On cancel culture, the Harper’s letter, the counter letter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Bari Weiss, hypocrisy, and more

Nicholas Grossman

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Jul 15 · 8 min read

A few days after spearheading a open letter in Harper’s defending free speech and denouncing cancel culture, Thomas Chatterton Williams announced on Twitter that he kicked someone out of his house for saying things he didn’t like about now-former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss. According to Williams, the expelled individual could not “substantiate the ridiculous claims he was repeating” about Weiss, which Williams says is typical of “many” who criticize her but “can’t even name a single thing she’s written.”

Criticism, mockery, and charges of hypocrisy followed. Here’s Williams, imposing social penalty on someone in response to speech, the very behavior his letter claims “will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time.” He was fully within his rights — freedom of association, private property — and exercising them in this manner was counter-speech. But as Elizabeth Picciuto points out, social media criticism, insults, demands to fire someone, declining to publish someone (perhaps in response to employee complaints), boycotts, firings, and other actions that cancel culture critics deride are also within people’s rights — freedom of association, at-will employment — and are also acts of counter-speech.

Williams first tried clarifying that this person wasn’t kicked out, but “ended up self-expelling with my encouragement.” (Are those different?) Then he deleted the tweet, but made sure others knew he didn’t see anything wrong with it: “I didn’t want to delete it, but my wife made me delete it. Twitter is a toxin, that’s the moral of the story.”

This little slice of Twitter drama doesn’t really matter, but it highlights something that does: Williams, the Harper’s letter signatories, and many of the people who cast themselves as defenders of free speech do not understand a central critique against them, and therefore misunderstand why their line of argument — which is prone to catastrophizing but has some merit — hasn’t proven more persuasive.

Here’s the critique: You say you value free speech and oppose social penalties for bad speech, but your actions show that you don’t. You value free speech for you and people who agree with you and oppose social penalties for expressing things you agree with. You’re open to disagreement on some topics, sure, but when it comes to things that are important to you, social penalties for speech you identify as bad — such as “Bari Weiss sucks” — are not just acceptable, but good, something to be proud of, something to broadcast on a public forum so others know that you did it, encouraging them to do it too.

That critique often comes with an accusation of bad faith — that the signatories don’t care about free speech, they’re just trying to protect their power — which I think is unfair. Some, at least, genuinely care about how cancel culture hurts people with less visibility and influence. (Williams, it’s worth noting, did not name the dinner party guest, which spared the guest from some internet unpleasantness.) But the hypocrisy charge sticks, and free speech defenders play into it by miscasting their argument as a high level defense of the principles that undergird a free society rather than what they’re actually doing: debating the parameters of socially-acceptable speech regarding race and gender.

Free Speech Hypocrites

Not incidentally, hypocrisy is also a central criticism of Weiss. She denounces cancel culture, builds up cancel culture opponents as heroes and martyrs, and tries to cancel people whose expressions she deems antisemitic. And her definition of antisemitic includes things that others would classify as criticism of Israeli government policy rather than bigotry against Jews. Among the people Weiss has gone after are Palestinian-supporting Columbia professors in 2004–05 and cartoonist Eli Valley in 2019. Weiss has become an object of scorn in some circles not because they’ve never seen any of her work, but because she embodies the hypocrisy of free speech for me, but not for thee.

I take Williams’s word that his soon-to-be-expelled dinner guest was unable to articulate this critique, but that doesn’t mean no one has. Philosopher Judith Butler offers a version of it in Jewish Currents while reviewing Weiss’s book How to Fight Anti-Semitism. For example, Butler discusses Weiss’s emphasis on “opposition to identity politics,” snarkily adding “which presumably excludes Jewish identity politics.”

Williams’s defense of Weiss highlights a problem that’s too prevalent among free speech defenders: focusing on their least thoughtful opponents, including randos on social media, rather than engaging more thoughtful critiques. And it’s a problem for anyone who supports things like freedom of expression and a relatively open marketplace of ideas, because it means the most visible defenders of free speech are talking past their opponents to preach to the choir.

“We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters,” claims the Harper’s letter. But for Williams, that evidently doesn’t include when the counter-speech is counter-Bari Weiss. For Weiss, it doesn’t include counter-Israel. For others, it doesn’t include counter-George Washington or America’s Founders. But the letter signatories broadly agree that it does include counter-speech that social justice activists consider counter-Black, counter-trans, or counter-another historically marginalized group. And the letter reads quite differently if you know that in advance.

What Are You Fighting About?

