Yes, Free Speech Depends on A Resilient Culture
A response to Ken White’s polemic against “free speech culture.”
On October 1, 1917, the Trustees of Columbia University dismissed two professors who had written and spoken out against U.S. involvement in World War I — violating a Columbia policy requiring “unqualified loyalty to the Government of the United States” by staff, students, and faculty. A faculty committee concluded that the professors had engaged in “public agitation against the conduct of the war,” disseminating doctrines “tending to encourage disloyalty,” causing “grave injury” to Columbia’s reputation.
The celebrated historian Charles Beard — who was himself investigated and later cleared after being accused of condoning disparaging comments about the U.S. flag — resigned in protest against the dismissal of his colleagues, describing an atmosphere dominated by men who “are reactionary and visionless in politics, narrow and medieval in religion.”
Even the New York Times praised Columbia for cracking down on doctrines “dangerous to the community and to the nation,” insisting that “academic freedom has two sides,” and that “freedom to teach is correlative to the freedom to dispense with poisonous teaching.” It lauded Columbia’s refusal to indulge Beard’s protest and decision to stand firm against “the teachers of false doctrines sheltering themselves behind the shibboleth of academic freedom.”
Did any of this erode free speech? Not according to the logic of Ken White (a.k.a. Popehat) — a prominent First Amendment lawyer — who published a polemic against the notion of “free speech culture,” insisting that free speech essentially means protection against state censorship. Apply White’s formulaic conception to Columbia’s purge, and there’s nothing to see.
Columbia was a private university with broad legal freedom to choose whom it employs and what norms it enforces. The New York Times was equally free to applaud the crackdown. If the standard is simply “no one was censored by a government actor,” then there is no scandal here — only private association and private editorial judgment.
But if your standard is the values that undergird an open society — if you believe universities and a free press should cultivate habits of open inquiry and pluralism rather than enforce political loyalty — then the Columbia episode looks like an attack on the very culture that sustains those principles.
Getting to the heart of which conception of free speech best sustains a liberal democracy at a time of intensive polarization and illiberal crackdowns matters enormously. White doesn’t simply reject the concept of a free speech culture as philosophically incoherent. He also claims it is easily exploited by bad-faith actors and even implicated in the rise of government censorship under the Trump administration.
He identifies some real pathologies, but he draws the wrong conclusion: he responds to hypocrisy and vagueness by trying to discredit the underlying ideal. That move is not only historically myopic but strategically self-defeating.
Let’s take his argument seriously, in good faith. And then let’s test it against principle, logic, and history.
What White Gets Right
White is right about at least three things.
First, free speech attracts bad-faith actors and grifters. Since the election of Donald Trump, free speech grifting on the political right has surged, as complaints about censorship and cancel culture have given way to gleeful mobilization of online mobs to punish dissent. White’s point that free speech hypocrisy has become rampant is depressingly obvious to anyone with a social media account.
Second, he is right that the line between criticism and “cancellation” blurs more readily in private life than the line between private pressure and the state’s coercive machinery. Government censorship is categorically different: it threatens liberty by force and is constrained by constitutional rights that prescribe relatively bright lines.
Third, he is right that we should guard against civic nonsense like “criticism is censorship.” White argues that “free speech culture” talk encourages precisely that confusion, fostering a “false equivalence” between state punishment and social sanction.
But none of this is decisive. Each point cuts both ways. Hypocrisy is real, but so is the basic insight that free speech depends not only on law but on norms. The line between criticism and cancellation is fuzzy, but fuzzy boundaries do not erase meaningful distinctions. And confusion about “censorship” may erode hard-won constitutional protections, but one of the best remedies is to teach the difference — without pretending that social coercion is morally trivial or irrelevant to how those constitutional norms took shape in the first place.
Which brings us to White’s two main arguments: the “First Speaker problem” and the claim that “free speech culture” favors the powerful over the powerless.
The “First Speaker” Problem Is Largely A Rhetorical Ploy
White’s central thought experiment imagines a censorious speaker coming to campus and students responding with protests and disruption. He then suggests that “free speech culture” asks moral questions only of the students, not of the censorious speaker.
He calls this the “First Speaker problem.” It is less a problem than a framing trick.
If a speaker arrives to argue that “gender ideology” should be banned from curricula, that faculty should be policed for “anti-American” content, or that immigrants should be deported for criticizing the government, nothing prevents students from vigorously opposing those views before, during, and after the event — so long as they do not physically or procedurally prevent the speaker from speaking or the audience from listening. That is the heckler’s veto, and opposing it is not the same as endorsing the speaker.
