The Trump administration’s systemic attack on free speech is hard to defend. The easier move for the president’s apologists is to attack critics for their hypocrisy.
“The left has amnesia when it comes to the cancel culture they perpetuated. It is a game they created with rules they made up. Now they hate that it’s being applied to them,” the USA Today columnist Nicole Russell writes. The X account End Wokeness, which has nearly 4 million followers, recently posted a photo of a Covington Catholic student in a MAGA hat widely tarred as racist over a viral video of him confronting a Native American man on a 2019 field trip in Washington, D.C., arguing, “You tried to ruin this kid’s life for a smirk. Do not dare lecture us on cancel culture.”
Relying on charges of hypocrisy to defend attacks on free speech is a dodge. It willfully neglects principled defenses of liberal norms in order to justify abandoning these principles. Just as dictators assume that all leaders abuse human rights and gangsters think that everyone would break the law if given the chance, people who move to censor their opponents are quick to insist that they are just doing what their rivals were already doing, so quit complaining.
The problem is that the charge of hypocrisy is useful only for judging people, not for judging ideas. If Ted Bundy accuses somebody of being a murderer, Bundy might be a hypocrite, but that doesn’t mean that the person he’s accusing isn’t a murderer, or that murder is no big deal.
The argument implicit in these sweeping charges of hypocrisy on the left is that every progressive bought into the cancel-culture frenzy, but this is clearly not true. The American left has spent a decade engrossed in vicious internecine feuding over left-wing illiberalism. In July 2020, a public letter published by Harper’s Magazine and signed by more than 150 scholars and writers decried “the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.” The nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression expanded its mission in 2022 from combatting censorship on college campuses to defending free speech for all Americans against threats from all sides.
The notion that cancel culture was primarily something liberals did to conservatives is also untrue. The phenomenon of the left-wing outrage mob occurred almost entirely within progressive institutions, such as universities, publishing, media, and the arts, and involved skewering, silencing, and often firing anyone deemed insufficiently progressive. Some victims were indeed conservatives, including the actor Gina Carano, who was fired from The Mandalorian in 2021 after implying on social media that being a Republican was like being a Jew in Nazi Germany.
But the most prominent targets, such as David Shor, James Bennet, and Nicholas and Erika Christakis, were liberals who violated the language and dogma of the left. Mercifully, this frenzy has gone out of style, in no small part because of Donald Trump’s victorious appeal to the nonwhite voters who were supposed to feel served by the censorious, woke left.
The tactic of defending attacks on free speech with charges of hypocrisy is hardly the preserve of conservatives. Some progressives are fond of greeting every right-wing attack on free speech by sarcastically predicting silence from the very people who denounced left-wing cancel culture.
It is true that many people who fervently scold illiberalism on the left often ignore it on the right (see: Fox News), and vice versa (for one instance among many, see: Charles Blow, a former New York Times columnist, insisting on X in July 2020, “Once more: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CANCEL CULTURE. There is free speech. You can say and do as you pls, and others can choose never to deal [with] you, your company or your products EVER again. The rich and powerful are just upset that the masses can now organize their dissent”).
The illiberal right, like the illiberal left, grasps that straightforward arguments for repression are a hard sell. The easiest way to win the argument is to pretend that the only question is not whether open debate is worthy of tolerance but who’s repressing whom. Presuming that all opponents are hypocrites relieves people from having to make a case against liberal values.
It’s important to avoid hypocrisy about free speech. It’s important to avoid hypocrisy on anything, for that matter. But if your only way of engaging with the issue is to accuse opponents of lacking any principled beliefs, then you probably don’t have any principles of your own.
