The Far Right Genealogy of Today's Dopey "FrEe sPeAcH!" arguments

“There is a CONSPIRACY in this country to limit public comment and discussion to what a small but powerful clique has predetermined to be 'acceptable.' The moment anyone attempts to introduce an idea that is 'unacceptable,' nationwide forces are mobilized to silence the 'heretic' "

Those words could have been spoken yesterday by Tucker or Elon or Alex Jones or any of a number of right wingers who’ve built a brand out of being supposedly silenced and victimized by “the woke mind virus” or “the global elite.” But that quote comes from a book published in 1986 by the Liberty Lobby, a Nazi-sympathizing and Holocaust-denying organization that for over two decades had devoted its million-dollar-plus budget to advancing the argument that the US should be a white ethnostate purged of Jews and other non-Christians. The Liberty Lobby claimed that the Anti-Defamation League, by organizing a public pressure campaign to get radio stations to drop the Liberty Lobby’s neo-Nazi radio program, had violated their First Amendment rights. THEY, the fascists who wanted to deport Black people and remove Jews from public life, were the REAL First Amendment warriors and poor, innocent victims of a dastardly, Jewish-led “conspiracy against freedom.” Uh huh.

I’ve gnashed my teeth more than once over the past few years when I’ve heard some right winger complain that Alex Jones or another conspiracy monger was being denied their 1st Amendment rights because a private company de-platformed or de-monitized their account in response to public pressure. The first words of the 1st Amendment are “Congress shall make no law…,” not “you have an inalienable right to have your shitty, empirically-baseless opinions blasted out over whatever communication medium you want whenever you want.” YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, or CNN can not infringe upon anyone’s First Amendment rights, only Congress can. But that sure hasn’t stopped people from whining about their First Amendment rights whenever their anti-democratic ideas meet with opposition and censure from an American public that, at least for now, largely values multi-racial democracy and religious pluralism. This right wing whine about the First Amendment is not some new phenomenon…its genealogy traces back, at least to some extent, to Cold War era, McCarthyite far right groups like the Liberty Lobby.

That 1986 book by the Liberty Lobby focuses on the ADL’s partially successful effort to get local radio stations to drop the Liberty Lobby’s syndicated radio show in 1973-4. The four page forward (posted below) is worth reading, if only because so much of the rhetoric and so many of the “arguments” will sound quite familiar to what we hear today from the right.

I think my favorite line here is “Does recognizing a [non-existent] conspiracy [about how the Jews control the world] make you ‘anti-Semitic?’ The ADL says yes. The Liberty Lobby says no.” Just so we’re clear, the Liberty Lobby was openly and proudly antisemitic—as in, their entire brand was pretty much built around the idea that Jews are America and Christianity-hating Communists who secretly control the media, the educational system, and the government. Their claim that people will be prevented from hearing “both sides” of the argument is akin to the argument creationists make that biology classes should teach “both sides,” or the anti-vax peoples’ argument that one can’t understand how vaccines work without hearing from “the other side” that falsely claims they don’t work and have ackshually killed millions of people. Bullshit bothsidesism is, I’m afraid, not a new rhetorical move.

Multi-racial democracy and religious pluralism are fragile and always contested and reversible accomplishments. They create the framework in which people can live freely in a diverse modern society and engage in debate with each other as members of a public that has a shared interest in finding the best, empirically-grounded solutions to its problems. The Liberty Lobby believed that white Christian “true Americans” like them had all of the solutions, and that they were being prevented from implementing those solutions by a secret cabal of anti-American Jews and their liberal lackeys, an all-powerful conspiracy that only the few hundred thousand readers of the Liberty Lobby’s materials could properly discern. The Liberty Lobby, in other words, was the quintessential American fascist organization that wrapped itself in the cross and the flag. The ADL, an organization with a long history of trying to thwart fascist movements in the US since the 1920s, was carrying forward its pro-democratic historical mission by trying to use all legal means possible to raise public awareness about and limit the reach of the Liberty Lobby’s lying, anti-democratic propaganda.

Seeking to sustain and nurture a civic culture that is conducive to the future survival of multi-racial democracy and religious pluralism is, to my mind, simply an unqualified good thing. It’s not surprising that a range of far right anti-democrats and religious authoritarians find such cultural efforts to be “tyrannical impositions on our freedom of speech.” But it is disappointing that such tired old arguments still need to be rebutted.