Free speech defenders cast their argument as upholding first principles, but it’s not. A substantial majority of Americans agree that:

1. The government should not use state power to punish people for expressing their opinions, especially opinions about the government.
2. In general, influential private actors — employers, media outlets, universities, crowds, etc. — should not use their power to punish people for expression, whether or not they agree with the substance.
3. Some expressions are beyond the pale, and private actors should use their power to reduce the space in which those expressions are socially acceptable.

While both sides of this debate cast it in sweeping, sometimes civilizational terms, the entire thing takes place within point three: Which expressions should be beyond the pale, and how should private actors punish transgressions?

The racial slur “n*****” used to be widely acceptable in the United States. Now it’s not. When I was a kid in the late 20th century, the anti-gay slur “f*****” was a common insult (whether or not the target was gay). Now it isn’t. I think those are positive developments, and I bet most, perhaps all, of the Harper’s letter signatories think so too. But those changes came about through private sanction, social pressure, and cultural change, driven by activists and younger generations. It might not be possible to get an effect like that without a version of that cause.

That’s what social justice activists are doing: pushing for certain expressions, such as telling a transwoman “you’re really a man” or flying the Confederate battle flag, to join “n*****” and “f*****” on the socially unacceptable side of the line.

Some go quite a bit further. A counter to the Harper’s letter published in The Objective introduces Thomas Chatterton Williams as “a Black writer who believes ‘that racism at once persists and is also capable of being transcended — especially at the interpersonal level.’” The statement hangs there as if it’s obviously discrediting, on par with something like “Chuck Johnson, who says he ‘agrees… about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real.’”

I think Williams’s claim about racism is innocuous and Johnson’s Holocaust denial is not. Dispute Williams if you’d like, but I think it would be unreasonable to rule his statement so unacceptable that expressing it warrants social punishment. By contrast, I think it’s reasonable to treat Johnson with scorn. And I bet Bari Weiss would agree.

But no matter your opinion on how society should treat these speech acts, that’s what’s under discussion: not “is free speech good?” but “should X be a socially acceptable expression?”

And to give you an idea how narrow this debate really is, consider the case of David Shor, fired from data consultancy Civis Analytics in May 2020 after tweeting out a 2017 paper from a top political science journal that found that violent demonstrations tend to decrease the Democratic share of the vote while non-violent protests increase it. Critics interpreted Shor’s tweet as conflating Black Lives Matter protestors with rioters, and his firing has already become a go-to case for free speech defenders. It’s referenced in the Harper’s letter. But it’s also referenced in the Objective counter-letter: “If Shor was fired simply for posting an academic article, that is indefensible.”

The Hard Part

Discussing this topic with The Ethics of Microaggression author Regina Rini, Oliver Traldi argues that the burden should be “on the people who would expand the exceptions to show that they do not infringe dangerously on the general principle.” But social justice activists are doing that, and free speech defenders aren’t responding.

Activists have identified various expressions as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or otherwise bigoted and argue that treating those expressions as beyond the pale — like we treat overt racial slurs and Holocaust denial — would improve society by making historically marginalized people closer to equal. One could disagree with this line of argument, of course, but it’s been pretty successful, influencing various institutions and persuading many young people.

Defending free speech in the abstract doesn’t really counter it, because free speech isn’t really being attacked. Most supporters of what critics call “cancel culture” don’t want the government jailing people over speech. And they agree David Shor shouldn’t have been fired. Countering their excesses requires persuasively arguing that something they identify as bad speech isn’t actually bad, or at least isn’t bad enough that it should be treated as socially unacceptable. But that varies by case, and it’s harder than arguing that free speech is good.

And this is one of those arguments that’s especially undermined by hypocrisy. When Jordan Peterson or Quillette editor Claire Lehmann threaten litigation against people who criticize them; when Bret Stephens sees a joke at his expense on Twitter and emails the jokester’s boss; when Bari Weiss publicly supports deplatforming critics of Israel; when James Lindsay repeatedly misrepresents people and argues in bad faith; when Thomas Chatterton Williams broadcasts that he kicked someone out of his house for speaking ill of Weiss, it communicates that their free speech arguments are not principles, but rhetorical conveniences.

Because the hard part isn’t telling other people to be more open to ideas they don’t like. It’s drawing the lines of socially acceptable expression and determining appropriate responses to transgressing those norms. It’s accepting that an open discourse means you’ll encounter speech that bothers you, including negative statements about you and your friends, plus protests, boycotts, and disassociations of which you disapprove. It’s not enough to talk the talk, you have to walk the walk. Model the behavior. Show that it’s doable. Some free speech defenders do, but many do not.

If the standard you advocate is, in practice, that one can say mean things about trans people but can’t say mean things about Bari Weiss, then you might be undermining the value of free speech more than helping it.