Internet Frogs and the Free Speech Debate

Since around the time a television-borne pathogen ascended to the now-defunct American Presidency, political discourse has taken on a feverish cast. The cultural proxy wars that made of the nineties a cartoon spectacle —official saccharine censoriousness pitted against generic, bespiked rebellion — have ballooned into a lurid clusterfuck. In a diseased symbiosis, the racist goons and the graphomaniacal “take” industry serve each other wormy platters of moral panic. Message board runoff carried enough cultural currency to earn mentions in Clinton campaign speeches, and the problem of Too Many Internet Cartoons about Eugenics has made its way into the parlor room debates of august newspapermen.
On college campuses across the nation, credulous internet denizens take their oversaturated political pathologies to the dining and lecture halls. Dudes in camo pointlessly frighten their classmates with huge guns they learned to tote on 4chan, while students donning defiantly shorn sides-of-heads demand that sushi be taken off the cafeteria menu for fear of cultural appropriation.
In this context, many pundits and academics, disoriented by this hypertrophy of political posturing, feel compelled to freshly interrogate the meaning of “free speech.” One of the more tireless interrogators is Freddie deBoer, who offers a fictional dialogue between himself and a hypothetical “pro-censorship leftist” in a Medium article. He begins with the following scenario:
Pro-censorship leftist: You’d allow Milo and Richard Spencer to speak on campus?!? They’re literally white supremacists!
Me: But Condoleeza Rice has been pushed off campus before. I’m fairly sure she’s not a literal white supremacist, though I hate her politics.
Let’s return to that exchange in a second, because another recent piece puts the hypothetical into context. Arguing that “it’s not a good idea to equate speech with violence,” John Sexton writes in Hot Air that “the view of social justice being taught on many campuses encourages students to view every perceived slight as an intentional attack on their identity.” This is probably true, to some degree. People are fucking dumb, and the most reductive and illiberal interpretation of a given ideology or doctrine has generally emerged as the loudest. Why should intersectionality be any different?
However, the obvious objection to Milo and Spencer being allowed to speak on campuses is that the former has nothing to say, and the latter wants to incite a race war. Both are pretty poor programs for an academic forum. Milo’s shtick is that he wants you to know that he’s noticed fat people and trans people, and finds them repellent. Spencer openly encourages “ethnic cleansing.” I suspect there’s a lot of fat people, transgender people, and people with ethnicities on a given campus, so it’s not a stretch to say that two dipshits whose platforms consist almost exclusively in calls to taunt and harm those students oughtn’t be encouraged and incentivized to go where they are by the people to whom the students pay exorbitant heaps of money. And to argue that the speeches given by Milo and Spencer shouldn’t be equated with violence is a little like saying that Hesh suggesting that Tony Soprano consider castrating a debtor in episode three shouldn’t be equated with violence. Sure, it’s a difference in degree, but not in kind.
The only solid argument for an abstract, unconditional approach to free speech on campuses in DeBoer’s piece is an economic one:
People will straight up tell me that Republican students have no right to speak on campus, which is basically begging our state legislatures to destroy tenure and further impoverish our vulnerable state colleges.
His example is a ridiculous strawman that doesn’t do much service to the broader question, but the idea that the perception of campus culture could inflect the education budgets put forth by lawmakers is likely true. It’s also true that the perception of Black mothers influences budgets for social services. If DeBoer is in favor of Spencer being allowed a platform, his proposal is tortuous and paradoxical: material improvement for students must be conditioned upon maintaining a cavalier attitude towards their immediate safety.
Ultimately, anemic education budgets aren’t a response to collegiate ideological tenor any more than slashing social services is about the promotion of goodly childrearing. It’s about a plutocratic, avaricious, cold-blooded agenda propelled along by racism.
These plutocrats fuck us all over at all turns, because their hearts are made of shit. Fighting back requires a similar arsenal, including the power to be selective about the people to whom we offer a platform. Not only is total nihilism about public speech untenable and practically impossible, but its effect is to merely amplify the most retrograde blowhards servicing the status quo.
To DeBoer’s credit, he addresses this point in his imaginary dialogue:
Me: But Zionist student groups claim that pro-Palestinian activism makes them feel unsafe all the time. Yet you guys laugh off those claims. Who decides when feeling unsafe actually constitutes a reason to censor?
PCL: B-b-but power differentials! POWER DIFFERENTIALS!
Me: I’m not sure what you think that means, but since we’re talking about power — where did you get this idea that students at elite private colleges, where most of these activism controversies start, are somehow the powerless of the earth? Those schools pull overwhelmingly from the most affluent families, and their students go on to be parts of the economic and social upper classes in large majorities. Besides, in the neoliberal university, students are customers, and customers have power when negotiating with institutions.
His poor interlocutor, all bumbling and nervous and suffering from Tourette’s syndrome. I think what s/he means is that there exist wildly varying degrees of power attached to different ideas, and therefore more power is granted the spokespeople of some ideas than others. For instance, a Senate bill was recently introduced which threatens jail time for supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions effort against Israel. So one side gets jail time and the other side gets, well, a law that puts its opponents in jail. DeBoer pretending that the imaginary student means “students are the poor, huddled masses” is fairly disingenuous.
DeBoer’s argument is, in effect, that denying Milo or Spencer a platform is a slippery slope, which is potentially damaging to the left. He even cites the BDS bill in a Facebook post, demonstrating the degree to which the slope has been slipped on. But the BDS bill is obviously not the consequence of an ambient atmosphere of censorship encouraged on college campuses. It’s the consequence of shit tons of AIPAC money and morally cavernous lawmakers. It’s as though deBoer thinks that if you can invite some wonk onto campus who says “national debt is a problem we must tackle,” it follows that the same courtesy be extended to a guy in a Klan robe who points to the audience saying “fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!” It’s the only way to save our universities.
The convulsions of the identitarian online and student left produce some vile results, as one would expect with any complex moral framework only recently reaching somewhat popular appeal. But it’s not hard to parse the viable positions out of the gurgling trough of illiberal castigations. And since colleges are one of the only reliable arenas of any sort of left-leaning thinking, let’s ensure they stay that way, even if that thinking is often bastardized or misapplied.
Let’s fight for free public universities in order to let more working class and marginalized people enjoy a context in which empathy and thoughtfulness are the norm, let’s oppose illiberal or misguided interpretations of well-meaning frameworks, and let’s stop insisting that these goals can only be achieved with the caveat that every month, each college must meet a quota of one racist YouTube celebrity. I think we can do all of these things.
