You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at all the Hollywood celebrities rending their garments about Donald Trump’s attacks on free speech. In an ‘open letter’, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro, among others, took the administration to task for browbeating ABC into pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show from the air after he falsely claimed that Charlie Kirk’s murderer was associated with the ‘MAGA gang’. ‘In an attempt to silence its critics, our government has resorted to threatening the livelihoods of journalists, talk-show hosts, artists, creatives and entertainers across the board,’ they wrote. ‘This runs counter to the values our nation was built upon, and our constitution guarantees.’
Where were these high–minded defenders of the First Amendment when ABC cancelled Roseanne Barr’s show following a tweet she posted about a member of the Obama administration? And why didn’t we hear a squeak from these guardians of the US constitution when the Biden administration put pressure on social media companies to remove posts during the pandemic?
To be fair to these limousine liberals, their intervention does seem to have had the desired effect. The day after their letter was published, Disney president Bob Iger announced that Kimmel’s show would be back on ABC this week. But this makes their silence when conservatives were being cancelled more unforgivable. Free speech, it seems, only matters to the Hollywood elite when it is their views being censored.
Nevertheless, they have a point. I’m currently in Australia at the invitation of the Robert Menzies Institute to give the annual oration and am planning to take the American right’s recent abandonment of free speech as my theme. The Trump administration seems to have lost sight of the cause it has championed in foreign affairs. A few days after Kirk was shot, the US attorney general Pam Bondi blamed ‘hate speech’ and threatened to prosecute anyone indulging in it. She subsequently walked that back, but it was a disturbing echo of the excuse the woke left makes for no-platforming gender–critical feminists and evangelical Christians. Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, seemed to threaten ABC with a regulatory investigation when he urged the network to cancel Kimmel’s show. ‘We can do this the easy way or the hard way,’ he said. And J.D. Vance told employers to identify and discipline anyone guilty of celebrating Kirk’s murder.
The MAGA lot look just as hypocritical as the Hollywood crowd – free speech for me, but not for thee
I think this is a mistake for a variety of reasons. First of all, it makes the MAGA lot look just as hypocritical as the Hollywood crowd – free speech for me, but not for thee – and the next time Trump or Vance calls out Keir Starmer for failing to uphold freedom of expression, he’ll be able to point to the double standards. Then there’s the fact that it plays into the hands of their hysterical left-wing critics, who are constantly raising the alarm about the ‘fascists’ in the White House. Like it or not, using the machinery of government to silence your political enemies is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. And it dishonours the memory of Kirk, who believed in defeating your ideological opponents by besting them in open debate, not by getting them fired. As Louis Brandeis said, if you think your antagonists are trafficking in falsehoods and fallacies, ‘the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence’.
I know this view is far from universally held by my fellow conservatives. I’m often told the only way to force the radical left to abandon cancel culture is to give them a taste of their own medicine. But that seems to take for granted that the right’s use of these militant tactics is just temporary. That’s a tad naive, surely? How often have powerful politicians voluntarily relinquished the tools of censorship? Another argument is that if people on our side defend our enemies’ right to free speech while they don’t defend ours, we’ll be fighting with one hand tied behind our back. I disagree. Our most powerful weapons are reason, evidence and logic, and provided we don’t relinquish them we will prevail, just as Kirk always did.
The political career of Robert Menzies, Australia’s longest-serving PM, is a case in point. In 1950 he passed a law outlawing the Communist party, but it was overturned by the High Court, who ruled it unconstitutional. He then called a referendum on the issue, which he narrowly lost. Yet Menzies’s fears about the threat of communism never materialised. In the end, he proved more than equal to the task of defeating it through ‘more speech’ rather than ‘enforced silence’. Trump would do well to learn that lesson.
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