Panic Attack

by Robby Soave

  “It’s one of those great historical ironies, the fact that Berkeley was the foundation of the Free Speech Movement in the modern era,” Alice Dreger, a historian and former professor of bioethics at Northwestern University, told me in an interview. “The students have absolutely no knowledge of that.”

  A problem, it seems, is that activist students increasingly see free speech as a tool for harming some aspect of the intersectional agenda. Speech wielded by the powerful against the marginalized is not desirable, whether or not it’s “free.”

  “Free speech is not dead. It was never alive,” wrote Juniper, the trans student at Berkeley, in a May 2017 op-ed for the student newspaper, the Daily Californian. She continued: “I am not here for free speech.”11

  Juniper wrote this in response to Yiannopoulos’s first visit to campus. Trouble seems to follow Yiannopoulos, a former editor at the pro-Trump conservative news website Breitbart and author of the book Dangerous, about his favorite subject (himself). But much of that trouble is self-inflicted. Yiannopoulos first made national headlines back in 2014, when he became one of the best-known defenders of the GamerGate movement, a public awareness campaign undertaken by (mostly male) videogame players who were annoyed by left-leaning media coverage of the industry. For these gamers, some developers and journalists were ruining the gaming experience by injecting social justice themes into games or deriding the lack of politically correct representations. A favorite target of the GamerGate movement was Anita Sarkeesian, creator of the Feminist Frequency YouTube channel, which called out sexism in videogames like Super Mario Bros., Metroid, and The Legend of Zelda. GamerGate activists frequently resorted to nasty tactics to convey their irritation at Sarkeesian and other “social justice warriors”—a term of derision leveled against particularly pro-PC individuals—sending harassing tweets and even death threats.

  Whatever legitimate grievances the GamerGaters had were more than cancelled out by their obnoxious and abusive behavior, but they found a powerful champion in Yiannopoulos. As a young, out, and proud gay man, Yiannopoulos was a perfect vehicle for countering the argument that GamerGaters were mean-spirited, backward jerks. How can we be right-wing assholes if the flamboyantly gay Milo Yiannopoulos supports us? the argument went. And Yiannopoulos was happy to equip them with this defense, as long as it made him the center of attention.

  Indeed, Yiannopoulos’s shtick had always involved putting the personal before the political. Before he was GamerGate’s staunchest ally, he was actually a critic of gamer culture.12 In February 2013, prior to his reinvention as emperor of the nerds, he was making japes at gamers’ expense. “Few things are more embarrassing than grown men getting over-excited about video games,” he tweeted. Later, he tweeted a link to an article about the social habits of gamers, with the colorful caption “Are online gamers as overweight, awkward, and lazy as we think they are? Writer trying to be nice but answer is yes.” He even said that the only people present at videogame launches are “pungent beta-male bollock scratchers and twelve-year-olds.” But then Yiannopoulos had a change of heart—probably because there were millions of clicks to be mined from attacking the enemies of said pungent beta-male bollock scratchers.

  Yiannopoulos gradually transitioned from attacking the Sarkeesians of the world to attacking liberals and political correctness more generally—as well as defending the avatar of resistance to political correctness, Donald Trump. When I interviewed him during the 2016 campaign, he told me that Trump—whom he affectionately refers to as “Daddy,” a term with both parental overtones and pseudo-sexual connotations in the gay world specifically—is “becoming an icon of irreverent resistance to political correctness. It’s why people like him.” Yiannopoulos noted—correctly, in my view—that a lot of young people on the right were excited about Trump not because of his policies but because he was reliably, militantly anti-PC.

  It was this base of young, right-leaning, anti-PC students that helped catapult Yiannopoulos to national notoriety. He soon undertook a campus speaking tour, at the invitation of student Republican organizations at various colleges and universities. The events gave Yiannopoulos what he wanted, attention, and they gave the young conservatives what they wanted—also attention. They provided an opportunity for Yiannopoulos to make ridiculous and offensive statements, like calling for women to eschew engineering jobs, suggesting that lesbians may not exist, downplaying sexual abuse, and excusing Trump’s behavior.

  The scheme would have failed if only the left had decided to simply ignore Yiannopoulos’s provocations. Instead, they turned out in droves to protest Yiannopoulos’s speeches, shout him down, and even attempt to revoke his platform or cancel his events.

  For conservatives, this was the entire point of bringing Yiannopoulos to campus in the first place. The Republican groups knew they could drum up publicity—national publicity—by inviting a speaker who was sure to provoke the ire of the left. Keep in mind that many conservative student groups already bear the brunt of censorship on campus; bringing Yiannopoulos and watching the spectacle unfold must have seemed like a surefire way to prove the point that yes, the campus left is intolerant and eager to shut them down. Yiannopoulos wasn’t particularly well versed in conservative philosophy, or even much of a conventional Republican (beyond his support for “Daddy” Trump, another unconventional Republican without much of an interest in conservative philosophy), but that didn’t matter to them.

  Writing for the conservative Trump-skeptic magazine National Review, former Stanford University student Elliot Kaufman described a scene he had witnessed at a meeting of the university’s conservative student paper, the Stanford Review, when someone suggested bringing Yiannopoulos to campus.

