In one of the more awkward exchanges on television in recent memory, the stand-up comedian Bill Burr sat down with Bill Maher on HBO's Real Time. "I think we have something in common," said Maher. "We think political correctness may be ruining comedy." To Maher's surprise, a visibly irked Burr disagreed.
"It's a really weird time where people are bringing [PC outrage] up all the time like it's a major problem," said Burr. "Like usual, they're acting like the sky is falling. It isn't. It's a fun time." A flustered Maher turned ashen. He is among a growing class of pundits—call them the Free Speech Grifters—who flog PC culture as a singularly eminent threat to the freedom of expression in America. And Burr, a decidedly un-PC comic, punctured the narrative.
After that 2015 interview, Burr never appeared on Real Time again. But Maher did find someone to be "on his side": New York Times columnist Bari Weiss.
In just the past month, Weiss has appeared on Real Time twice, most recently to discuss the dust-up over her identifying an American-born Asian as an immigrant. "I love immigrants," Weiss told Maher, despite the fact that no one accused her of the opposite. "Saying 'I am offended' is a way of making someone radioactive, a way of smearing their reputation."
Weiss sidestepped measured criticisms and mild mockery so that she could claim that she was crucified because she "departs from woke orthodoxy." It was a sleight of hand. And it wouldn't be the first time.
Two days prior, Weiss's column titled "We're All Fascists Now" highlighted the protest of a Christina Hoff Sommers talk at Lewis & Clark Law School, the latest example in an overexposed series of well-meaning college students acting like morons. It was riddled with misrepresentations. To frame the debate as another instance of the liberals attacking fellow liberals, Weiss described Ms. Sommers as a "self-identified" feminist and a "registered" Democrat. To that end, she withheld from readers Sommers's more relevant professional affiliation: resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative think tank, which counts feminist Democrat heroes Dick Cheney and Dinesh D'Souza among its past fellows.
Among the Free Speech Grifters, Sommers has perfected the art. She likes to call herself a feminist, specifically a "factual" one. But if there has been one feminist cause worth addressing in the past 30 years, you wouldn't know it by reading her work. She has had plenty to say on how biological preferences may account for gender distribution in STEM fields, while she's been silent on harassment of women in tech and finance. And she's been outspoken about the due-process rights of men accused of rape on college campuses, but apparently has no interest in addressing the complexity of a crime that is notoriously difficult to prove.
Plenty of scholars and writers have challenged feminist talking points. The economist Claudia Goldin wasn't tossed out of Harvard for her work on the gender pay gap, pinpointing childcare, not gender directly, as the cause. Sommers likes to position herself as a Goldin, a noble academic who questions received wisdom to further a worthy cause. The difference between the two is that Goldin offers both better data and solutions to nuanced issues while Sommers only offers naysaying. In interviews and recorded talks, a soft-spoken Sommers emphasizes the importance of being reasonable and polite, tut-tutting meanness. But her stance toward those with whom she disagrees is mostly derisive, serving up red meat to a social-media following rabid for the denigration of feminist and minority causes.
At Lewis & Clark Law School, Sommers found what seems to be her favorite kind of audience: a disruptive one. Prior to the speech, activists handed out flyers labeling her "a fascist," among other hyperbolic charges familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. When she attempted to give her talk, a handful of students, led by a blonde ringleader in a black "Stay Woke" jacket, disrupted it with chanting about comrades while holding up a cardboard sign that read "No Platform for Fascists." It was a Ben Shapiro wet dream. As the ringleader yelled, "Black lives matter," Sommers turned to the camera euphorically grinning from ear to ear. Here it was: the money shot.
The activist practice of no-platforming—denying public figures platforms like speaking engagements or articles, through protest or other means—has become an irresistible motif for the media. It is a terrible tactic for a number of reasons, for both academic freedom and the advancement of progressive causes. In the current moment, liberal ideas are dominant at universities, but it's not hard to imagine a world in which they are considered dangerous. More urgently, in the age of social media and conservative trolls, no-platforming turns into amplification on steroids; it does the very opposite of what it aims to do.
The number of students who resort to these tactics is fairly small—Sommers regularly gives talks at universities without incident. But the number of publications and prominent journalists willing to cover them is quite high. The news of Sommers's slightly curtailed lecture was hyped in at least 11 outlets, including Breitbart, the National Review, and two separate opinion pieces in The New York Times. Sommers herself tweeted about the event's coverage at least 70 times and scored a Wall Street Journal piece out of the ordeal. It's not difficult to intuit why she beamed at her videographer as the no-platformers chanted.
On the topic of campus politics and free speech, Andrew Sullivan has written in New York magazine about a half-dozen articles, warning that "the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy." His colleague Jonathan Chait has written another dozen on PC culture, arguing that "these episodes are the manifestation of a serious ideological challenge to liberalism." In The New York Times, Bret Stephens regurgitated a speech as an article called "Free Speech and the Necessity of Discomfort," while David Brooks dedicated a piece to "Understanding Student Mobbists," for which he spoke to exactly zero students. In ten months, Weiss has racked up three articles on the subject. You would think that these "mobs" on college campuses and Twitter were sending the unwoke to a Soviet-style gulag.
