In Which I Pick Some Bones With The Way National Review Columnists Talk About “Free Speech” When They Seem To Simply Be Annoyed That Powerful People Now Occasionally Listen To People Who Belong To Historically-Marginalized Groups

forb hadling
Aug 27, 2017 · 12 min read

I’ve been reading the National Review a lot lately, because if you are a thinking person, there is only so long you can spend telling the other side in a debate to fuck off, then being appalled when they tell you to fuck off. I mean, “GFY” is a fun game that has probably spiced up many a recent Turkey Day (and family reunion, and graduation, and facebook post about an upcoming yard sale), but at some point (hopefully before things get violent) it’s a good idea to quietly pull aside one of the more reasonable-seeming people on the other side and ask them to try to outline their position in a clear, cogent way. When I read articles in National Review, I usually come away thinking that yes, I disagree with what the author is advocating, but I recognize and often applaud their motives. Many conservatives’ fundamental ideas about values like honesty, equality, and freedom are quite similar to those of many on the left, and it makes me much less scared for our country when I can see evidence of that. Obviously I don’t agree with much of what NR publishes, but I’d be quite happy to sit across from them at a debate about American values, and I trust that they would approach the exercise with civility and good intent.

Some recent editorials have advanced the (unconservative, I would have thought) argument that private organizations have a responsibility to defend certain types of controversial speech in the interest of public discourse. Many editorials cite Google firing James Damore as an example of a — I don’t know exactly what word they would use. They seem not to, either; David French mentions it in passing:

And let’s remember that it was just days ago that Google — a company that claims to value free expression — summarily fired an employee for making good-faith arguments about sex differences that are “well-supported by large volumes of research across species, cultures, and history.”

I will say, before anything else, that I strongly disagree with the implication that any “sex differences” that are “well-supported by large volumes of research” are actually relevant to James Damore getting fired. I also think Google was right to fire the guy.

But the thing that really interests me about this quote is that he doesn’t actually state an opinion about anything. All he says is “let’s remember.” He doesn’t say, “Google should not have done that” though he implies it strongly. This was in the context of corporate attacks on free speech, and specifically the decision by several tech companies (including Google) not to offer their services to the Daily Stormer white supremacist website. French, after making clear that he finds TDS morally repugnant, says of the decision to blacklist it, “This was an ominous development for free speech.” Again, there’s that disembodied, passive-voice narrator. He did not say “Google, etc. should not have kicked TDS to the curb.” He also did not say “There is a law that says Google etc. should not kick TDS to the curb.” There isn’t, of course, and I hope and expect that French would line up against such a law if it were ever proposed. If we learned nothing else from Citizens United (the “corporations have free speech rights” decision that allowed the Citizens United lobbying company to run an attack ad against Hillary Clinton back in the 2008 primary, and established that corporations can use speech to attempt to influence elections without restriction), we learned that conservatives don’t take kindly to attempts to stop corporations from saying exactly and only what they want, about any topic, in any venue, at any time. Right?

So how can we reconcile these two positions? On the one hand, the conservative position is that Citizens United ought to be able to say as many mean things about Democrats as they can afford[1]. On the other hand, companies like Google, “cannot and must not fall for the activism and hectoring of ideological opportunists.” Whence comes this “cannot,” this “must not?” Is it the weaponless security guard’s “cannot” (“Stop or I’ll…I’ll yell ‘Stop’ again!”)? Is it the hectoring (yeah, that is a great word, I can see why he used it) “must not” of the chronic writer of letters-to-the-editor? In short, what moral or temporal or philosophical position, consistent with conservatism as David French sees it, is backing up the statement that Google has to do other than it damn well pleases, about speech or anything else?

He does provide one small corner of an argument that might advance his position, but it has nothing to do with free speech. He writes, “Americans by default and without any meaningful choice are putting their trust in a collection of companies that are largely ideological monocultures disproportionately influenced by the social-justice Left.” So maybe there’s a kind of antitrust angle here. I actually have some sympathy for this position (except for the “social-justice Left” bit, which seems to me both an oversimplification and also, as a lefty in everything but handedness, the correct state of the universe even if it were not). It really is scary to see the control that Google and Facebook have amassed over our civic discourse.

But I can’t see any road to regulating Google and Facebook that doesn’t first pass through the net neutrality to which conservatives seem so staunchly opposed. Surely if Google has a blanket responsibility to amplify any American voice, like James Damore’s or the Daily Stormer’s, then so does Comcast. If Google’s effective monopoly on “being found on the internet” requires them to be impartial, then the companies that hold geographic monopolies on access to the internet must also be required to offer access on terms that exclude no one. But this is not the argument Mr. French is making, and yet it’s the only leg-like object he advances in his whole column on which his “free speech” objections can be propped.

