I was a student in the late 2000s when I had my first brush with “cancel culture.” A campus group had invited Nick Griffin — a racist Holocaust denier and leader of a fascist British political party, among other charming things — to speak.
Many shocked students, including me, called Griffin’s views vile and warned that violent extremists might come to support him. Eventually, the group rethought the invitation and canceled the event. Thank heavens.
No one’s speech had beendenied. Others had simply exercised theirown.
Yet a few short years later, campus protests like these became abete noirefor right-wing politicians, who produced countless diatribes against “woke mobs” and the “free speech crisis” on campus. Then, with ample backing from well heeled donors, they launched an actual war on speech, on campus and beyond.
Protest has never been a threat to speech — itisfree speech. What we’ve learned is that the real threat is inequality.
Consider this spring’s campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza and U.S. support for it.
Conservative politicians who’d thrown fits over free speech on campus cheered as police officersroughed upandarrestedstudent protesters. Some even called to deploythe National Guard, which infamously murdered four Kent State students during the Vietnam era.
Meanwhile billionaire CEOs like Bill Ackman led campaigns toout students who’d participated in the protestsand blacklist them from employment.
Cynically casting these oftenJewish-led protestsas anti-semitic, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) — who has ahistory of embracing truly anti-semitic conspiracy theories—hauled several university presidents before Congressto answer for why the protests hadn’t been shut down more brutally.
When University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill feebly defended the First Amendment, a$100 million donor complainedand Magill was compelled to resign. Under similar donor pressure, Harvard President Claudine Gayfollowed suit. And Stefanik? Sheraked in campaign cash.
Of course, high-end donors are shaping what can and can’t be saidinsidethe classroom as well.
Corporate and billionaire-backed groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council and Of The People havepoured enormous sumsinto backing laws that ban books, restrict what history can and can’t be taught, and severely curtail classroom instruction on race, gender, or sexuality.
Manypublic librariesanduniversitiesface defunding for carrying materials these billionaire-backed politicians don’t like. And in some redstates, teachers and school librarians maynow face felony chargesforrunning afoul of state censors.
In other cases the public square itself is falling under sustained assault from extreme wealth. For example, after spending a fortune to buy Twitter, billionaire Elon Musk proclaimed himself a “free speech absolutist” andpromptly eliminated nearly all content moderation.
But perhaps “absolutist” was a relative term.
As threats and hate speech predictably flooded the platform, Musk threatened a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against a watchdog group that cataloged the growing trend. He also appeared tosuspend journalists that covered him criticallyand otherwise censored users who espoused causes he didn’t care for, likeLGBTQ rights or racial justice.
A parallel problem has played out more quietly in local news, with beleaguered American newspapersnow outnumbered by dark money “pink slime” news sites, which peddle misinformation while posing as local news outlets.
Lying, of course, is usually protected speech. But when it’s backed by big money and linked to a sustained, state-backed assault on speech to the contrary, then we’ve badly warped the field on which free speech is supposed to play out.
Similarly, when the Supreme Court rules thatcash payments—even bribes— are “free speech,” then those of us with less cash get a lot less free speech.
Extreme inequality threatens our First Amendment right not only to speak freely, but to assemble together and petition our representatives.
Alongside real campaign finance reform and anti-corruption laws, higher taxes on billionaires and corporations would leave them with less money to spend warping our politics, classrooms, and public squares. So would stronger unions who can win pay raises and social movements that can protect their communities from retribution.
If we want an equal right to speech, we need a more equal country.
