If you believe in nothing, you will achieve nothing
Andrea Long Chu and the triumph of the left nihilists
Andrea Long Chu has a problem. She and her acolytes presently enjoy dictatorial control over every discourse that falls to the left of Fox News. They have convinced the world that speech is inherently violent and therefore a dedication to free speech is a precondition of fascism, if not outright genocide. Every decent person must agree with every thing they say, no matter how deranged or implausible. And so if a random person, for example, says that sexual dimorphism exists or that maybe cosmetic hysterectomies shouldn’t be the first response to teenage mental health issues, that person has committed a severe act of violence and must be silenced.
But, oh no, it turns out that Chu and her cohort have found themselves outgunned on the topic of Israel-Palestine. The same left that has gleefully silenced all improper discussions of culture war issues for the last decade is now seeing their exact same tactics being used to silence any criticism of Israel’s ongoing genocide. You can’t even do something as anodyne as expressing support for a ceasefire without making a Jewish Yale student feel unsafe, and since speech is violence and feeling unsafe is even more of a genocide than an actual genocide I’m sorry, you were bad and unvalid and you must silenced. Them’s the rules.
Chu attempts to reconcile these two, very sad realities in a recent piece for New York Magazine titled “The Free Speech Debate is a Trap.” The essay is staggeringly moronic, even by Chu’s august standards. I had to read it twice just to make sure I wasn’t understanding it unfairly.
My readers seem like decent people. I find no joy in subjecting them to crap like this. But a deep dive into Chu’s essay is necessary because it confirms the value of free speech on two fronts: 1) it shows why nothing short of a doctrinaire support of the first amendment can allow for the dissemination of opinions that dissent against the consensus of the permanent war state, and, 2) it demonstrates how an opposition to free speech leads to the proliferation of braindead analysis among supposed leftists.
Let us begin:
As is her wont, Chu writes in an obfuscatory style. She belabors simple points to weaken the reader’s attention, so that when she sneaks in observations that are insane or otherwise very stupid we’re less likely to notice.
She starts with a description of herself, another writer, and the whole staff of a poetry center being deplatformed for expressing their support of the Palestinian cause. This is, obviously, an injustice. But rather than taking the fascist’s way out and deciding that maybe this free speech thing is actually worth pursuing, Chu explains that the incident actually strengthened her resolve against the free and protected exchange of ideas. Because, naturally, anything else would render her a hypocrite, and then she wouldn’t be able to silence people for dissenting against gender bullshit:
Now it’s true: A left that supports the deplatforming of transphobes but opposes the deplatforming of anti-Zionists cannot justify itself by appealing to free speech — nor should it. For the liberal, freedom of speech is a deliberately empty principle. It allows a liberal institution to mediate peacefully between differing political views without any (apparent) reference to the content of those views — all while quietly promoting its own views under the banner of neutrality. The left can do better.
Now, here it’s very important to note the degree to which the concept of transphobia has been expanded in recent years, thanks in no small part to the work of Chu and her allies in media and academe. The concept once meant something like “a hatred of trans and/or gender non-conforming people,” which is bad. But now it’s expanded to include things like recognizing that males and females have different athletic abilities, expressing concern with the thought of male sex offenders being housed in women’s prisons, the refusal of female service workers to perform intimate procedures on natal males, or even simply using words like “male” and “female.” This type of extreme narrative control simply could not persist in a discourse that wasn’t very broken, or among people who did not regard the aggressive policing of speech as a paramount ideal. Like the rest of the identitarians who now control what passes for the American Left, Chu is very unabashedly pro-censorship.
Strip down the blandishments and you’ll find her point is simple: free speech is bad, because it allows people to say things that may discredit her. Only instead of admitting to being discredited, she shall claim that speech itself in an act of violence, because after all if she’s discredited that means violence has been inflicted upon her. Herself and other people who believe everything she believes should be anointed the gatekeepers of what does or does not constitute acceptable speech. Those who break from their dictates must be shunted from the public sphere and suffer professional consequences.
The type of nihilism endorsed by Chu is only advantageous to those whose beliefs benefit the empowered. And, at the end of the day, the people who run most every left-liberal institution (including the Democratic party) are resolutely in favor of Israel’s genocide. Some of them take genuine pleasure in watching Palestinians die; others were taped fucking children on a sex island and cannot upset their blackmailers; and the bulk of them are mortified by the prospect of being labeled some kind of -ist or -phobe, as they know full well–thanks, again, to the efforts of Chu and her cohort–that they would not be able to proffer any defense against such accusations, regardless of how stupid they may be.