The enthusiasm to defend those triggering libs makes the Free Speech Grifters uniquely susceptible to right-wing propagandists. In her last op-ed, Weiss featured an obvious parody Antifa Twitter account, run by alt-right trolls, and YouTuber Dave Rubin fell for the same gag. In 2016, Sommers unwittingly did a full hour on a Swedish white-supremacy podcast. And the same year, in a since-deleted tweet, she announced she would be "defending free speech and reason" with Milo Yiannopoulos, who was recently outed by BuzzFeed for working with white nationalists to smuggle their ideas into the mainstream. He also appeared alongside Maher, railing about free speech, on Real Time. This isn't all complete ignorance. Columbia University College Republicans invited Tommy Robinson of the far-right English Defense League, while the new Canadian free-speech club Laurier Society for Open Inquiry announced white nationalist Faith Goldy as its first speaker. In the National Review, Elliot Kaufman chided fellow campus conservatives for purposely giving the alt-right a platform in an effort to bait the left into doing something "silly and destructive," so that they could play "martyrs for free speech on campus" and draw media coverage. "The left-wing riots were not the price or downside of inviting Yiannopoulos," he wrote. "They were the attraction."
As Adam Serwer in The Atlantic and Jamelle Bouie in Slate have pointed out exhaustively, there are many more deeply disturbing threats to free speech, namely those enforced by the state. (Technically, First Amendment protections apply to guarding against the state imposing on the free speech of people, not the battleground of ideas at universities.) Examples include laws that ban positive portrayals of homosexuality in public schools, and police unions urging their members to retaliate against private citizens who have lodged complaints of misconduct. At Trump's inauguration last year, an anti-capitalist and anti-fascist march called J20 resulted in mass arrests, including of journalists, medics, and legal observers. Originally, 239 people were charged with felony inciting to riot, facing up to 60 years in prison. Houses were raided. The ACLU got involved. And not a peep in an entire year from any of the so-called free-speech warriors. Ditto this past week, when a Wisconsin school administrator was fired for allowing black students to hold a discussion about white privilege in a district that is 90 percent Caucasian. How peculiar.
Serwer theorizes that fixation on liberal college students persists because it involves the environs of scholarly elites, gives elders the opportunity to "sneer at a younger generation," and is politically expedient for conservatives. According to FIRE, an individual-rights organization with ties to the Koch brothers, from 2000 to 2017, there were anywhere from six to 35 self-reported disinvitation attempts annually and 40 percent of them came from the right, while Heterodox Academy, an organization devoted to increasing viewpoint diversity, finds that the majority of successful disinvites came from the right, not the left. Still, libertarian website Quillette summarized these outbursts as "the psychology of progressive hostility." Pundits like to characterize online outrage and an aversion to idea diversity as a phenomenon unique to the left, largely ignoring the death threats directed at the teen Parkland survivors for speaking out against a powerful gun lobby or the conservative dictates of Sinclair Broadcasting and Fox News. Given the myopic focus on liberals, it would seem that Free Speech Grifters are not actually interested in the free exchange of ideas, per se; they are interested in liberal caricature for clicks, social-media followings, and monetization.
Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor turned conservative provocateur, said he's figured out "how to monetize social justice warriors." Ben Shapiro, who rose to fame "owning" liberals on college campuses, sells "Leftist Tears" mugs and a book entitled How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them. Andy Ngo, a conservative activist who followed Sommers around to her Portland engagements, asked for donations after he published a video of the Lewis & Clark episode, notably edited down to just the protesting rather than including Sommers's ideas. Sommers vouched for Ngo's plea for money, tweeting that "he works tirelessly promoting free expression in Portland area. Often for no compensation. Help him out if you can."
It is easier for the Free Speech Grifters to mock microaggressions and trigger warnings than to grapple with serious social-justice concepts. They do not debate New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones's extensive reporting on policies exacerbating racial segregation in housing and schools. Nor do they question why professor Michelle Alexander's bestselling book on the criminal-justice system, The New Jim Crow, was banned in some prisons. When Sofie Karasek published a piece on reimagining the model for punishing campus sex crimes, the only murmurs were on the left. They give these voices a wide berth. Trying to work through some of the more complex issues of the day doesn't get you an invite on The Rubin Report or a two-in-one month on Real Time with Bill Maher. The Free Speech Grifters were silent when Maya Wiley, the Social Justice SVP at the New School, made news for the humanity she showed toward Sam Nunberg during his six-hour media meltdown over an FBI subpoena. It didn't fit the narrative of social-justice incivility for their canned opinion pieces, which are always good for a retweet. Wiley has 29K Twitter followers. Sommers has 224K, and Weiss recently almost doubled hers to 58K. You do the math.
If "offense is being weaponized," as Weiss said on Real Time, you wouldn't know it from the marketplace. Netflix just paid $60 million to Dave Chappelle for two specials, during which he angered some in the trans community; Ali Wong, who jokes about wanting to be a stay-at-home mom, is selling out theaters; and Bill Burr's show F is for Family was renewed for a third season. In 2010, Ben Shapiro tweeted out "Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage." Today he runs his own website, The Daily Wire. And last year, in response to Senator Ben Sasse inviting him to work in the fields, Maher replied: "Senator, I'm a house nigger. No, it's a joke." Maher didn't lose his show over that remark (although his old show, Politically Incorrect, was nixed for dissenting with the state over 9/11—not, mind you, angering leftists).
In America, there's always been a contemptuous crowd thirsty to pick off the extremists in and caricature movements for social change. We see it in the old cartoons painting suffragettes as red-faced old spinsters or black people as shiftless watermelon eaters, and in taunts of anti-war activists as dirty hippies and commie pinkos. SJWs are the new SDS; Stay Woke jackets and BLM T-shirts the new long hair. As young people agitate for much-needed change, be it on racial bias, rampant sexual harassment, or gun control, there will always be behind-the-curve commentators getting paid to do nothing but lecture "Respect First." The left would do well by not showing up to play character actors in fake free-speech theater. But the Free Speech Grifters never seem to be concerned with exactly whom they are entertaining with their performative indignation and why. It's kayfabe for those who are perfectly comfortable with enforcing the status quo.
Update: An earlier version of this story misstated the campus disinvitation statistics cited by FIRE. The post has been updated.
