We're All Noticing the Hypocrisy, Right?

I just want to make sure we're all clocking this

Police confront student protesters at City College of New York. (Photo from Anadolu via Getty)

Campus protests have sparked a culture war flare up, which are not typically America’s best moments. Culture war fights are the trash TV of politics: They’re pulpy and inane, and they cut our collective IQ roughly in half. They typically end like an episode of Baywatch, in that there’s a forced “what did we learn?” moment that should probably just say: “Honestly, none of us learned jack shit.”

But let’s see if we can learn something in spite of ourselves. I propose this: Let’s take a moment to note the constant, egregious, eye-watering hypocrisy that’s emerged from all sides during this episode. Many people are loudly espousing principles that they recently denounced; it’s as if Richard Dawkins decided to become a priest, or if Princess Di had started a company that makes landmines. To even attempt these feats of duplicity implies a belief that perhaps nobody will notice, so: Let’s notice. Let’s take a moment to register the gobsmacking hypocrisy that’s everywhere right now.

For example: It’s fucking incredible that some leftists have the nerve to suddenly make appeals to free speech. For years, many leftists mocked free speech as nothing but a fig leaf for bigots. They coined the snarky “freeze peach” meme and responded forcefully when my former podcast co-host T Chatty Dubstep (as he likes to be called) organized a pro-free speech letter. The apotheosis of this duplicity occurred a few months ago when university administrators used free speech principles to justify their light treatment of protesters. As many noted at the time: Their arguments weren’t actually wrong — the problem was that their schools had spent the past several years imposing restrictions on speech that make a Trappist monastery seem like a coke party. To spend years policing milquetoast non-racism, and then turn on a dime and cite free speech in defense of blatant anti semitism requires balls that should truly be on display in the Smithsonian.

Meanwhile, right-wingers have gone the other way. The right embraced free speech in recent years, though there were signs that their commitment to the principle was superficial. And now, calls from the right to shut down the protests have grown loud — Texas governor Greg Abbott recently tweeted this: