Not that I object to the piece at all, but I do wonder who, in the year of our Gritty 2025, needs to be told that the freeze speech crowd were always full of shit, and it was always just a backlash of elites to the notion that lesser people - and peoples - had any right to speak at all.
Flash-forward to 2025. The backlash against wokeness is the core of Trump’s second administration, and it’s being used to justify an assault on free speech unequaled since the McCarthy era. Trump has banned diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives throughout the federal government; has used the levers of the state to compel universities and other elite institutions to do the same; and has repeatedly jailed legal residents for engaging in what was once protected speech—usually speech in defense of the human rights of Palestinians. But as In These Times noted in April, just under a quarter of the Harper’s letter signatories have spoken up for the detained Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil and other victims of Trump’s unconstitutional crackdown. (Those who have include progressives like my fellow Nation columnists Jeet Heer, Katha Pollitt, and Zephyr Teachout.) For the large majority—notably including Weiss, a leading champion of Israel’s war on Gaza—Trump’s reign of terror has apparently been less objectionable than the irritating undergraduate and entry-level scolds of the 2010s.
If these erstwhile free speech champions were only guilty of hypocrisy—or bad faith—they would hardly be worth writing about now, but in many ways they helped lay the groundwork for Trump’s second term. Consider the column for which Bennet was ousted, which was among the inspirations for the Harper’s letter: a Republican senator, Tom Cotton, calling for the use of military force to violently suppress free assembly (in protest of lethal police violence, no less). Cotton recently described Khalil as “a pro-Hamas foreigner” and scoffed at the idea that he has any rights worth defending. From the start, the speech being defended was advocating the violent, top-down defense of existing social hierarchies—which in 2025 is not the least bit abstract.
People either have known this for a long time 😠or they have know this for a long time 😜.