There was a moment — it was brief — when I thought the era of peak woke, or what Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently referred to as “Woke 1,” could lead to a free speech renaissance in this country.
On July 7, 2020 — in the midst of a shameful and sometimes terrifying wave of cancellations and terminations that included a number of innocent people who either had the misfortune of being misunderstood or speaking in ways that angered the most intolerant voices online — a cross-partisan coalition of writers, professors and other public figures published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” in Harper’s Magazine.
I recognized most of the signatories, with ideologies from left to right and everywhere in between. But they were united under the banner of free speech, and their words were music to my free-speech-loving ears. “The restriction of debate,” they wrote, “whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.”
“The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away,” they said. And they made perhaps the most critical argument of all — that justice and freedom are not in tension. Instead, they “cannot exist without each other.”
It was a necessary message at a crucial moment, and had that message been the manifesto of the so-called anti-woke movement, then I’d argue that our nation would be in a substantially different place in 2026. More free. More united. More grounded in the Constitution and the pluralistic principles of the founding.
That’s not what happened. The anti-woke movement went in a different direction, and its “cure” for wokeness was more intolerance and more repression — just from a different faction of American politics. The anti-woke movement has taken all the excesses of wokeness, absorbed it into the Republican Party and weaponized it into the worst and most repressive administration for free speech since Woodrow Wilson arrested and prosecuted thousands of political opponents during World War I.
This administration has arrested college students for writing opinion pieces and participating in demonstrations, retaliated against universities and law firms for their constitutionally protected speech, threatened broadcasters based on the content of their programming and recently even threatened a think tank, the Center for American Progress, with a $5 billion defamation suit for publishing a study that found that there is “no evidence” that President Trump’s deployment of the National Guard into multiple American cities reduced violent crime.
We had a preview of Trump’s censorship well before his second term. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida declared that his state was the place “where woke goes to die.”
And how was Florida killing wokeness? Through a wave of censorship that would make many of the most woke college administrators blush. It passed a statewide speech code that purported to ban critical race theory but in reality unconstitutionally violated the free speech rights of professors and corporations in the state. It passed a different speech code that sharply restricted discussions of gender and sexuality in public schools, and it retaliated against Disney when the company objected to the policy.
All of this has been chronicled before. I’ve written about the excesses of the anti-woke right time and time again.
But I’m less interested in what happened than in why it happened. Why did the right choose to fight censorship with censorship, and why — as a side effect of that fight — did it also become the home of America’s worst cranks, grifters and conspiracy theorists?
In other words, the right didn’t just become more repressive; it became more stupid at the same time.
The reason, in hindsight, is obvious. Instead of choosing to defend free speech, they embraced many of the worst people and worst ideas and then wielded them as a weapon against the hated left.
As a longtime free speech lawyer and proponent, I’ve become quite accustomed to defending speech I dislike. That’s, in fact, central to the job description. If you defend only agreeable speech, you’re not defending free speech; you’re defending your speech.
For example, in 2005 — when I was president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (then called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE) — we defended the free speech and academic freedom of a professor named Ward Churchill. He wrote an essay just after 9/11 that compared the victims of the World Trade Center attack to Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust.
He called them “little Eichmanns.” Their sin was being part of “a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire.” He praised the 9/11 hijackers for making “gallant sacrifices.”
In other words, he was vile.
But it is easy, or at least should be, to defend speech without embracing the speaker. As Greg Lukianoff, our legal director (and now FIRE’s president), wrote at the time, “If he intended to generate sympathy for terrorists, the effect has been the opposite. We need not fear his words, and we must not allow our anger to cause us to betray our deepest moral and legal principles.”
I was proud of our work in that case. We did our best to stand in the shoes of the great free speech advocates who came before us, the people who defended the least popular speech so that all of us could be secure in our liberty.
