"Free Speech Absolutists"
We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?
-George Orwell, 1984
Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.
-JD Vance, Munich Security Conference
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Vice President JD Vance reportedly spent most of his time speaking at the Munich Security Conference chastising Europeans for opposing “free speech” (by which he seems to have meant that mainstream political parties should stop freezing out the hard right Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, party).
For example, during the speech, Vance said,
I look to Sweden, where, two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant—and I’m quoting—“a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.”
Vance also alluded to European authorities allegedly punishing citizens for “thoughtcrime,” a reference to Orwell’s 1984, often a shorthand for positioning the speaker as a defender of “free speech”.
Vance claimed that the Biden administration had been trying to “silence” citizens, in contrast to the Trump administration, which would do “precisely the opposite”.
Vance railed against censoring “the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news”. Yet the Trump administration, in the early days of Trump’s second term, has already been directly interfering with the press, banning the Associated Press from the White House and Air Force One (for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America”— an almost comically Orwellian Party move if there ever was one).
German leaders from multiple mainstream parties have, predictably, condemned Vance’s remarks for the general tone of the speech, but more specifically for both supporting the AfD and for potentially interfering in Germany’s upcoming election (where the AfD is second in the polls).
What is the AfD?
Alternative für Deutschland is a German far-right party which has seen little mainstream success, but which has been gaining in the polls recently, probably on the strength of its anti-immigration rhetoric.
Some of the AfD’s leaders have made pro-Nazi statements. The party, itself, has been under investigation by the German government for suspected involvement in domestic terrorism. One of its leaders, Björn Höcke, has been charged twice for using pro-Nazi slogans, including the slogan of Nazi stormtroopers, “Everything for Germany!”. (Höcke, a history teacher, claimed he didn’t know that the phrase was associated with Nazis.)
JD Vance is, of course, part of an executive branch that has more and more prominently featured the unelected, unappointed billionaire Elon Musk, who said AfD is “the best hope for Germany” in a speech alongside party leader Alice Weidel— Vance also met with Weidel during his own trip.
“Free speech absolutists”
Musk has described himself as a “free speech absolutist”. His actions and words, along with those of Vance and other members of the Trump team, give us a pretty good idea what “free speech absolutism” means, in practice.
For example, Musk bought Twitter and went on to ban, demonetize, or otherwise censor a whole bunch of people— apparently, including journalists— who used his platform to do things like criticize him, or advocate for trans rights (the platform labeled “cisgender” a slur, while loosening up its content moderation policies on extremist speech).
Musk is also currently suing advertisers for leaving Twitter/ X because, as they have indicated, Musk’s own behavior— including alleged illicit drug use and public statements and actions that ran afoul of SEC rules (an agency he is now empowered to oversee)— was toxic to their brands.
Musk is currently the subject of an SEC lawsuit alleging he did not properly disclose his purchases of Twitter stock. It remains to be seen how or if Musk will respond to that lawsuit now that he seems to have at least some unofficial power over the agency.
Taken together, all of this shows that, in effect, Musk doesn’t believe that the speech entities or individuals opposing his own should be protected “absolutely”.
To be fair, at one point, even Musk muddied the waters of what he meant by “free speech absolutism” by responding to criticism for some Twitter/ X bans by writing, “The first amendment is protection for ‘free speech’, not ‘paid speech’ ffs”.
Of course, this is true: the First Amendment of the US Constitution is meant to protect people from government interference in free speech, and has not generally been interpreted by the courts as an absolute right. But Musk’s actions as a “special employee” of the government in an administration that has engaged in wide-ranging attacks on speech don’t support this interpretation of “free speech,” either.
Musk’s deflections when he is accused of censorship of the platform have also clashed with the anti-moderation policies often voiced by many “free speech absolutists”. For example, JD Vance downplayed the threat of Russian disinformation with his audience in Munich, saying,
You can believe it's wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do… But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn't very strong to begin with.
But Vance is the same person who explicitly said he wanted to screen potential State Department nominees for “radical” “wokeness,” and, as a leaked memo showed at the time, used ideological tests to hold up their appointments when he was in the US Senate.
