber to The Dispatch. I subscribed as a way of breaking out of my echo chamber(s) and exposing myself to more conservative opinions. Ideally I meant it to be a way of keeping me honest, challenging my liberal viewpoint with opposing views from a group that largely hadn't fallen down the MAGA rabbit hole. In one sense I do have to give people like Hayes and Jonah Goldberg credit - they've certainly argued against the Republicans on nearly everything related to Trump, January 6th, the big lie, and other topics. And they both have paid something of a price for this as well albeit not anything that revokes their "pundit cards". There is a big "HOWEVER" to this whole paragraph...
So when you were tweeting about Steve this past weekend, you gave me a great deal to think about. And I mean that in the best possible way too. I didn't know Steve wrote the 9/11 book but even before l learned that, the "however" I just mentioned had been rearing its head. The folks at the at the Dispatch have not gone MAGA however they take issue with literally every single thing the Biden Administration does. It does not matter the topic, if Biden does "A", you can bet they will argue for "B". And they are surrounded by the National Review/AEI crowd who tend to act as an echo chamber. I struggle with whole notion of "punditry" and pundit credibility much like you do but when I can predict a pundit's take, almost to the letter, before they write it, it seems "extra" bad.
This is "pollyanna-ish" but I do wish there was a better way to police pundits. Honestly, I find some (stress: some) of the political debates on Twitch a better method of discussing and policing "take-havers" than anything in the mainstream media. At least there, for all the various pitfalls, you may be forced into engaging with someone diametrically opposed to your view and who will pull no punches in telling you so. I find many mainstream pundits do not really engage with the best of their opposing sides. I see a lot of group-think and invite-your-friends-on-a-podcast-to-agree-on-everything. I do think the cage-match style debates of the Twitch world can act as a method of policing punditry but there are, of course, issues with all this. Not the least of which being Twitch is primarily, a video game website (lol).
Parker, I think you're raising some damn good points here and with your broader points on punditry. It's thought-provoking and I think it's a topic that should get a HELL of a lot more discussion and visibility and I'm here for it. I've rambled a lot but I'm sure you have a good sense for the many directions a topic of this weight can take someone!