What if you created a movement that proclaimed its love and admiration for free speech while engaging in cancel culture with ferocious glee? What if that same movement proclaimed its love of the American founding at the same time that it got busy attacking the founding’s most important achievement, the Constitution?
Meet the anti-woke right. It’s a loose coalition of podcasters, influencers and Silicon Valley moguls who’ve led a mass movement against the left, a movement that helped return Donald Trump to the White House. If you’ve followed its rise to power, very little about the Trump administration’s first 100 days would surprise you.
First, let’s walk through a bit of recent history. The anti-woke right existed before 2020, but the combination of the racial reckoning after George Floyd’s murder and the Covid lockdowns (and the school closures and mask mandates that came with them) gave it rocket fuel. Its early messages were both simple and compelling — let us have a say, we don’t mindlessly obey, and the elite doesn’t possess a monopoly on the truth.
They had a point.
We might not like to dwell much on 2020 (it was a terrible year), but we can’t understand 2025 without remembering that both the racial reckoning and the early Covid response had a dark side. Cancel culture was real. Efforts to combat disinformation about Covid were often amateurish and heavy-handed.
I often think about the double standards applied to churches, for example. In October 2020, I covered a court case that perfectly represented the way in which selective enforcement and political favoritism turned so many Americans against the public health establishment.
Capitol Hill Baptist Church, a prominent church in Washington, sued the local government in 2020 after it continued to deny permission for the church to conduct outdoor, masked worship — even as restaurants were opening again for outdoor seating and even as the mayor of Washington had marched alongside protesters in outdoor protests against racial injustice.
In an alternate universe, the rise of the anti-woke right would have been the beginning of a constitutional renaissance. At the very moment when public debate was most necessary — to address some of the most complicated and emotionally fraught issues that divide our nation — was the moment when millions of Americans felt most afraid to speak.
This was exactly the time to double down on the Bill of Rights, to engage in a cultural and legal argument for the value of free expression.
But it was not to be. In the contest between a love for liberty and a hatred for the left, hatred won, and now the freethinkers of the anti-woke right have enabled the rise of the most speech-restrictive authoritarian president since Woodrow Wilson, who prosecuted his political opponents by the thousands.
Ironically enough, in its blind rage and quest for control, the anti-woke right effectively conceded one of the left’s key critiques of the American experiment.
At the risk of oversimplifying complex arguments, one of the left’s core critiques of American history and the American Constitution is that liberty can be an illusion that masks the reality of power.
Free speech? That’s for the powerful. Due process? That’s for the powerful. The long history of American oppression shows that the dominant faction will always resist the spread of liberty and prosperity to marginalized groups, and the only way for marginalized Americans to gain anything like true equality is to seize power, in part by limiting the liberty of the dominant factions.
Perhaps the paradigmatic argument for this position is found in Herbert Marcuse’s 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance.” Marcuse was one of the New Left’s most influential political theorists, and in his formulation, a neutral public square — one that grants its participants equal rights to speak — perpetuates injustice. After all, it’s the people who are already powerful who have the most access to the instruments of public communication.
If you really want to experience true, liberating tolerance, Marcuse argued, that “would mean intolerance against movements from the right and toleration of movements from the left.”
Free speech proponents have long contested Marcuse’s claims. We’ve pointed to the facts of history — that poor and marginalized Americans have been able to use the First Amendment to create significant social change. As the Rev. Walter Fauntroy, a pastor and civil rights leader, told me years ago, “Almighty God and the First Amendment” were responsible for the civil rights movement’s success.
“The First Amendment gave us the ability to speak,” Fauntroy said, “and Almighty God softened men’s hearts” to the message of legal equality.
The anti-woke right, by contrast, has gone reverse Marcuse. It embraces intolerance against movements from the left and tolerance for movements from the right.
All of this has been obvious for some time. Or, another way to put it is that Ron DeSantis walked so that Donald Trump could run. When the time came to formulate a policy response to the woke left, no one mattered more than the governor of Florida.
He tried to ban critical race theory in education. He sharply limited discussion of gender and sexuality in public schools. He tried to limit the free speech of university professors. He retaliated against Disney when it had the audacity to exercise its freedom of speech to criticize the governor’s policies.
And through it all, DeSantis declared that Florida was the place where “woke goes to die.”
In his second term, Trump is a scaled-up version of DeSantis. Every element of the DeSantis model has been deployed against Trump’s ideological enemies. Trump retaliated against law firms based on politics. He’s attacking the academic freedom and independence of private universities. He’s sweeping immigrants off the street based on nothing more than the content of their speech.
Precious few anti-woke activists objected to DeSantis’s tactics. And precious few object to Trump today. It turns out that when they said, “Let us speak,” they weren’t embracing free speech as a universal value, but rather as an instrumental value — free speech is important only so long as they get to say what they think.
The left? It’s too dangerous to be heard.