These actions suggests that Vance finds progressive, liberal, or pro-egalitarian ideas— or whatever he means by “wokeness”— problematic in a way he does not find the AfD’s rhetoric (or that, more likely, he is not arguing any of this in good faith— he is, after all, the same guy who once argued that Donald Trump might be “America’s Hitler”— and he wasn’t saying that as a defense of Trump.)
Pete Hesgeth, Trump’s new Defense Secretary, wrote a bestselling book fretting about how wokeness was destroying America and how public schools were a “progressive” plot to make students hate America. He is now overseeing attacks on “wokeness” in military schools that have led to the removal of everything from rainbow flags to depictions of Hariet Tubman. He has also banned transgender Americans from serving in the military.
Trump, of course, built his third campaign for the presidency heavily around an attack on the “radical left”— which, in practice, seems to mean anyone who opposes him (calling many traditionally moderate figures “radical leftists” and painting his opponents across the political spectrum with statements like, “We will put America first and today, especially in honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.")
President Trump and his team have set about defunding and seeking to outlaw diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings and practices, and whatever they mean by the sweeping phrase “gender ideology”. They have stripped information about LGBTQ+ people from government websites in ways that would seem to directly parallel the kind of “memory hole” fascism “free speech absolutists” used to decry when others supposedly did it, often explicitly citing 1984, a book they, like South Carolina’s own government censors, don’t seem to have actually read or understood.
In other words, “free speech absolutism” means, in practice, the freedom for the “absolutist” to say whatever they want to say, and to use their speech and other actions to suppress any speech they oppose. It is the freedom to play the victim when you don’t have a rational or compelling argument, and the freedom to play the censor when you gain the upper hand. This is the freedom— as 1984 famously demonstrates— to control reality, and it makes sense that it would be more interested in protecting fascist groups than in actually protecting open discussions involving diverse viewpoints.
When O’Brien forces Winston to repeat the Party slogan, “Who controls the past controls future; who controls the present controls the past,” the victory is not in the slogan itself, but in making his opponent repeat it until he believes it.
Reasonable people might rationally object to some of the same groups, ideas, and practices the Trump team has moved to attack, but in order to be logically consistent (or even honest), they would have to stop pretending that all speech no matter what should be protected.
But if a person or group is disinterested in rational arguments, but, as O’Brien says of the Party, “we are interested solely in power,” it doesn’t matter if it makes sense. It only matters to keep repeating the slogan, to keep controlling the narrative, until people believe there is not alternative. (That’s how you get a book ban committee, like South Carolina’s, which seems to know that it would be absurd for them to ban 1984, and which can still say, with a straight face, that the “sexual content,” as defined by their own regulation, which you can easily read in 1984—is not sexual content— because they say so.)
Of course, in real life, even if “free speech absolutists” don’t have a yen for totalitarianism, they often don’t seem interested in logic, or even in free speech, either.
“Free speech absolutists,” instead are often engaging in a kind of “I know what you are but what am I” schoolyard logic, where because they have been accused (whether in good faith or not) or racism, homophobia, misogyny, or other intolerant attitudes, they simply flip the argument around on the accuser without worrying if it makes any sense. (The AfD seems to understand this playbook well— both the party and Elon Musk have ridiculously claimed that Adolf Hitler, who oversaw the imprisonment and murder of European Communists and socialists, was himself “a communist or a socialist”. Logic, here, doesn’t matter; only us vs. them fearmongering matters.)
This, too, is traditionally a tool of strongmen, fascists, and other antidemocratic forces. It is exactly what the Party of 1984 is doing when it declares one day, that it has always been at war with one country, and the next day creates a completely different story. The point, as O’Brien shows Winston, is not to convince or persuade, but to be able to say “two plus two equals five” and have that be reality simply because they will it.
“The paradox of tolerance”
Philosopher and sociologist Karl Popper’s famous discussion of the “paradox of tolerance” in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies (“unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance”) anticipates this problem.
Popper, who was thinking about the totalitarian movements of the mid-20th century, believed that “open societies” should defend free speech by sometimes limiting the kind of hate speech, rhetoric, and other bad-faith actions that are actually intended to make society less open. (Many German officials would probably argue this is what they are doing by refusing to ally with the AfD— a group which is nonetheless free to run for office and speak out about its controversial positions, within the limits on pro-Nazi speech under German law.)