It is not the government’s role to determine the viewpoints that are too terrible to hear. When it has been given that free hand, it was more likely to wield that license as a weapon against abolitionists, pacifists, partisan opponents and anyone else who seeks to challenge those in positions of prestige and power than it was to preserve any sort of civic virtue. As Frederick Douglass wrote, free speech, “of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.”
At FIRE we never let our love of liberty cloud our moral judgment. To refer to one of the most famous First Amendment cases in American history: Nazis may have a right to march through Skokie, Ill., but they are still Nazis.
Many in the anti-woke movement, however, changed this calculus. Rather than defend principles, they embraced extremists. Yes, innocent people were canceled, but terrible people lost their jobs as well (sometimes quite appropriately), and when they did, the anti-woke right welcomed them with open arms.
Imagine if the A.C.L.U. didn’t merely defend the free speech of Nazis in Illinois but put them on television, raised money for them online, gave them book deals and created a podcast — perhaps one called “Just Asking Questions” — that further injected their vile ideas deeper and deeper into the American bloodstream.
Once you see this pattern on the anti-woke right, you can’t unsee it. The instant the “woke” declared certain things or people bad was the instant that the right started to find their points of view intriguing, provocative and perhaps even compelling. And the definition of “woke” was always shifting, until it settled on “anything or anyone even slightly to my left.”
The examples are legion. Tucker Carlson was canceled by Fox News for, among other things, the sin of being a serial fabulist and conspiracy theorist. He soon became one of the most popular podcasters in the land.
Nick Fuentes was canceled by YouTube for Holocaust denial and profound antisemitism. At the time, he had roughly 87,000 Twitter followers. Since that time, his Twitter following has grown to a staggering 1.3 million people, and he met with Trump in between Trump’s two terms.
Marjorie Taylor Greene was stripped of her committee assignments after engaging in extraordinarily antisemitic and Islamophobic speech and then went on to become one of the leading Republican fund-raisers in the House and a MAGA darling (at least until she turned on Trump — the only unforgivable sin on the MAGA right).
I can keep going.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is and was a veritable geyser of medical lunacy. He went from claiming he was censored on Facebook and Instagram to becoming the secretary of health and human services.
And, of course, we have the godfather of all the canceled, Trump himself, who helped use right-wing outrage that he was ejected from multiple social media platforms after Jan. 6 to help kick-start his political comeback.
After a while, being canceled went from being a horrifying experience that ruined the lives and careers of decent people to being a cause for right-wing celebration among the worst of the worst, the first thing they’d put in their bios when they went hunting for book deals or speaking gigs.
On the right, many politicians, influencers and other public figures went from fearing the online mob to deliberately provoking it, hoping to become a lightning rod so that their star would shine brighter in the right-wing firmament.
This phenomenon has leaked all the way down to the grass roots. Perhaps the worst example is a woman named Shiloh Hendrix. She achieved her 15 minutes of infamy when she was recorded on video defending calling a young Black child the N-word, only to raise almost a million dollars on GiveSendGo, a Christian giving platform, after she faced a public outcry.
Don’t think for a second that she was apologetic. As she said in her fund-raising appeal, “I called the kid out for what he was.”
The reason for the shift is best explained by my colleague Ezra Klein’s interview with The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro last September. The modern right isn’t really conservative any longer. It’s “anti-left,” Shapiro said. And when it became primarily anti-left, it adopted an ethos that declared that the enemy of my enemy was my friend — even if your new friend is a loathsome person sharing profoundly hateful or deranged views.
But calling the new right anti-left understates the case. It hates the left, with all of its heart, soul and mind. And when you hate a movement that much, you don’t care about its supporters’ civil liberties. You will gladly violate their rights.
In some quarters of the new right, this view hardened into a doctrine that goes by the acronym NETTR, short for “no enemies to the right.” NETTR is different from the 11th Commandment popularized by Ronald Reagan: Thou shalt not speak ill of any Republican. NETTR, in essence, means that Republicans shall not speak ill of any fascist.