  “‘Someone should sponsor his lecture—it’s a matter of free speech,’ argued a confused fellow editor,” Kaufman recalled. “Soon, other editors made different arguments: ‘This will create a huge stir,’ said one. ‘It will drive the social-justice warriors crazy,’ offered another. That is, the left-wing riots were not the price or downside of inviting Yiannopoulos—they were the attraction.”13

  So it was at Berkeley, the site of the most infamous Yiannopoulos event. Invited by the Berkeley College Republicans—with the support of Berkeley’s administration, which wisely upheld its free speech commitments (this time)—Yiannopoulos attempted to deliver his usual shtick. Two hours before the event was scheduled to begin, antifa struck.

  Protesters surrounded the building where he was supposed to speak, tearing down the metal barriers erected by the police. They started banging on the walls of the building, smashing several windows. Then they began to light fires: one particularly large blaze consumed a nearby tree (lighter fluid helped). Police smuggled Yiannopoulos out of the building before he could say a word. Hence the beefed-up security measures months later, when Yiannopoulos attempted his return: no one wanted a repeat of the Battle of Berkeley.

  Assuming Berkeley’s Republicans had the same goals as Stanford’s Republicans, the event was successful nonetheless: it proved the campus left was just as censorious, violent, and destructive as advertised.

  “They’re just making him more famous,” a freshman student, Kevin, told me.14

  The intolerance was not primarily the work of students—according to reports, some of the masked vandals who lit the fires and smashed the windows were local activists. But many students supported these efforts, because letting Yiannopoulos speak would be tantamount to unleashing actual violence on the sorts of people that Yiannopoulos criticizes: people of color, trans people, immigrants, feminists, and others.

  It was against this backdrop that Juniper wrote her op-ed taking issue with free speech. I asked her why she did so. “The premise of the op-ed was basically discussing the importance of prioritizing student safety over abstract concepts like free speech,” Juniper told me. “The intention was not to diminish free speech as a right or a privilege, but more so to refocus conversation on the lives of marginalized students.”

&
nbsp; Another Berkeley student, Kathryn, who is majoring in rhetoric and African American studies, told me she was furious at the administration for providing a platform to speakers who make her feel threatened. “I came here to learn,” said Kathryn. “I didn’t come here to feel threatened or violated or oppressed. I came here to further my knowledge and I can’t even do that because of who they’re inviting to come speak and who they’re protecting.”

  Turning Against Free Speech

  Clearly, modern Zillennial activists feel differently about free speech than their predecessors did.

  “When we’re dead, when people die, and you’re sitting here like, ‘Well, at least they got to practice their free speech,’ I’m so sorry, your free speech is not more important than the lives of black, trans, femmes, and students on this campus,” Jamil, a student and activist at Evergreen State College, told Vice.15

  The question, of course, is, why? How did the left stray so far from Mario Savio’s ideals?

  To the extent this newfound hostility toward speech is philosophical, the widespread influences of intersectionality and safety culture—as discussed in Chapter One—help shed light on what’s happening. An extra sensitivity to harm, coupled with a drive to find more and more—and smaller and smaller—sources of oppression, might have made shouting down the Milos and Murrays suddenly seem much more important to activists.

  Indeed, many of the academics who teach and promote intersectionality come out of a tradition of new leftism that emphasizes language itself as a form of oppression. During the 1950s and 1960s, the German-born sociologist Herbert Marcuse—famously described as the “father of the New Left”—held a variety of teaching positions at Columbia University, Harvard University, Brandeis University, and finally the University of California, San Diego. In his most famous essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse argued that the government would be perfectly justified in abridging the freedoms of right-wing movements, and that capitalism had undermined democracy to the point that society could no longer trust social equality to triumph in the marketplace of ideas.16

  “Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left,” wrote Marcuse. “It would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word.”

  Marcuse even used a familiar metaphor: “The traditional criterion of clear and present danger seems no longer adequate to a stage where the whole society is in the situation of the theater audience when somebody cries: ‘fire.’” In context, Marcuse meant that an act of right-wing political expression was akin to shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, and should be prevented on public safety grounds.

  Marcuse’s project was making Marxism palatable for a new century. Marxism, of course, refers to the older leftism of nineteenth-century socialist thinker Karl Marx, who viewed class struggle as the overarching source of human oppression. Marxist thinking dominated the left in the second half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century, culminating in the Russian Revolution and global ascendance of communism. (I’ll have much more to say about Marxism in Chapter Six.) But by Marcuse’s time, Marxism seemed hopelessly naive; Marx had hypothesized that the world would inevitably progress beyond capitalism, but capitalism was more entrenched than ever, and undeniably more successful than Stalinist Russia or Maoist China.