Indeed, the reason speakers become controversial is often that their viewpoints have already been hotly debated and criticized long before any invitation was issued. White pretends that the “first speaker” floats into an apolitical vacuum and is then crowned a hero simply because they were scheduled first.
More importantly, White conflates two separate ideas: opposing a heckler’s veto and treating the invited speaker as a moral hero.
A commitment to a robust culture of free speech entails the first. It does not entail the second. White’s repeated insinuation that “free speech culture” treats the first speaker as “the hero” and dissenters as “villains” describes a caricature, not a principle.
A culture of free speech does not grant anyone the right to be loved, amplified, platformed, or shielded from scorn. It does not guarantee an op-ed in the New York Times or a massive social media following. The point is narrower and sturdier: in institutions devoted to inquiry — universities above all — the default response to disagreeable ideas should be argument and critique, not purges and punishments. Students should be habituated to respond to ideas they dislike with arguments that articulate the substance of their disagreement, not incentivized to build echo chambers of conformity. They need not be polite or pull rhetorical punches; they can peacefully protest and use epithets if they so wish.
In other words, you can condemn the speaker’s views and condemn efforts to prevent the event from taking place. You can reject the censor’s worldview while also rejecting censorious tactics by the censor’s opponents. Anyone who works in the field of free speech recognizes this instantly. I cannot count the number of times I have argued with people who believe that “misinformation,” “hate speech,” or other poorly defined categories should be prohibited. Yet, like most other civil-libertarian proponents of free speech, my response is not to demand that people who argue for censorship be cancelled.
Like Nadine Strossen, Greg Lukianoff, Suzanne Nossell, Salman Rushdie, Floyd Abrams, and other principled free speech defenders, I respond — to the best of my ability — with arguments, evidence, and counter-mobilization. The goal is not to canonize the censor. The goal is to defeat bad ideas without turning institutions into engines of ideological punishment. That is not “preferring the first speaker” — it is refusing to imitate the censor.
What Is Cancel Culture?
White is right that “cancel culture” is often vaguely defined. But that calls for better definitions, not for dismissing the phenomenon as incoherent.
Jonathan Rauch has done what White largely declines to do: he offers a practical checklist that distinguishes criticism from cancellation. His “Cancel Culture Checklist” asks whether the response is punitive — aimed at livelihood and social exclusion with denunciations to employers and professional groups; whether it attempts to blacklist; and whether the campaign seeks to isolate or intimidate rather than persuade. Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott have written an entire book full of data and compelling examples that document and discuss cancel culture.
I have also tried my hand at defining this phenomenon in Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media:
“Determining whether private action undermines or is an exercise of the culture of free speech can be difficult. After all, free speech does not grant anyone the right to have an op-ed published in the New York Times or a huge following on social media. Still there is a fundamental difference between reacting to ideas one loathes with scorn or criticism and demanding that specific viewpoints be purged and their authors and enablers punished with loss of livelihood or disciplinary sanctions…It is particularly problematic when media institutions, social media platforms, and universities — who cannot function without free speech — come to internalize the idea that provocative opinions are ‘dangerous,’ ‘unsafe,’ or even ‘harmful’ to their own staff, students, readers, and users.”
You may disagree with any of these definitions and authors, but lumping them together with right-wing grifters and enablers of government censorship would be intellectually dishonest.
White argues that giving a platform to someone like Amy Wax to discuss her cancellation — after she was disciplined by her university for saying discriminatory things about Asian Americans — shows that the “ethos” of “free speech culture” is broken. But providing someone a platform to speak does not imply agreement. A student group inviting a communist may not be apologists for the dictatorship of the proletariat; they may simply be curious about why someone would cling to political beliefs discredited by history.
Moreover, using Amy Wax as his example makes White’s case easy by narrowing the field to edge cases with high moral salience. But the vast majority of cancellations do not target bigots or literal Nazis. They can target even mundane views, such as opposing race-based university admissions. And in recent years, many of the most intense cancellation campaigns have centered on conflicts — like Israel and Gaza — where moral certainty is widespread but moral clarity is scarce.
Unlike White’s selective examples, FIRE’s “Students Under Fire” report identified over 1,000 efforts by administrators and student governments to punish student speech from 2020 to 2024. In 637 cases — 63 percent — students or student groups received at least one administrative punishment over the five-year period.
