"Freedom of speech" for campus conservatives means their "freedom" to be racist

Are we not all for “free speech,” even the hypocritical kind? A new film entitled Bombshell is not about how leggy, “bombshell” blondes helped “sell” Fox News’ far-right agenda to millions of red-blooded white males who otherwise would have been indifferent to its propaganda, but about the alleged sexual misconduct committed by Roger Ailes. Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman didn’t want to make a movie about Aryan-Nordic type white women espousing white nationalist views for profit; no, they have to be the “victims” rather than face the truth in themselves. Just look at Megyn Kelly’s brief tenure at NBC; she just couldn’t keep in all of that racial garbage she frequently spouted on Fox News. For those who don’t remember the Fox News version of Kelly (portrayed by Theron in the movie), John Oliver composed a “greatest hits” of her racist commentary on Fox back in 2017, in questioning the intelligence of NBC in hiring her.

But that is “liberals” being hypocrites. Another brand of hypocrites are “conservative” student groups and their defenders who frequently decry the lack of “free speech” and “political correctness” on college campuses. Right-wingers don’t really believe in “free speech” when they are in control; take for example Denver radio host Craig Silverman, a conservative commentator working for a conservative station. He claimed that he was fired mid-show recently for refusing to “toe strict Trump party line. I call things as I see them. I see corruption and blatant dishonesty by President and his cronies. I also see bullying/smearing of American heroes w/courage to take oath and tell truth. Their bravery inspires me.” Although the radio station offered a different explanation, Silverman maintains that it was just a matter of time before someone came in the booth and told him “You’re done.”

But race is the thing with most campus “conservatives” these days. When Zack Beauchamp, a reporter for Vox, covered the first National Conservatism conference, one of the speakers invited was Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania Law School professor. He reported how Wax justified racist immigration policies by obsessing over the amount of litter she claimed to see in “mixed” or “diverse” neighborhoods relative to the well-off white neighborhoods she was accustomed to seeing. Beauchamp reported that Was obsession with her litter metaphor led her to proclaimed that “Europe and the First World to which the United States belongs remain mostly white for now, and the Third World, although mixed, contains a lot of nonwhite people. Embracing cultural distance, cultural distance nationalism means in effect taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” Beauchamp was subsequently attacked by right-wing commentators who claimed that he “misunderstood” Wax; she wasn’t actually talking about “race,” but “culture”; the reality is that for “conservatives,” it is a difference without a distinction.

I recall an incident in college when I was sitting in a corner, when a group of white male students gathered nearby, thinking that there was no one around to hear their conversation. They talked about minority students at the school in disparaging terms, their lack of “qualifications” and that there were too many in the school. Then one of them noticed that I was sitting there listening to this, and I sensed this “fear” that I might “expose” them. One of them said they were just “joking.” But they were not joking. Even when they talk about “culture” it is a racial “ownership” issue; you can “assimilate” and maybe even know “their” culture better than they do, but that only distracts from the narrative “conservative” students actually are pushing;  I recall another incident when I was listening to a “mix tape” of some favorite songs from the 70s and 80s, and this white student sneered at me and said “That isn’t your music.” 

The problem with campus right-wing “free speech” advocates is that when they talk about their “free speech” rights, they are talking about their “freedom” to air their racially provocative viewpoints. It isn’t about “conservatism” per say; frequent campus speaker and law professor Josh Blackman doesn’t attract protestors because he is a “benign” advocate for “strict constitutionalism”; it is how he uses it to defend some abhorrent beliefs. He’s not just a defender of federalism, which has been the basis of many racially-motivated policies in “red” states, including voter suppression laws, but he believes that speakers with clear racist agendas like Jeff Sessions, Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan and Milo Yiannopoulos have an inherent right to foment discord on college campuses in the phony guise of “free speech” rights. There is nothing remotely “free speech” about promoting speakers who want to take freedom from whole groups of people, like these people do. Coulter may claim she isn’t a racist because she has a “friendly” relationship with a couple of black people, but her protest-inducing recent speech entitled “Adios, America” at UC Berkeley should be called by its right name: it was about her racist, paranoid fear of a Hispanic “takeover” of the country. The truth is that you only have to be racist against one group to be a racist.

“Free speech” has been a concept used and abused to promote white nationalism, nativism, xenophobia and white paranoia for a long time, more so today than in many decades, and even some so-called “liberals” can’t expunge it from with themselves. “Comedian” Bill Maher may complain that white “liberals” are full of “self-hate,” but what he really means is that he doesn’t like feeling “guilty” for harboring racist thoughts, which he has been accused of many times. That he is still working is testimony to the fact that racism and “conservatism” is cloaked in many different shades of wool.