Quoted in Morgenbladet + some thoughts on fixing our free speech confusion

A week or two ago I talked with Martin Gedde-Dahl, whose piece on the ideological foundations of Trumpism is out in the Norwegian weekly Morgenbladet. It’s paywalled and anyway would have to be translated for my non-Norwegian followers, but here’s a key passage about the foundational speech delivered by libertarian theorist and right-wing ideologue Murray Rothbard at a meeting of the John Randolph Club in 1992 (the translation here is mine):

Those gathered rose from their seats while he spoke, according to the writer John Ganz, who depicts the scene in his book When the Clock Broke (2024). For years people had said that it was not possible to turn the clock back, Rothbard said on that January day in 1992. But now they knew that was wrong. The clock of the Soviet Union was “broken forever.” To cheers and tears of joy, he declared that it was social democracy, liberalism and the entire American welfare state’s turn. The task was nothing less than to “undo the entire twentieth century.”

That, says Evan McLaren, is the Rosetta Stone we need. The ideological glue in Trumpism’s confusing web is a fundamental agreement that the clock must be broken.

I don’t know if Gedde-Dahl would have cited Ganz’s book if I hadn’t mentioned it to him, but I’m pleased he’s helping bring it to the attention of Norwegian readers. I don’t yet fully understand Norway’s media landscape, but Morgenbladet did a lot to earn my respect by not hesitating to call the situation in the United States “the coup against the State” on its front page a few weeks ago.

A spade named

I appreciate that decades-old ideological tomes, screeds, rants, and editorials are not everyone’s idea of pleasure reading, but it’s hard to not want to strap everyone down, A Clockwork Orange-style, and force them to study some of the material cited in Gedde-Dahl’s article. There is very little guesswork required when it comes to the origins and aims of Trump’s movement and administration, especially now that we are watching it unfold in real time. As a younger man I was utterly obsessed by the work of Rothbard, and of the other figures who did the most to anticipate and call forth the movement that eventually came to be led by a flabby reality TV personality. There was obviously something very broken and insecure about me, otherwise I would have devoted myself to healthier interests. But unfortunately there was also something very prescient about my focus on precisely these sources of thought.

I have to pause here and clarify. Any discussion of my past radicalization and deep involvement in modern-day fascism and Nazism has to begin and end with what is wrong and malignant about me. There is no born-again narrative here. One aspect of Ganz’s book that I very much appreciated was his portrait of David Duke as a man with debilitating character flaws over which he is simply unable to gain control. Duke can’t get ahold of his own racism, yes, but also of his own creepy narcissism, desperate womanizing, and strange need for attention. When you see weird little right-wing guys doubling down again and again on debunked talking points, half-baked ideological narratives, and toxic political projects (when they’re not pursuing outright terror and violence) as if it is some sort of pathology, it’s because with them it absolutely is. But it’s not as if everything else about them is hunky dory and they just happen to be driven towards fascist activity. As I saw someone remark recently on Bluesky, personality precedes ideology. If you’re involved in fascism, there’s something pathologically wrong with you as a person. Maybe a fascist can find it in him to mend or manage what’s broken about him as a person, but much more often he cannot. And so the Dukes, Spencers, Fuenteses, Vances, Posobiecs, Millers, and Trumps of the world will continue to veer into inhumanity regardless of the personal or external damage and misery.

As for me, in the end I am not “better” than David Duke—or at least, there but for the grace of God go I. I just happen to be in that thin Venn diagram space containing people who were messed up enough to be attracted to fascism, but also sensible enough to eventually snap out of it. Again, that mostly meant figuring out that I had character flaws I had allowed to take over—a need for attention even if that attention was negative; a need to defend the indefensible and be a focus of culture war chaos; a need to feel and signal that I was smarter than the world. I trace all of these needs back to personal fears and feelings of insecurity that inclined me to attack humanity rather than trust and encourage it. But the work I have to do on myself isn’t finished now that I’ve cut ties with fascism and made some realizations. I’m not a fundamentally different person, I’ve just managed to mature and gain some measure of perspective on my own experiences. I’m not afraid of the unknown and chaotic within myself the way I was as a younger man and I’m no longer at odds with society, but I’m still probably a bit of an attention-seeker in some not great ways, and maybe I continue to be too argumentative and iconoclastic … the point here is that taking care of myself is a process, not a momentary thing. And also that my capacity to care for myself in this way is a gift, as Duke’s lack of the same is a curse. What separates us has a quality of fate.

I’ve made this long-winded clarification about my personal flaws for its own sake, but also so that I can set my flaws aside for a moment and discuss external factors that facilitated my turn towards fascism. The important issue here, I think, has to do with the way liberal societies think about fairness and dialogue. A lot of people who should know better do weird, confused things based on a botched belief in hearing “both sides” of an issue or debate. The program of the Right relies on manipulating and exploiting this belief, and many respectable centrists and liberals make themselves easy marks.