In other words, in order to remain free, societies, in Popper’s view, have to limit the power of bad faith actors to dominate conversations— for example, by using Nazi rhetoric or hate speech. Importantly, Popper believed societies should only impose these limits when good “rational argument” and “public opinion” is unable to keep them in check. (Popper was likely thinking about Nazism, for example, which moved swiftly to censor and burn books, to jail political opponents, and to otherwise censor and violently suppress speech that didn’t serve its interests, but to keep the 1984 analogy going, he might have argued that a society that allowed the Party, for whatever reason, to use propaganda, disinformation, and force to capture the entire public conversation was a society that had succumbed to excessive tolerance.)
Vance, et al seem to be trying to redefine publicly-acceptable speech by allowing the bullies and the (literal) fascists of the world to enter and ultimately dominate public discourse, if it benefits their own interests.
Real free speech requires protections and guardrails.
For anyone who actually wants the kind of “free speech” framed by the First Amendment, it’s important to oppose these kinds of moves by government officials, while creating as much space as possible for anyone who wants to engage in good-faith dialogue— rather than suppressing the speech of others— to voice their views. This doesn’t seem possible without opposing the kind of government interference the Trump administration is engaging in by firing people with disfavored views, outlawing entire identity categories, and censoring academia.
It doesn’t seem possible without opposing state level book bans that are openly based on double standards and ideological biases.
It doesn’t seem possible without opposing forces that reject content moderation that targets social media manipulation and disinformation, but support government censorship of history, ideas, and entire groups of people (particularly transgender and nonbinary people) that don’t serve their own purposes.
In essence, today’s reactionary censors make a strong argument that Popper was right: absolute tolerance of all speech and all groups leads, ultimately, to the powerful seizing control of the conversation and ending free speech (in much the same way that a billionaire buying a major social media company and giving himself the ability to ban or de-platform anyone he chooses does not actually create an open exchange of ideas in a metaphorical “digital town square” as much as it creates an increasingly chaotic echo chamber, the way it would if you invited Nazis and con-men to set up formal information booths in the town square.)
I taught school for a long time, and there is obviously a difference between silencing perspectives and creating rules to allow those perspectives to be heard.
In real life, if we didn’t have any limits on speech in the classroom, most people would find the results to be unacceptably chaotic and even unsafe.
Imagine a classroom where, in the name of “free speech,” we allowed students to shout one another down until only the literal loudest voices prevailed. Imagine a classroom where, in the name of “free speech,” we allowed students to give presentations about verifiably false conspiracy theories, presented as fact. Imagine a classroom where we allowed students to shout racist, misogynist, or queerphobic slurs at one another. Obviously, none of these classrooms would result in a situation in which all voices and perspectives could be heard.
Instead, an effective classroom allows students to voice their views and opinions with just enough guardrails to keep conversations on track and ideally to keep fistfights from breaking out, and to keep the loud from dominating the quiet. An effective classroom does not outlaw “woke” or “conservative” or “liberal” views, but it might limit intentionally incendiary, false, or provocative statements.
In Popper’s formulation, we can tolerate almost all speech except the speech of people whose only goal in entering the conversation is to keep others from participating.
Of course, the country is not a classroom, and the world is not a school, so this isn’t a perfect analogy, but I think “free speech absolutists,” in their actual behavior and speech, reveal quickly that they do not support all speech, and that in fact they support a kind of discussion that, in effect, results in less diversity of perspectives. (To an extent, this is so obvious I probably don’t need to say it: Trump, Musk, Vance, Hesgeth, and others are literally rooting out diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.)
When there have to be limits on speech in order to protect open dialogue, Popper is probably right: the main question should be, which speech is designed to derail the conversation, to suppress others through intimidation or other bad-faith strategies? It’s impossible to take seriously the argument that a poster of Harriet Tubman, a rainbow flag, or a book about racism is somehow too incendiary for the public, government-funded sphere, but that Nazi apologists like those in the AfD are fine.
Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organised societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg [sic] said, is ‘freedom for the other fellow’. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: ‘I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.
And, unfortunately, it may be impossible to adequately respond to such bad-faith arguments with logic and public opinion, so we have to seriously consider how to peacefully preserve the legitimate freedoms of all people, and the possibility of honest dialogue and debate, in a society where self-labeled “free speech absolutists” have so much power.