Instead, the unifying element behind the National Review’s incidents of — I still don’t know what they would like me to call it — “failure to stand up for controversial speech” maybe? The unifying element of the incidents of FSUCS is that the decisions to renounce support for the speaker were based on ideas rooted in what is called “social justice.” French acknowledges that directly in his column, in the “social-justice Left” quote above. It seems particularly important to him that powerful organizations resist the pressure from social justice activists to refuse to support speech that they[2] find offensive.

For another article in the same vein, we can look at Elliot Kaufman’s editorial opposing the decision by the ACLU to…admit that one of its tweets might have offended some people, and walk it back a bit. I bet that sentence did not end the way you thought it would. But we will call now to the switching yard operator to pull the lever and send our train in the direction of fruitful debate, leaving behind forever the question of why this particular interaction merited even a sentence.

The facts Kaufman presents are these:

  1. The ACLU put out a tweet that said, “This is the future that ACLU members want.” accompanied by a pretty cute white toddler holding an American flag and dressed in an ACLU onesie.
  2. Some people responded that they felt that was offensive. This being the internet, “counterprotesters” also immediately showed up.
  3. After 9 minutes or so, the ACLU felt the need to clarify: “PSA: The future we want is babies in ACLU onesies.” After 41 minutes, when the people who had first complained about the original tweet continued to complain about it, the ACLU tweeted a kind of agreement with them: a picture of Kermit the frog saying “that’s a very good point” accompanied by the text “When your Twitter followers keep you in check and remind you that white supremacy is everywhere.”

So why does this bother Kaufman so much? I’ll let him explain:

In less than an hour, the nation’s foremost defender of free speech was cowed by a bunch of semi-anonymous Twitter users into calling attention to its own nonexistent racism and retracting an utterly unimpeachable statement. Jarring, isn’t it?

He commits in this quote, and in the rest of the editorial, to an interpretation of the interaction in which the ACLU is being opposed by the people who criticize it — that’s what “cowed” in that quote means — that ACLU was intimidated, rather than convinced, into walking back the first tweet. He repeats this point in an interesting way a few sentences later:

The only way to prove oneself as an ally is to demonstrate absolute devotion and selflessness; for an ally, Dhimmitude will always be the name of the game. And the best way to demonstrate that is to defer to “marginalized” social-justice warriors even when it makes no sense to do so.

Dhimmitude” being a new word for me, I had to go look it up. It’s a pretty interesting one, invented fairly recently by a right-wing British author concerned that, to quote her Wikipedia article, “Islam, anti-Americanism and antisemitism hold sway over European culture.” “Dhimmi” was a word for a non-Muslim citizen of a Muslim country. Historically, their rights were restricted in various ways, and they had to acknowledge the primacy of Islam as the price of their physical and social safety. Thus, “Dhimmitude” is constructed to mean something like “an unfair and antidemocratic requirement to subserviently acknowledge the rightness of a particular viewpoint as a precondition for participating in a social system.” (along with, it would be naïf not to note, one large, steaming portion of fearmongering over Islam). In this case, Kaufman is arguing that the ACLU “capitulat[ing]” to its critics is a sign that people advocating for social justice are in fact a conspiracy to subjugate white people beneath the (I presume) diverse heel of the social justice oppressor. And just to remove any doubt that we are talking specifically about restrictions on white people, here’s Kaufman again:

…that may be what it takes to be a good “ally,” the term the Left has developed for white supporters of social-justice movements. Their job is to subordinate themselves to non-white “marginalized peoples,” and help those peoples to be heard. As Mia McKenzie, a queer Black feminist who founded the popular website Black Girl Dangerous, has written, the key to being a good ally is to “shut up and listen.”

This is why I read National Review. Yes, it offends me to read such an ugly and (it does seem intentionally) hurtful misrepresentation of a movement that has made such important progress in so many areas of American culture in my lifetime. But it’s clear and it tells us something about the guy’s perspective.

In Kaufman’s view, there simply is no possibility for negotiation — for give and take — with the massed forces of Social Justice waiting on the steppes beyond the Great Border Wall of white American experience. If these social justice types are so uncaring, so vile, that they would take an innocent white American toddler and…criticize the use of a picture of it on Twitter, then they certainly can’t be trusted with a seat at the adult table. The fact that the response of the ACLU was (first) “oops, we didn’t mean it like that” and (second) “Oh yeah, we see how that was a bad look for us, thanks for calling it out” must mean that the ACLU is quaking in their boots, humiliated and terrified of the onrushing hordes.

When I looked at the Tweet in question, I was unable to find the evidence to support Kaufman’s claim that the ACLU was “hounded by the social-media mob” over their tweet (it was a few days prior to this writing and I don’t use Twitter, so I may simply have missed it). I really wanted to find it, because Kaufman claims that

The ACLU knows what it did was not racist or an instantiation of white supremacy. It also knows that no reasonable person would find its actions racist or offensive.