In fact, it’s sometimes hard to discern the difference between the far left and the far right. Last week The Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Dugan wrote a fascinating piece describing how Chris Rufo, perhaps the anti-woke right’s leading activist, is now embracing an Italian Marxist named Antonio Gramsci. They see his ideas as a blueprint for the culture war.
Gramsci placed a premium on attaining “cultural hegemony,” in part by seizing control of universities and attacking establishment media as mouthpieces of the ruling regime. “The right needs a Gramsci,” Rufo argues.
But does the right really need a Gramsci when it has a Trump? He is, after all, committed to wielding his power against the “Radical Left Lunatics” (as he said in a memorable Easter post), and he commands the unconditional loyalty of the tens of millions of people who make up his MAGA base.
At first I was optimistic about the anti-woke right. Their free speech argument resonated with me. I’d spent decades litigating free speech cases, after all, and I’d never really seen anything like a mass movement for free expression.
But my optimism quickly faded. In 2021, the anti-woke right embraced a series of state laws that were designed to ban critical race theory. Rather than meet critical race theorists in the marketplace of ideas, the right chose to try to suppress their expression.
A movement that had spent decades fighting speech codes on college campuses was now enacting speech codes of its own. States that once passed laws meant to protect free speech on campus were now passing laws suppressing the discussion of so-called divisive concepts about race.
By this time I was familiar with the right’s authoritarian turn — and getting very worried about it. In 2019, parts of the intellectual right were consumed with a fight over liberalism itself, with the new right arguing that liberal values — freedom of speech and free trade, for example — were hollowing out American culture, creating a nation of atomized individuals who were consumed with self-actualization (and consumption itself) at the expense of family and community.
The authoritarian right laid the intellectual foundation for this moment. The influencers, moguls and podcasters of the anti-woke right made it popular, and they did so in the most pernicious way possible — by smuggling censorship into American life under the banner of free speech and free thought.
There is a profound difference between liberty and power. When you have power, you certainly experience it as freedom. You can do what you want to do. Liberty, by contrast, protects people against power. Liberty is what grants you freedom of action even when you are not in control. The anti-woke right spoke the language of liberty when its freedom was under threat, but now we know the terrible truth: The movement was about power all along.
Some other things I did
My Easter Sunday column was a reflection about two kinds of churches:
When I talk to Christians who are struggling with their faith, one of the first things I ask them is, “Were you raised in a fear-the-world church or a love-your-neighbor church?”
Most churchgoers instantly know what I’m talking about. The culture of the church of fear is unmistakable. You’re taught to view the secular world as a threat. Secular friends are dangerous. Secular education is perilous. Secular ideas are bankrupt. And you’re always taught to prepare for the coming persecution, when “they” are going to try to destroy the church.
The love-your-neighbor church is fundamentally different. It’s so different that it can sometimes feel like a different faith entirely. The distinction begins with the initial posture toward the world — not as a threat to be engaged, but as a community that we should love and serve.
More:
To be raised in a fear-the-world church is to experience a Christianity that declares with its words that the Resurrection is real, but seems incredulous about the possibility of a resurrection within its heart. If Christians truly can declare: “Where, death, is your victory? Where, death, is your sting?” then why is there such pervasive fear?
Another way to describe a love-your-neighbor church is to say that it embraces a resurrection faith. Its aim is to follow Christ’s consistent pattern of moving to the suffering, the alienated and the sick, all to bring life from death.
We cannot, of course, exercise Christ’s literal power over death. We cannot declare, as Christ did to Lazarus, “Come forth,” and watch our loved ones walk out of the tomb. But we can try to heal, to care for the physical needs of suffering people, and we can be instruments of grace to those dying from different kinds of deaths — spiritual, emotional and social.
Last Friday, I joined a podcast discussion with my Opinion colleagues Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Cottle to address the Trump administration’s attack on our constitutional rights. Here was my summary of the stakes:
I don’t think folks understand how completely the Trump administration is demolishing the Bill of Rights here. Because when you really dive into the legal doctrines, the first thing you have to know is that the protections of the Bill of Rights as a general matter accrue to persons, not just citizens. If you’re a human being in the country, you enjoy the protection of the Bill of Rights. So this sort of argument that, well, this is awful for this undocumented immigrant, but I’m an American citizen and this couldn’t happen to me — it’s just completely wrong. Trump is already talking about bringing American citizens that may have committed particularly heinous crimes and sending them to this El Salvadoran prison.
And so when you have a human being taken from the United States against a court order, sent to a prison — and this prison, by the way, would violate cruel and unusual punishment standards in the United States — and then what he’s saying is, well, now he’s in a foreign country. This is all just a matter of foreign policy, and you can’t make me do anything. Of course, you can’t enter an injunction order against El Salvador.
So think this through: If human beings — you’re one of them, if you’re listening to this podcast right now — if human beings, who are covered by the Bill of Rights, can now be whisked away from the United States of America, dumped into an inhumane prison, and then an American government just washed their hands of it, now it is not a matter for the courts to intervene because it’s a matter of foreign policy. You’ve just hacked the Bill of Rights. There’s just no other way around it.
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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