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  • Free Speech and the Alt-Right
  • Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda (bio)

"Freedom of speech" has now become the official rallying cry of the alt-right—a loosely affiliated group of individuals whose core belief is that "white identity" is being attacked by "multicultural forces" who are allegedly attempting to destroy white civilization.110 In fact, "free speech" and the "alt-right" have become inextricably linked in the contemporary media landscape.111 That the concept of "free speech" traveled from the far-left end of the political spectrum (when it provided a framework for civil rights and third-world liberation activists and student organizers in the early sixties at the University of California, Berkeley, among other places) to the far-right within half a decade points to a fundamental flaw in the concept itself.

So how did we get here?

One way of answering this question is through a critique of "rights discourse" writ large. A key element of liberalism has always been its insistence on abstracting broad, allegedly "universal" principles out of concrete political and historical situations. Often, [End Page 369] liberalism's rigid adherence to these principles results in an ahistorical fundamentalism that ends up inhibiting broader emancipatory goals. Property rights, for example, "imply promotion of individual freedom and security, and yet property rights are precisely the justification afforded to … wreak havoc over the lives of tenants, workers, and neighbors."112

The "right to free speech" is no exception to this. Free speech fundamentalists usually define "freedom of speech" as a negative right—that is, the right of the individual to freely express their views without government intervention or censorship. Less government regulation of speech, however, has no explicit correlation with the liberation of marginalized groups or social progress overall. When freedom of speech is framed as a universal right—without regard to the specificities of race, class, and gender—it can in fact work to consolidate the power of the ruling majority and thus reproduce the status quo. As one scholar notes: "Conservatives can deploy the indeterminacy of rights for their benefit. Using the language of rights reinforces the individualistic ideology and claims of absolute power within individuals' spheres of action that must be undermined if progressive social [and collective] change is to become more possible."113 In other words: freedom of speech is not a good in itself; it makes sense only within a broader push for social equity.

Consider the case of Milo Yiannopoulos, a journalist for the far-right news source Breitbart (run by former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon) and a popular leader within the alt-right movement. During the fall of 2016 Yiannopoulos organized a series of talks at various US universities.114 These talks followed a highly predictable pattern: Yiannopoulos would arrive on campus; deliver an inflammatory speech in which he would spew hateful rhetoric against marginalized groups of people, as well as harass and target individual students; students and activists would protest the talk and call for its cancellation; and Yiannopoulos would argue that his free speech rights were being violated by these protests.

Yiannopoulos's golden ticket ensuring his access to institutions, which would otherwise object to the propagation of such views in their classrooms, was through the concept of "free speech." His [End Page 370] claim that students who called for the cancellation of his talks were violating his fundamental free speech rights won over the hearts and minds of the liberal public, both inside and outside the academy. His extraordinary success in advocating for this position—he was essentially convincing universities to lend time and money to the public airing of fascist viewpoints—depended on a collective amnesia of the conditions under which the "right to free speech" were originally framed in the US Constitution.

Bryn Buchanan succinctly summarizes these conditions as follows:

The Naturalization Act of 1790 extended citizenship to "free white men with property"—meaning that citizens were required to have these social positions in order to be incorporated into the Constitution of the United States. For those of us outside of that frame, neither our speech nor our bodies were free. Black bodies and communities were enslaved to support the speech and interests of white...

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