How the far right has weaponised free speech
This article that first appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of Index on Censorship, Gen Z is revolting: Why the world’s youth will not be silenced, published on 18 December 2025
Within weeks of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, his vice-president JD Vance flew across the Atlantic to lecture European leaders about “free speech”. Yet within days of this, students were being taken off the streets by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) patrols and deported because they had been protesting about Gaza; foreign nationals who had criticised Trump on social media were denied entry to the USA; federal websites containing materials relating to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) issues or climate change were being taken down; universities were being defunded and faculty sacked for teaching courses and conducting research deemed to be “woke” and/or – ironically – for allowing antisemitic speech to be expressed on their campuses.
After the assassination of Charlie Kirk – posthumously sanctified – in September 2025, many public officials, including FBI agents, schoolteachers, academics and others deemed to be insufficiently reverential in their remarks about him were fired. Famously, the late-night chat show host Jimmy Kimmel was “cancelled” by Disney simply for expressing a dissenting view about Kirk’s secular beatification. (Disney reinstated the programme after a public outcry.) The VP, having seemingly forgotten his European lecture tour, encouraged US citizens to engage in the mass “doxing” of anyone who didn’t quite see eye-to-eye with Kirk.
In the UK, the political right also claims regularly that free speech is under threat from an overbearing state, policing speech on behalf of a “woke” elite keen to suppress the “common sense” and “legitimate concerns” of “the people”. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage even raised the parlous state of “free speech” in the UK at a US congressional hearing, citing the cases of Lucy Connolly [who had called for people to set fire to migrant hotels after the Southport murders] and Graham Linehan [who regularly posts content about his views on trans people]. Right-wing activist Tommy Robinson jumped on the bandwagon too, proclaiming that September’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally was about defending “free speech”.
Robinson has erroneously claimed that more people are arrested in the UK for offences relating to online comment than anywhere in the world. Neither Robinson nor Farage, though, have said a word about the proscription of Palestine Action in June 2025, and the arrest of more than 2000 people protesting this. And while Farage claims that Connolly’s incendiary tweet – “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care … if that makes me a racist, so be it” (one hotel was, in fact, torched) – should be treated as protected speech, he has himself testified in court on behalf of a prosecution against threatening social media posts directed at him. Meanwhile, Reform UK in power has itself shown little tolerance for a free press, with local councillors denying access to media outlets critical of the party’s actions.
I could go on and on. The ocean of hypocrisies swirling around the issue of “free speech” is vast and is growing. Such hypocrisy must be called out, of course. But there is a bigger story here. This story begins in the early 1980s, when US conservatives first began to weaponise “free speech”, part of a deliberate political strategy to re-establish the social and political hierarchies that had been rocked by the civil rights and second-wave feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Among their many achievements, these movements understood that the languages of racism and sexism were as responsible for the reproduction of racist and sexist social hierarchies as the everyday practices of racial discrimination and patriarchal subordination. The two, in fact, mutually reinforced one another. There was, thus, a concerted struggle to challenge, contest, overturn and overwrite racist and sexist representations circulating through culture and the media. This was accompanied by the insistence that such forms of representation be considered unacceptable. This was a necessary first step toward dismantling the hierarchies and barriers preventing racialised minorities and women from participating in public life on equal terms, and from entering the social and institutional spaces that they had traditionally been excluded from.
Universities were among the first institutions to recognise that certain forms of language and representation needed to be excised if people historically excluded from these institutions were to take up the opportunities that they offered. Many universities developed campus speech codes, prohibiting the use of racist or sexist language in order to create a safe and welcoming environment for all. Outside academe, many other workplaces and institutions followed suit from the 1980s.
At the same time, a new understanding of “free speech” emerged through the course of the 20th century, first in the USA and then among the other liberal democracies of the developed world (albeit slowly, and with local inflections). This was driven largely by First Amendment jurisprudence and decisions of the US Supreme Court from the 1920s onwards. This understanding of “free speech”, drawing largely on the arguments of John Stuart Mill, held that “speech” should be as unrestricted as possible. This, the argument goes, gives all ideas the opportunity to be freely exchanged within a “marketplace of ideas”, which can sift what is valuable and true from that which is worthless and false. The obvious parallel here is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, guiding real markets towards a price that represents a product’s “true” value.
No idea or form of speech should therefore be ruled out until it has been given a hearing within the marketplace of ideas. In fact, Mill went much further than that; he suggested that no idea should ever be ruled out, because even if thought to be false in the present, it may yet turn out to be true at a later time, when more is known about it. (Mill’s 19th century liberal faith in progress is clearly evident here.) So, “free speech” involves an insistence on what might be called “infinite and perpetual openness”.
This increasingly capacious understanding of “protected” or “free” speech created something of an opening for US conservatives pushing back against the egalitarian movements struggling for social justice in 1980s USA. The First Amendment could be used to argue that campus speech codes were unconstitutional – creating a space for the re-insertion of racist or sexist speech, even if the Fifteenth Amendment prevented the overt and explicit reintroduction of the discriminatory practices associated with them.
These were the first skirmishes in what we call today the culture wars. It marked the beginnings of a potent political strategy whereby “free speech” has been increasingly weaponised to deliver one principal aim: the rehabilitation of racism (and misogyny, homophobia and other inegalitarian ideologies) and its normalisation within mainstream political discourse.