In this view, the political and cultural dangers of the present moment are so great that it requires rallying everyone on the right — no matter how extreme — in a grand alliance to take down the left.
And what is the emergency that justifies wrapping both arms around Carlson, Kennedy and Trump? It’s wokeness, of course, the all-purpose rationalization for every authoritarian, dishonest, conspiracist turn in right-wing politics and thought.
To use the language of the new right, don’t you know what time it is? The old rules brought our nation to the brink of extinction. It’s time for the new rules and the new tactics.
It turns out, however, that when you embrace cranks, they change you more than you change them. And that is especially true when your movement is led by a crank — a crank you love in part because he is cruel, because he is hateful. Or, as JD Vance said before he became vice president, “Our people hate the right people.”
And anyone wonders why MAGA has gone so wrong?
There is no doubt that Woke 1 was often, as Ocasio-Cortez said, “crazy.” It was often worse than crazy. It could be gleefully vindictive. Good people — including people I know — were put through hell. I’ve experienced its scorn also, and I know what it’s like to face deeply unfair and grotesquely wrong accusations of hate and bigotry, along with demands that I face extreme personal and professional consequences for my speech.
I’ve felt the anti-woke movement’s claws as well, and no one has called for my cancellation with more vigor than the new right. As person after person endures this deep intolerance — an intolerance backed by the full power of the federal government buttressed by a vitriolic right-wing media ecosystem that’s being remade in the image of the 1930s radio demagogue Father Coughlin — it’s very clear what has happened in the United States of America.
Some other things I did
My Sunday column was about college. In his reality television show, Sean Duffy, Trump’s transportation secretary, told his daughter Paloma that she might not be allowed to go to Harvard even if she was admitted and wanted to go. Why? Because, as he said, “If I send you there, I think what happens is they have professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you and, I think, corrupt their minds.” I disagreed:
I’m convinced that every person — especially those of us who live in the world of ideas — should spend time in a place where he or she is a distinct religious or ideological minority, even when it’s hard. It can be among the most clarifying and rewarding experiences in life.
In a conversation last week with MS NOW’s Katy Tur and me, my friend Mona Charen, the policy editor at The Bulwark, reflected on her experience as a conservative at Barnard College in the 1970s. She referred to a quote of John Stuart Mill’s: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”
When I was in law school, I appreciated the fact that my ideas were being tested by the smartest people I’d ever met. There was no way for me to skate through a conversation — much less a class. That was worth the scorn, as annoying and painful as that scorn could sometimes be.
My Saturday round table conversation with my colleagues Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Cottle was about Vance, wokeness and the future of the Democratic and Republican Parties. We covered a lot of ground, including whether Vance can replicate Trump’s appeal.
I think JD Vance is more shrewd in some ways, in that he’s also like Ron DeSantis, too online. But unlike Ron DeSantis, I think he speaks the language of faith more fluently. And critically, I think he’s better at whipping up religious fervor against his enemies.
And if you’ve carefully looked at the numbers from 2024, I mean, a couple of numbers stand out. One is white evangelical votes in favor of Trump. If you’ve got up to 30 percent of the country that’s going to go for you by this more than 80 percent rate, you have to fight, scratch and claw to get 40, only 40 percent of the rest.
So JD Vance has a very, very intentional message to this community. He is very much wrapping it around faith. And I think — to answer the actual question, Michelle — look, you’re seeing battle lines being drawn internally, within the conservative, sort of the MAGA movement between Rubio and Vance. And it’s entirely possible that this could be the contest. But to Jamelle’s point, I’m also seeing a lot of people telling Rubio: “Run in 2032. Run in 2032,” because they’re thinking of this more like the John McCain-Barack Obama election, that this is the election where the Republicans are essentially — whether they like it or not, want to or not or believe it or not — going to be offering up a sacrificial lamb to a Democratic nominee.
I think that’s way premature to say, but if the fundamentals continue where they are, there’s some real validity to the idea that JD Vance may end up taking on the B team rather than the A team in 2028.
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