CHAPTER ONE The Establishment vs. Free Speech
In June 1998, Matt Drudge announced in a speech to the National Press Club: âWe have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices. Every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be. The difference between the Internet, television and radio, magazines, newspapers, is the two-way communication. The Net gives as much voice to a [onetime] thirteen-year-old computer geek like me as to a CEO or speaker of the House. We all become equal. And you would be amazed what the ordinary guy knows.â1
Less than five months earlier, Drudge had single-handedly sent the political and media worlds into turmoil. His website, the Drudge Report, not only broke the story of President Bill Clintonâs affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, but revealed that Newsweek magazine had been sitting on the story. In one fell swoop, Drudge delivered a shattering blow to both the political and media establishments. That, Drudge reflected in June, was the power of the Internet: one man and a laptop could expose facts that important people wanted ignored.
Six years before Facebook was founded, seven years before Google launched YouTube, and eight years before Twitter existed, Drudge predicted the effect that platforms like theirs would have on public knowledge and the media industry. âAnd time was only newsrooms had access to the full pictures of the dayâs events. But now any citizen does. We get to see the kinds of cuts that are made for all kinds of reasonsâendless layers of editors with endless agendas changing bits and pieces, so by the time the newspaper hits your welcome mat it had no meaning. Now, with a modem, anyone can follow the world and report on the worldâno middleman, no Big Brother. And I guess this changes everything.â
On October 13, 2016, eighteen years after Drudgeâs comments, legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen, in a speech at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, delivered a prescient warning about the âmost urgent free speech question of our time.â That question, Rosen said, is how to âprotect First Amendment values in an age where⌠young lawyers at Google and Facebook and Twitter have more power over who can speak⌠[and] be heard, than any king, or president, or Supreme Court justice.â Rosen warned that Google, Facebook, and Twitter were facing âgrowing public pressure, here in America and around the world, to favor values such as dignity and safety rather than liberty and free expressionâ on their platforms.2 As a result, the great challenge would be âto ensure that the American free speech traditionâwhich is so necessary for the survival of American democracyâflourishes online, rather than atrophying.â
Rosenâs âgreat concern,â he told his audience, was that he was ânot confident that the public will demand First Amendment and constitutional valuesâsuch as transparency, procedural regularity, and free expressionâover dignity and civility. In colleges in America, and on digital platforms around the world, public pressure is clamoring in the opposite direction, in favor of dignity rather than liberty of thought and opinion.â His speech centered on an ominous prediction of the future:
As public pressures on the companies grow, they may increasingly try to abdicate their role as deciders entirely, to avoid being criticized for making unpopular decisions. I can imagine a future where Google, Twitter, and Facebook delegate their content decisions to government, to users, or even to popular referenda, in order to avoid criticism and accountability for exercising human judgment. The result would be far more suppression of speech, and less democratic deliberation than exists now, making the age of the deciders look like a brief shining age, a Periclean oasis before the rule of the mob with a dictator.
Rosenâs pessimistic vision didnât take long to become reality.
Donald Trumpâs election in 2016 sent a shockwave through the liberal political and media establishment. That establishment suddenly realized that it had lost control of the national conversation. Panicked, it turned to Big Tech to censor and suppress open debate on the Internet in order to control it and bring it in line with the left-liberal consensus of the media, the Democratic Party, and public education, which has long been hostile to âpolitically incorrectâ thinking and speech.
If they succeed, it will be bad news for people who believe in freedom and diversity of opinion, because the mainstream media, the Democratic Party, and the education establishment are among the most intellectually narrow-minded institutions in American life. Even the Washington Post has acknowledged that âliberal intolerance is on the rise on Americaâs college campuses, with data showing that college students have steadily become more intolerant of controversial speech in the last half century.3 Although the average American is more likely to be a self-described conservative than a self-described liberal, left-leaning professors outnumber conservative professors in academia more than five-to-one.4 Ten times as many professors are registered Democrats than are registered Republicans.5 Public school teachers, many of whom graduate from left-wing schools of education, are also overwhelmingly on the left.6
Viewpoint diversity is no greater within the media: most every cable news program slants leftward. (In fact, Fox News tops the cable news ratings precisely because itâs the only major network that speaks to the right side of the aisle.) A 2014 study found that between 2002 and 2013, the percentage of mainstream journalists who were registered Republicans fell from 18 percent to 7 percent.7 Other studies confirm that the average journalist is much more likely to be left-wing than the average American.8
The leftâs stranglehold on education and media has serious consequences for the lives of everyday Americans. Itâs how ideas like âtoxic masculinity,â âwhite privilege,â and âpreferred pronouns,â leak into mainstream discourse: they germinate in the offices of far-left academics, migrate to the news and editorial desks at the New York Times, buzz into the minds of Democratic politicians, and then are stamped into the mandatory curriculum at your local high school. Of course, not every journalist or public school teacher is a leftist, but the data make clear that most are, especially at the upper levels of their professions. The power players in these industries are all on the same ideological team, and they are all part of the same liberal establishment that has driven Americaâs national discourse for decades.
The advent of Internet search engines like Google, video-hosting sites like YouTube, and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, produced new ways around the leftâs information monopoly; they empowered private citizens to report events, express opinions, and reach broad audiences on a scale that had traditionally been reserved for network news anchors, print reporters, and prominent intellectuals.
Social media represents a real threat to the political monoculture enforced by elite institutions. Absent an editorial tilt, social media is pure democracy. Thatâs why social media, more than any other medium, is where conservatives have gained their strongest foothold, and itâs also precisely why the progressive left feels the need to censor online speech so urgently.
