What Happens to the Free Speech Warriors?

For the last decade or so, one of the media’s favorite hobbyhorses is the idea that free speech in this country is acutely threatened by what you might call “the campus left”: a loose conglomeration of activists, professors, and bureaucrats who shout down campus speakers, police everyday speech, and dish out social and administrative punishment for anyone who steps out of line.

The amount of ink spilled on this has been incredible; dozens of milquetoast careers are floating in it. And yet now, to anyone with a functioning brain, it seems quaint. We are now witnessing an actual assault on free speech, backed with the force of the state, and initiated by people who harbor genuine disdain for the principles of the First Amendment. Protestors who committed no crime deported; law firms who represent Donald Trump’s enemies targeted with executive orders; congressmen who criticize Elon Musk threatened with prosecution; media organizations who don’t toe the line having their access limited; universities having their federal funding stripped for political reasons. 

And how were free speech advocates spending their time in the years leading up to this moment? The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a prominent free speech advocacy group, was maintaining a database of “deplatforming attempts”: attempts to cancel or disrupt campus speech. Under their framework, anything from a single person’s petition to cancel a speaking event to a brief outburst of protest during a speech qualifies as a “deplatforming attempt.” Moreover, they count each speaker separately. So, for example, when a few protestors chanted “ceasefire now” at a Stanford University event last December before being escorted out, FIRE tallied six deplatforming attempts – one for each speaker. 

Even with this loose rubric, FIRE generally counts just a few dozen deplatforming attempts per year (with a notable uptick in 2024 given the nationwide Gaza protests). In a country with about 4500 degree-granting institutions of higher education, most of which consistently host speaking events, art showcases and so forth, what we’re talking about is at most one deplatforming attempt per every several thousand events.

In other words, while the American right loudly and publicly coalesced around its authoritarian impulses, self-described free speech advocates occupied themselves with trifling minutiae. The charitable view is that they were wasting their time. But the reality is a little darker: these groups weren’t just spinning their wheels, they were actively facilitating the right-wing campaign against free expression.

Upgrade to premium!