The Real Reason the Far Right in America Doesn’t Care About ‘Free Speech’
The right's war on free speech in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk goes beyond hypocrisy; it exposes the white nationalist conservatism that has won the heart and soul of Republican identity.
There’s something different about the American right these days. The gruesome murder of Charlie Kirk has led supposed “free speech absolutists” to declare war on the American left over its alleged “violent language.” Yes, the advocates of anti-cancel-culture, who routinely dismissed hate speech laws, ridiculed the notion of a “micro-aggression,” and championed the “right to offend,” are now up in arms about the unsympathetic reactions some of Kirk’s usual targets have had to his death. “It is good that these people lose their jobs,” far-right commentator Matt Walsh said, responding to some unsavory comments about Kirk. “‘Free speech’ does not mean that we should act with anything but revulsion and disgust to people who say revolting and disgusting things.” In 2016, however, that same Matt Walsh tweeted that to be a “free speech advocate,” you should “always oppose anyone getting fired over a controversial tweet.”
This type of contradiction has been rampant throughout Trump’s second term, which has seen the biggest attack on free speech in the United States since the McCarthy Era persecution. Students have been detained for writing op-eds, universities have sold out their foreign students to ICE snatchers, and anti-Trump protests have been met with disproportionate police repression – all to the approving chorus of the free speech warriors of a decade past. Kirk’s assassination seems to have intensified this trend, leading to increasingly unhinged tweets by Matt-Walsh-types, already talking about the need to dismantle “LGBT terror networks.”
With Democratic leadership nowhere to be seen, the liberal establishment seems more than happy to be overrun by this assault. The progressive left, for its part, has struggled to understand this sudden change beyond a charge of hypocrisy: “Can you imagine if a Democrat said this”? This is a natural, yet reactive conclusion. It tells us what the far right is doing, not why. The political processes at play go far beyond mere hypocrisy.