Musings on the Free Speech Shuffle That Really Isn't About Free Speech...

One of the bizzarest things that has occurred in my lifetime during the neoliberal post-Margaret Thatcher era is the rise of a right wing free speech movement that really isn't about free speech. Think of it, the very group whose pedigree goes back to the anti-anarchist, anti-socialist, and anti-communist crusades and to figures like Gerald L.K. Smith and groups like the John Birch Society, people and groups who supported making the Communist Party illegal in the US, have suddenly become champions of free speech. All I can say is don't believe the demagogic hype. Right wing free speechers are hardly proponents of no holds barred free speech.

First of all, right wing free speech groups really don't seem to have much of a conception of free speech beyond the tautological or circular: free speech is good because it is good to have free speech. Second, right wing free speechers, as the above examples show, have, like those who argue that free speech is limited and that you can't yell fire in a theatre when there is none, limited freedom of speech in practise. As I noted, right wingers have been leaders in what is today called cancel culture. They favoured cancellation of anarchist speech, socialist speech, anti-war speech, whatever speech they disagreed with and coded as profane. These right wing free speechers whinge about attacks on Christianity by the secularist crowd, but they would, I suspect, favour limiting the free speech of someone who went into a White evangelical Church on Sunday morning at 11 am spewing all kinds of expletive invectives at those sitting in the pews. They would claim, I assume, that anyone who would do such a thing must be a disrespecful "hater" of Christianity, a claim that is akin to yelling fire in a theatre that is not aflame and akin to limits on adolescent hate speech on, for example, college or university campuses. But then right wing free speech groups have long been inherently hypocritical.

Of course, in the end the issue for right wingers is not free speech. It is about their speech. For them the only speech that should be free is their speech and any speech that disagrees with theirs or which they categorise as evil godless commie nazi socialist fill in the blank should not, they believe, be freely available in the marketplace of ideas. They don't even trust that the free marketplace of speech, which doesn't really exist, of course, will lead to the triumph of their "ideas", which is why they favour limiting the speech of those they disagree with and favour limiting the voting rights of those they disagree with. In the end then it is all about power for these right wing faux free speechers. They want it and they want to cleanse "America" of any speech that does not agree with theirs. Welcome to the insane world of modern postmodern America.