The Free Speech Grifters
The Free Speech Grifters
March 19, 2018
Elizabeth Lippman/The New York Times/Redux
Why are some of the biggest public intellectuals so fixated with a small minority of liberal college students?
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 dikk 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.
TRENDING THIS VERY SECOND
You would think that these “mobs” on college campuses and Twitter were sending the unwoke to a Soviet-style gulag.
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 threearticles on the subject. You would think that these "mobs" on college campuses and Twitter were sending the unwoke to a Soviet-style gulag.
The Free Speech Grifters
March 19, 2018
Elizabeth Lippman/The New York Times/Redux
Why are some of the biggest public intellectuals so fixated with a small minority of liberal college students?
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 dikk 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.
TRENDING THIS VERY SECOND
You would think that these “mobs” on college campuses and Twitter were sending the unwoke to a Soviet-style gulag.
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 threearticles on the subject. You would think that these "mobs" on college campuses and Twitter were sending the unwoke to a Soviet-style gulag.
Maher is an elderly comedian, he'll always be annoyed at anybody who tries to limit jokes. How is he a grifter? He's had a show on HBO for ten years. The actual free speech grifters are these Ben Shapiros and Jordan Petersons.