  “In the West, the Left has failed to generate significant socialist parties, and many socialist parties have become moderate,” argued Stephen Hicks, a professor of philosophy at Rockford College, in a 2002 essay. “Major experiments in socialism in nations such as the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Cuba have been failures.”17

  In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, leftist thinkers assailed Marxism as too scientific: postmodernists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida were skeptical of Marx’s grand claims about history and economics. It’s difficult to make generalizations about postmodernist thinkers, since their writings are often inscrutable, esoteric, and filled with contradiction. But broadly speaking, these thinkers were hostile to Enlightenment ideas about using reason and science to arrive at objective truth. Postmodernists understood that objectivity was a lie—that the interplay of language, power, and oppression served to obscure the truth.

  “To my mind, the high-water mark of academic postmodern theory, at least in its political form, was the 1990s,” wrote Matt McManus in an essay for Quillette. “Many of the pioneers of postmodern theory were at the height of their fame and influence.”18

  That doctrinaire Marxism and leftist postmodernism are in significant tension with each other may surprise readers who are familiar with the term “postmodern neo-Marxism” (occasionally called “cultural Marxism,” often by those on the far right who dabble in conspiracy theories, as this term is anti-Semitic and anti-gay in origin), which is something that many right-of-center thinkers have recently pilloried. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, an infamous critic of the left whose attempts to speak on campuses have frequently resulted in shutdown attempts, has claimed that postmodern neo-Marxism is the ideology of the modern left and leads to totalitarianism, as it squelches free expression and tramples individual rights. Peterson’s critics often ridicule this analysis, pointing out there’s no group of leftists who call themselves postmodern neo-Marxists. What’s more, hard-line Marxists should view postmodernists with suspicion, and vice versa. Marxism is a rationalist system that purports to explain how certain social and economic phenomena arise, whereas postmodernism assails the very idea that phenomena have rational explanations.

  But despite this inconsistency, a kind of postmodern neo-Marxism does appear to exist in the wild. Francis Fukuyama, the influential author of the 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, briefly studied under Derrida in the 1970s. In a recent interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Fukuyama described a philosophy that sure sounds a lot like postmodern neo-Marxism to me.

  “They were espousing a kind of Nietzschean relativism that said there is no truth, there is no argument that’s superior to any other argument,” he recalled of the postmodernists. “Yet most of them were committed to a basically Marxist agenda. That seemed completely contradictory.”19

  Call it what you will—Peterson likes “postmodern neo-Marxism”; I, on the other hand, am attempting to coin the phrase “neo-Marxist in the streets, postmodernist in the sheets”—but it does seem like the left proceeded from Marxist assumptions about the oppressive nature of capitalism, swallowed Marcusian ideas concerning the power of language to thwart social change, embraced the postmodernist approach to eschewing the Enlightenment in favor of radical subjectivity, and let intersectionality endlessly expand the circle of grievances. Sprinkle in the new cultural understanding of safety as requiring emotional protection, and the portrait of a suddenly speech-critical left is complete.

  * * *

  FOR THIS CROWD, free speech is not an absolute, or a moral good in and of itself. It’s a means to an end—and a flawed one at best. Free speech is good if the people exercising it are saying the correct things. If they are using free speech to say hateful things, their speech shouldn’t be protected, according to Zillennial activists.

  This view has been spreading and reproducing itself for the past few decades, and has clearly found a home among Zillennials. Some young people now even believe—quite wrongly—that hate speech is already outside the protection of the Constitution, for reasons that would certainly impress a streets/sheets leftist philosopher.

  “Our country’s free speech amendment says, ‘Free speech except for hate speech,’” Jessica, a white female student at historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C., casually informed me. “It’s very clear that when people practice the right of ‘free speech’ to use hate speech that it incites violence.”

  I spoke with Jessica at a protest on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in summer 2017; her small group of demonstrators had gathered to oppose a nearby
alt-right rally. Some of Jessica’s friends carried signs bearing the message “Hate speech does not equal free speech,” which echoed her comments.

  “A good analogy I like to use is that in Nazi Germany, after the Holocaust, Germany did not allow the fascists and the Nazis to continue to organize, rally, and spread propaganda and indoctrinate people with hate speech,” said Jessica. “We should not allow the same in the United States. Only fifty years ago was interracial marriage even legalized.”

  The implication, then, is that it would be wrong to allow racist speech, since the United States has only recently granted full legal rights to racial minorities. Immediate post-Nazi Germany, which vigorously policed speech in order to root out fascists, should serve as a role model.

  Jessica was not alone in thinking that free speech was a good thing only if it excluded hate speech. Take Rose, a seventeen-year-old high school student wearing a shirt bearing the text “Feminist A.F.” I asked her to explain what all the free-speech-is-not-hate-speech signs meant to her.

  “Free speech is allowing people to express themselves in a way that doesn’t put other people down,” she said. “It doesn’t oppress people and damage our society.”

  Speech is “free,” according to Rose, only if it doesn’t oppress people or damage our society. But speech is just words. Believing that speech itself (rather than, say, the effects of such speech) is oppressive or damaging is, I gather, exactly the kind of thing the Petersons of the world are concerned about.

  It’s worth remembering that the new activist approach to speech is completely at odds with legal norms. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Nowhere in the text of the First Amendment, or anywhere else in the Constitution, does it mention the words “hate speech.”