That statement would have benefited from some discussion of what the objections to the original tweet actually were, but Kaufman doesn’t even mention them — it’s apparently enough that he doesn’t think any “reasonable person” could have agreed with them. It’s certainly possible to come up with an objection to that tweet that would be bogus. But let’s just try to imagine an exchange in which the facts are the same, and we end up with the same result, but instead of the people involved being hate-filled bog-monsters, they are not hate-filled bog-monsters. I think it might go something like this:

ACLU: This is the future that ACLU members want. <picture of white toddler>

Critic: That sure is a cute baby! But because it’s the only baby, and in fact the only human, in a post describing a desired version of “the future,” it looks like you’re making a point about the people who ACLU members want to inhabit the future rather than (as of course I’m sure you meant) the outfits. Your organization, which is committed to the protection of basic human rights that we all enjoy, nevertheless tends to only get the opportunity to act in that protection to the benefit of some fairly awful people — many of whom, if they posted a picture like that with a caption like that, would indeed be making a comment about the people they want to see in the future rather than the outfits. Since you are so often seen standing in support of those people in court, and assuming of course that you don’t share their awful views (and also assuming that you would not like to inadvertently encourage those people to donate money to your organization by allowing them to believe that you do share their awful views), it would make, oh, a whole lot of us out here feel a lot better if you could not publish things that look exactly like what you would publish if you actually agreed with your awful, regrettable clients, instead of simply taking their cases to defend a right for all of us.

ACLU: Oh… yeah. Sorry about that, thanks for pointing it out.

I hope this seems like an exchange between two reasonable people to Mr. Kaufman — I tried to articulate a criticism of the first tweet that, while I didn’t spot it at first, seemed fairly straightforward and fair after I’d spent a minute thinking about it. The other thing that I was careful about in this imagined conversation (which I wish more people on the political left would attempt) was to refrain from calling anyone a racist. The understanding of “racism” — or at least, what remains of the understanding of “racism” as bounced enthusiastically back and forth across the Great Border Wall like a noxious volleyball — cannot adequately support the nuance required for the current national conversation. As I said at the beginning of this essay, many conservatives’ revulsion to what they see as “racism” is exactly as strong, and carries exactly the same social stigma, as the revusion on the left to what we see as racism. These definitions of racism overlap but do not coincide — we on the left would probably agree that much of what a conservative sees as racist is indeed racist, but we also notice other kinds, aspects, and effects of racism that those on the right do not.

On the left, racism ranges from the truly abhorrent to the simply inconvenient. In Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, you can hear him breezily admit that he has some unconscious bias himself. To Kaufman, this probably sounds like more Dhimmitude, and an excuse to stop listening. On the left, Kaufman’s attitude sounds like the whine of a petulant child: “I don’t wanna examine my preconceptions! Maybe you should examine your preconception that I need to!” This is the essential bashing of heads between right and left in America in 2017. This is also the unspoken reason that David French feels like he needs to extend himself beyond the limits of any real logical argument to call out Google for firing James Damore and refusing to link to the Daily Stormer. For Kaufman and French, us social justice advocates are not asking for a set of fairly small concessions to make the social environment more fair and comfortable for a lot of people — we’re asking for a kind of identity-shaking about-face and reconsideration of their place in the world.

I understand that the internet is not an unending font of civility. Twitter’s entire business model seems to be the monetization of the rage generated by forcing people who already deeply mistrust each other to communicate in bursts of 140 characters or less, without benefit of eye contact, tone of voice, body language, or any of the other social cues that help to defuse and deescalate conflicts in the real world. It’s an abhorrent system that has succeeded only at accelerating the progress of political discourse toward actual, literal mudslinging. But we really need to get better at communicating with each other about this stuff. If nothing else, I don’t want to be sitting around a campfire in 20 years, telling the kids born after World War 3 that we probably could have sorted everything out and averted disaster if only it hadn’t been for Twitter.

[1] To be charitable, I’m supposed to offer up a left-wing organization that does the same thing against the right. I dunno, doesn’t George Soros have a PAC? Conservatives don’t like Soros, right? OK, you can have that one. I bet Soros can take some criticism. I’m continually unimpressed by the ability of both the right and left to justify their assholes in opposition to the opposing assholes, as if culture is some kind of disgusting, shit-filled centrifuge where all that matters is that, on balance, all the walls are equally coated.

[2] In this “they,” French would presumably have us read “the social justice activists” because it would be extremely inconvenient for his argument if he was put in the position of asking Google, as a private company, to promote speech that it finds offensive, instead of just resisting pressure from the nasty external lefties to suppress it.

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