Listen, dialogue is obviously vital in any healthy, stable society. But there are prerequisites to dialogue that must be in place in order for it to work and produce something of value. Dialogue is not magical. Dialogue cannot solve the issue of how to deal with people whose ultimate aim is to undermine and end dialogue. This sounds like it might be the point of a lot of stuff Karl Popper wrote, but I’ve never read Popper, so I just have to pound this out bluntly: There is no dialogue with racists that can address racism. There is no dialogue with fascists that can address fascism. There is no dialogue with Nazis that can address Nazism. There is no dialogue with anti-Semites that can address anti-Semitism.

“But Evan, what about free speech?” This is the retort of people who confuse what “free speech” means. I think one of the most urgent tasks for serious, aware people that can make a tangible difference in this struggle is to doggedly insist on grounding discussions of free speech and being absolutely clear what the term means. Here I am going to pare down Ken White’s important treatment of this issue and say that there are two distinct concepts in play with the term “free speech,” and that an enormous amount of mischief and damage occurs when people, intentionally or not, confuse and elide them. Quoting White:

The first is fairly obvious. Free speech rights are rights conferred by law — in America, by the First Amendment, state constitutions, federal laws like Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, state laws like Leonard’s Law in California, and the bodies of common law interpreting those authorities. Even mundane things like contract law can govern free speech rights, like when a contract specifies what process a private employer must use to discipline an employee.

The key point about Free Speech Rights — “FSR,” let’s call them — is that at least in America, both the rights and the process by which the rights are identified and their boundaries determined are well-known and knowable. Whether it should be protected speech to burn your draft card is debatable; what the Supreme Court has said about that is not. (Answer: No.)

…

The next category is “Free Speech Culture,” or “FSC,” sometimes called “free speech values” or “free speech principles.” An appeal to FSC is based on history, philosophy, and political science. It presumes that it’s a social good to have wide-ranging, robust, uninhibited debate on important issues, though it might reach that conclusion by different roads. Some believe that a “marketplace of ideas” inevitably produces the conclusions best for society, some believe that all speech has inherent value, and some (like me) believe that as a matter of humility and consciousness of our limits we should be should be careful deciding that we are so clearly right that contrary ideas shouldn’t be heard. Ultimately FSC is utilitarian — we use it to debate how we ought to act collectively for the healthiest society and the optimal pursuit of knowledge.

Free speech rights, according to my understanding at least, are based on the idea that the government should not be in the business of limiting expression (outside of exceptions like true threats, incitement to violence, etc.). The State just isn’t good at wading out into debates to pick winners and silence losers, so we don’t assign or allow it this responsibility.

The critical takeaway here is: that is all free speech rights mean. Nothing more. If the government (or, say, a contractual limitation on one’s freedom of expression) isn’t involved, then there is no free speech rights issue.

It’s not that you can’t believe in both free speech rights and the idea that free speech culture, i.e., the idea that all speech, even from Nazis, has value. I don’t believe that, and neither does White, but it’s not an automatically contradictory set of views to hold. The problem arises when people forget or ignore the distinction and instead blend the two ideas together. That is when you get people arguing that failure to give Nazis, racists, and anti-Semites a platform is somehow a violation of their right to free speech. It. is. not.

I’ve already pretty much presented my notion of free speech culture, but I’ll give it some more context. Currently over here in Norway the most visible and successful apologist for fascism and right-wing extremism is a figure named Danby Choi. Choi operates an outlet called Subjekt (to which I decline to link) that functions as a laundering machine for vile right-wing ideas and behavior. For example, I felt obliged to clarify that a Nazi salute is actually a Nazi salute after one of Choi’s frequent contributors published a wholesale nothing-to-see denial regarding Musk’s sieg heil.

Choi is one of those figures who gives fascist apologetics a bespoke, tweedy, chin-rubbing aesthetic, and Norwegian media loves it. He is a regular guest and invited contributor in all manner of print and digital media. (I mean, I don’t want to be the ugly American here, but whoever invited Choi on this entertainment reality TV program is emblematic of Norwegian producers and program leaders who are probably dim-witted to begin with and allow the claustrophobia of their cultural puddle-environment to warp their judgment.)

Knut Jørgen Vie, a philosophy post-doc at the University of Oslo, upset Choi the other week with a piece asking whether Choi’s outlet had hit rock bottom in terms of the terrible right-wing crap it was willing to excuse. This declined into a lengthy back-and-forth among several pundits and media folk, centered on what Curtis Yarvin really meant when he condemned Anders Behring Breivik’s attack on practical but not moral grounds, crediting Breivik for attacking “communists.” I don’t know Vie personally, but we have some mutual friends who tried to interest me in the debate.

I utterly lack the energy. Of course Vie was entirely right in his critique, and Choi and company were typically disingenuous and wrong. I’m not saying there’s no point in calling out and refuting right-wing lies—quite the opposite. But rushing to debunk every piece of right-wing agitprop is a hopeless waste of energy. Fascists do not deserve respectful, considered reply—they deserve the cold shoulder, the closed door, and if they threaten to achieve their political aims, their just desserts. More than refuting fascists point-by-point, our task as anti-fascists is to force society to reckon with its free speech rights/free speech culture confusion. When journalists and podcasters prop up Choi and garnish his image of seriousness and respectability, they are committing a very serious form of malpractice and facilitating society’s movement towards the abyss we now see opening in the United States. They should be ruthlessly shamed and humiliated for doing so until they reform their behavior.