How Free Speech Warriors Mainstreamed White Supremacists
“How does one uphold free-speech principles and also counter the worldwide surge, from Charlottesville to Warsaw, in public displays by white supremacists? It’s an increasingly relevant one, too. White-supremacist propaganda at colleges, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), increased by 258 percent between the fall of 2016 to the fall of 2017, with college Republicans like James Allsup and Nick Fuentes turning to the alt-right, the modern, Internet-savvy incarnation of white supremacy. […]
“There is a magnitude of difference between protecting an individual’s legal right to free speech and taking the further step of uncritically promoting white-supremacist propaganda in mainstream platforms. These are dog whistles made into megaphones. Even free-speech enthusiasts, like the Pyles, don’t find speakers like Yiannapoulos to be worthy of an invite. […] When I visited Christopher Pyle in his office one morning, I asked him about a comment he had made to me implying that free speech doesn’t necessarily improve culture. ‘Not when jackasses do it.'”
When did far-right ideology seep into our public discourse? Mari Uyehara on how the most ardent defenders of free speech allowed fringe beliefs to go unchallenged.
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