Within this overall strategic aim, there are three interconnecting and mutually reinforcing objectives. The first is to ensure that racist tropes, images, motifs, ideas and beliefs are allowed to circulate as freely as possible within the channels of public discourse. “Free speech” is a very useful lever with which to prise open the gates of acceptable public discourse and thereby poison the well. The idea of infinite and perpetual openness means that no idea should ever be excluded, so racist and other inegalitarian discourses have as much right as any other discourse to be part of the marketplace of ideas. We then have to tolerate them and accept their presence – even if this results in the creation of a hostile environment for racialised minorities, women, LGBTQ+ and other vulnerable groups of people. This is the price we have to pay for “free speech”.
The second objective is to suggest, tacitly, that racism and anti-racism are politically and morally equivalent in value. Again, the way we understand “free speech” now is a highly effective tool for establishing this objective. In theory, the marketplace of ideas is a neutral space within which all ideas and beliefs jostle for acceptance on equal terms. In practice, of course, this is not the case. But this hasn’t prevented the idea that it is indeed a neutral space from establishing itself in the social and political imagination. And while racism has, in the words of Hannah Arendt, been subjected to “libraries of refutation,” its continued resurgence suggests that, within the terms of liberal free speech theory, it has not, in fact, been definitively discredited. This reveals more about the inadequacies and limitations of the concept of “free speech” than it does about racism; nevertheless, it is the case that, according to the marketplace of ideas model, racism must be treated as equivalent in value to anti-racism until proven otherwise.
Taken together, these two objectives have been very effective in achieving the strategic aim of the normalisation of racism. Recent academic research corroborates what we can all see happening to political discourse across the liberal democracies in the West. Once the sluice gates are opened, once the well has been poisoned, tropes, images, ideas and beliefs once confined to a far-right niche enter the political mainstream. Mainstream political parties have been drawn into aiding and abetting their normalisation, in turn amplifying these ideas and elevating their significance.
It is not surprising that so many “free speech” controversies involve race, nor that the political right only succeeded in effectively leveraging “free speech” for their own ends after the internet and social media removed some of the old gatekeepers that might have protected public discourse from being poisoned. The “democratisation” of discourse that social media offers closely approximates the marketplace of ideas model of “free speech”. But while this may have provided a useful condition of possibility for the strategy to be ramped up, it is clear that racism, homo- and transphobia, and misogyny are fertile grounds on which to build this strategy, because they tap into wider anxieties shared by more mainstream right-wing and even centre-left parties about racial, sexual and gender equality. This has more to do with the effective political mobilisation of emotions than with ideas, “truth” and reason; an ironic situation has emerged, wherein which the very things upon which our contemporary faith in “free speech” rests have been displaced by the things that this rationalist model of “free speech” was supposed to overcome – prejudice, anxiety, anger and fear.
It is no coincidence that alongside the weaponisation of “free speech”, the rhetorics of contemporary racism have decisively shifted away from (pseudo) “rational” arguments in favour of racism. These arguments have pivoted, instead, towards the mobilisation and manipulation of emotional responses through rhetorical repertoires that rely heavily on the use of euphemism, connotation and codes camouflaging the underlying racism. When racism operates as an evanescent, highly mobile and constantly mutating army of metaphors, symbols, images and fragments of beliefs and prejudices, it is no wonder that a conceptualisation of “free speech” grounded on “truth” and reason cannot be used to expose its fallacies. Liberals have duped themselves into believing that it could; the right, however, saw through this delusion and capitalised on it.
The third objective is to discredit anti-racism, feminism and other egalitarian movements, by casting them as totalitarian censors intent on policing language and eroding “free speech”. Anti-racist thinkers have long argued that it is racism that constructs the racial categories through which a racially hierarchical society is produced. This in turn creates the conditions of possibility for racist practices to take hold, which then reinforce racial categories in a vicious dialectical feedback loop. Racist “speech” is, therefore, not a by-product of a racist society rooted in human differences that “objectively” and naturally existed prior to their construction as differences; it is, rather, essential and central to the way racism works.
This means, however, that racist speech must be restricted, which is anathema to a society that insists on “free speech” as “infinite and perpetual openness”. It is therefore easy to turn this idea of “free speech” back onto anti-racist movements by characterising them as intolerant and anti-freedom – even though anti-racism and other egalitarian movements seek the realisation of freedoms that are precluded by inequality. By characterising these movements as a threat to “freedom”, they can be discredited without explicitly having to argue in favour of inequality – itself part of the euphemistic and evasive ways in which racism works today.
The term “woke” is a good example. Initially used by African-American communities in the mid-20th century, and then by the progressive left in the 2010s, in the hands of the right it has become an empty signifier; it can be made to mean anything precisely because it refers to no one thing in particular. The “woke” mob or “mind virus” or whatever you want to call it is a way of discrediting social justice and the concept of equality through assertion and insinuation, rather than through argument. If the right were to actually argue the case against social justice and equality, they would have to let the cat out of the bag and expose the underlying racist and inegalitarian rationale.
It is time to call out the right’s “free speech” charade and see it for what it is: a weapon that can be wielded against socially subordinated groups so that they can be put back in their place. The aim is the reconstitution of a hierarchical (that is, racist, sexist, homophobic etc.) social and political order, an order within which “freedom” is restored and restricted to those from whom it has been partially wrestled away. Hence the hypocrisies: free speech for me, but not for thee.
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