CNN commentator Kirsten Powers, herself a liberal, confessed that seen through the ânarrow and intolerant lensâ of people on the âilliberal left,â âdisagreement is violence. Offending them is akin to physical assault. They are so isolated from the marketplace of ideas, that when confronted with a view they donât like, they feel justified in doing whatever they can to silence that speech.â9
Thatâs why thereâs a push on many university campusesâwhere the illiberal left dominatesâto make âmicroaggressionsâ reportable to the campus police department. Itâs also the premise upon which left-wing agitators try to shut down Chick-fil-A franchises because the companyâs owner supports traditional marriage. And thatâs how you get New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio boycotting Chick-fil-A after it opened a franchise that provided jobs in his city.10
At the ideological heart of the left today is the theory of intersectionality, which holds that interlocking systems of oppression determine most of the worldâs outcomes. White women are victims, but less so than black men, who themselves are less marginalized than black women, who have more privilege than black transgender women, and so on. The more boxes you check that identify you as a member of a marginalized group, the more oppressed you are. And the more oppressed you are, the more deference your views should receive. Individuals who are more âintersectionalâ have a greater right to speak than those who score lower on the intersectionality scale.
If your goal was to create the opposite of a self-help philosophy, youâd land on intersectionality. The way to change your life for the better isnât to work hard, practice good habits and make good decisionsâthe way to change your life is to overthrow the systems of oppression that are keeping you down, and the way to gain moral authority among your peers is to achieve a higher level of victimhood. Because all oppressions are interlinked, the way to solve an issue is to chop away at our capitalist, racist, misogynistic system, no matter how narrow your concern may be. Once you overthrow the system, then your life can improve. As New York Magazineâs Andrew Sullivan observes, intersectionality has a quasi-religious element to it that necessitates silencing heretics:
It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explainedâand through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., âcheck your privilege,â and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. The sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if you are white or male or straight, that a profound conversion is required.
Like the Puritanism once familiar in New England, intersectionality controls language and the very terms of discourse. It enforces manners. It has an idea of virtueâand is obsessed with upholding it. The saints are the most oppressed who nonetheless resist. The sinners are categorized in various ascending categories of demographic damnation, like something out of Dante. The only thing this religion lacks, of course, is salvation. Life is simply an interlocking drama of oppression and power and resistance, ending only in death. Itâs Marx without the final total liberation.
It operates as a religion in one other critical dimension: If you happen to see the world in a different way, if youâre a liberal or libertarian or even, gasp, a conservative, if you believe that a university is a place where any idea, however loathsome, can be debated and refuted, you are not just wrong, you are immoral. If you think that arguments and ideas can have a life independent of âwhite supremacy,â you are complicit in evil. And you are not just complicit, your heresy is a direct threat to others, and therefore needs to be extinguished. You canât reason with heresy. You have to ban it. It will contaminate othersâ souls and wound them irreparably.11
Sullivan is one of the few voices in the establishment press willing to call attention to the toxic mob culture of the far left and its growing influence. National Reviewâs Kevin D. Williamson, for instance, barely lasted two weeks working at The Atlantic before left-wing mobs got him fired for his views on abortion. Williamsonâs left-wing detractors argued that his mere presence in the office could make his female colleagues unsafe.12 On campus, things are even worse. Across the country, campus administrators have set up âbias reportingâ hotlines for students to report their classmates for perceived thought-crimes, while left-wing academics admit to discriminating against conservative Ph.D. candidates.13 When conservative speakers arenât routinely disinvited from speaking on college campuses, mobs of left-wing students have repeatedly used violence or intimidation to try to silence them.14 In one famous incident in 2017, students at Middlebury College attacked author Charles Murray and a professor at the school, a liberal woman, who tried to help Murray escape the mob.15
As on college campuses, so too in public life when it is dominated by the far left. For example, I reported on how an independent, reformist candidate for city council in Seattle campaigning against âthe ideologuesâ dominating city politics felt compelled to drop his candidacy after left-wing activists threatened his wife and children. As he said in a statement, âTheyâve made vile, racist attacks against my wife, attempted to get her fired from Microsoft, and threatened sexual violence. They have even posted hateful messages to my eight-year-old sonâs school Facebook page. I know that as the race progresses, the activists will ratchet up their hate-machine and these attacks will intensify significantly.â16 When Trump supporters were attacked by violent protesters during the 2016 presidential campaign, the left often treated it as an open question as to whether it was the rioters or Trumpâs incendiary rhetoric that was at fault.17 Of course, when you believe that speech that opposes your point of view is a form of violence, then you can justify real violenceâor censorshipâas a matter of self-defense.
Free speech, however, appeared to have a sanctuary on the Internet. Many of the popular political commentators on YouTube and Facebook had one thing in common: opposition to political correctness and the left-wing censorship it produced. When a video of Professor Jordan Peterson protesting mandatory âgenderâ speech codes went viral, he became a Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter sensation. Christina Hoff Sommers, a respected feminist scholar, and liberal-libertarian, garnered millions of views for her videos critiquing left-wing arguments on such topics as the alleged male-female wage gap and âtoxic masculinity,â and pointing to the feminist cultureâs âwar on boysâ in Americaâs schools.18 Ben Shapiro made viral internet videos his calling card, aiming them especially at college age viewers looking for thoughtful, alternative arguments to what they heard from professors, liberal politicians, and media talking heads. His success led to the creation of the popular website the Daily Wire, which combines traditional online news commentary with podcasts from Shapiro and others.
Left-wing extremists have sometimes prevented Peterson, Shapiro, and Sommers from speaking on college campuses, but they havenât been able to stop them from speaking online (at least not yet). Nor could they stop the explosion of right-of-center media outlets onlineâlike Breitbart, Daily Caller, Townhall, and many othersâthat filled a gaping hole in the media market.
The activist left was slo...