There is no way to reconcile this situation within the boundaries set by left identitiarisn. None. You can either support free speech as an abstract principle and allow unpopular and inconvenient speech to proliferate without punishment, or you can endorse a society where the acceptability of speech is determined by the desires of the warmongering sociopaths who run the world. It’s one or the other. There are no other options.
I don’t think anything I’ve written so far is especially complicated, or even controversial. These are the sort of observations I would have easily grasped in middle school. But, oh, here’s where the obfuscation sets in, where Chu demonstrates her Pulitzer Prize-winning skill of making reactionary bullshit sound left-ish.
She starts with the well-worn trope of arguing that today’s speech debates aren’t really about free speech because the first amendment only applies to, like, the government:
It is worth remembering the vast majority of what we call free-speech issues have little basis in the First Amendment, which only forbids the abridgment of speech by the government, not private organizations like magazines, cultural centers, or Hollywood production companies. In most states, for instance, it is perfectly legal for employers to fire workers for speech, as a Westchester synagogue did last year after a teacher wrote an anti-Zionist blog post. So when advocates talk of freedom of speech, they are usually referring neither to the Constitution nor to statutory law but to a set of civil norms imagined to promote the health of the republic but which cannot be directly enforced by the government.
As a matter of simple fact, this is wrong. At least 32 of our 50 states require potential government employees to sign some sort of loyalty oath to Israel before they are allowed to receive state jobs. Compelled speech in support of zionist genocide–or, at least, the promise to never criticize said genocide–is enforced by the government. This is very literally a first amendment issue.
But, I will concede, the support of free speech largely redounds to a set of civil norms–the same as how we don’t go around slashing other people’s tires or puking in our neighbor’s mailboxes not strictly because it’s illegal to do so, but out of a sense of shared civic duty. Even if we can’t articulate exactly why, we just sense that it would be bad to abandon our principles to a degree where we did or tolerated that sort of stuff.
These unspoken compacts are essential for the existence of any human society. And probably any animal society. And, shit, this probably applies to plants and bacteria, too. But the persistence of these compacts pisses off people like Chu because such compacts can, at times, present a threat to their capacity as the sovereign overseers of what is or is not acceptable. If judgments were deferred to science or empiricism or any other existing form of adjudicating correctness and decency, all of a sudden Chu wouldn’t be a very smart intellectual, and we cannot have that.
Chu’s… her… discussion of this? I hate to call it a “response,” because an actual response would require some degree of honesty. But, uhh, the way she addresses this is to point out that free speech is actually, like, just a fiction, mannnnn…
While it is true that left-wing ideas have flourished in the humanities and, to a lesser extent, the social sciences — the result of the retreat of post-1968 social movements into the academy — the big private universities remain in the business of business, their endowments tied up in fossil fuels, big tech, and the prison-industrial complex and their purses fattened by wealthy donors who expect influence in return. After a letter was released at Harvard that blamed “all unfolding violence” on the Israeli government, the billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, apparently speaking for his fellow CEOs, demanded that the school publish the rosters of the student groups who had signed the letter “so as to insure [sic] that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.” The implicit understanding here was that elite private universities funnel their graduates into the nation’s highest positions of power and influence — including Congress itself — and that this pipeline must not be polluted by ideas that its previous beneficiaries find morally despicable or politically disadvantageous. The House hearing itself came chillingly close to a direct attempt by the federal government to materially intervene in the composition of the incipient professional class through, as more than one Republican suggested, the expulsion of student protesters.
Yes, indeed, speech has always been limited by the sovereign. Go back and read Locke and Bacon, see how much they hem and haw about their love of the Queen. Point to any of the hundreds or thousands of socialists who found themselves jailed in these United States for criticizing our involvement in the first World War. That’s all true. But none of these facts negate the value and utility of free speech as an ideal.
If you have no principles, if your only goal is a naked quest for power, you will eventually encounter someone more empowered whose desires run counter to your own. Then you will fail, as you will have no recourse to do anything but fail. Without ideals, there is no path forward. Without decency, there is no hope. If the battle over the continuation of a genocide redounds to nothing less vulgar than two sides claiming righteousness by din of their own existence, the side that owns all the guns and has the near-universal support of government and media is going to win.
But there’s no room for such realizations within today’s left, of whom Chu is a very sad but fitting embodiment. She is immensely successful not because of talent or intelligence or decency but because she manifests the perfect set of identity markers. If she were not physically hideous and/or a manipulative sociopath, she’d be a nobody. She thrives within our broken discourse only because her enablers fear her, and that fear is born of nothing more than pity. She cannot afford the existence of principles, as that would threaten her exalted status. And she is demanding that all the rest of us abandon every last sliver of hope to make sure she and friends remain in charge.