The most frequently targeted groups span the political divide: Students for Justice in Palestine, Turning Point USA, and College Republicans. And the censorious impulse has shifted. For the first time since FIRE began its annual College Free Speech Rankings, its 2026 edition found that the percentage of students willing to allow controversial liberal speakers dropped at a greater rate than for conservative ones, suggesting that right-wing cancel culture has grown on college campuses.
This data does not tell a story about protecting powerful “first speakers.” It reveals how quickly institutions reach for coercive tools against students across ideologies — and how those who wield the power to cancel today can find themselves on the receiving end tomorrow.
“Free Speech Culture” Protects The Vulnerable, Not Just The Powerful
White claims that “free speech culture” has “a natural tendency” to favor powerful people with big platforms over obscure people without them. He observes, fairly, that we notice prominent victims more than invisible ones.
But the conclusion does not follow. If anything, the moral logic runs the other way. The professors fired by Columbia in 1917 were neither powerful nor empowered by their dismissal.
The more economically and institutionally vulnerable you are, the more dangerous punitive social sanctions become. That is why right-wing cancellation campaigns after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump targeted not public figures but ordinary Americans — Home Depot employees, firefighters, chefs, and school counselors. And it is why I warned — after Charlie Kirk’s assassination — that “an ideological online inquisition seeking to punish people for social media comments” was producing “firings and blacklists” aimed at ordinary people, even as some of the same actors had built their brand on opposition to cancel culture.
Cancellation falls hardest on those with the least leverage: those who cannot weather reputational storms, hire lawyers, mobilize peers, wait out a news cycle, or start a successful podcast.
The deeper historical point is even more uncomfortable for White’s framing. The idea that cultural intolerance can prove more “formidable than many kinds of political oppression” was not a scheme invented by right-wing influencers to cash in on ragebaiting. Its most influential articulation comes from John Stuart Mill, who warned that Victorian norms created a “social tyranny” that could be worse than legal penalties.
Mill’s insight was not a defense of the powerful. It was a warning about how majorities— especially righteous majorities — use informal coercion to enforce conformity.
From Athens to Mill to Laski to Holmes: The Unbroken Thread White Ignores
But Mill did not invent the idea that a strong free speech culture undergirds free societies either. He refined it—drawing on a much older lineage reaching back to ancient Athens and what the Greeks called parrhēsia: frank, fearless speech as a civic practice, extolled in the Athenian statesman Pericles’ famous funeral oration around 431 BCE.
Mill’s close friend and ally, the nineteenth-century historian of Greece and radical MP George Grote, rehabilitated Athenian democracy as a model for liberal reform. Grote praised “the liberty of thought and action at Athens, not merely from excessive restraint of law, but also from practical intolerance between man and man, and tyranny of the majority over individual dissenters in taste and pursuit.” He contrasted this with modern societies where “the intolerance of the national opinion cuts down individual character.”
That is “free speech culture” in everything but name: the recognition that the social environment can either encourage intellectual courage or punish it into silence.
The nineteenth-century renaissance of Athenian parrhēsia would prove relevant to momentous developments in American First Amendment jurisprudence.
During World War I and the Red Scare, opponents of America’s involvement in the war were not only hounded out of universities such as Columbia. They were persecuted by the government under the Espionage Act. The legal protections of the First Amendment remained anemic as pacifists, radicals, and socialists were sentenced to years in prison for distributing anti-draft pamphlets. Yet Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous dissent in Abrams v. United States inspired later jurisprudence to move past restrictive readings of the First Amendment and protect speech even when the majority considers it objectionable.
That intellectual shift did not happen in a cultural vacuum. It happened amid precisely the kind of “cancel culture” pressures White wants to treat as morally uninteresting.
Holmes was influenced not only by abstract arguments but also by relationships—especially with younger intellectuals who lobbied him to reconsider his views. One of the most significant was British Jewish intellectual Harold Laski, then an instructor at Harvard. After pressure from faculty, administrators, and alumni to have him fired for his pro-union views, Laski ultimately left Harvard. Much of the outrage leveled at Laski was more than tinged with antisemitism. But Laski’s ordeal played a significant role in convincing Holmes that laws targeting “sedition” could just as easily scapegoat any opinion unpopular with intolerant majorities.
Here is where the Mill–Grote–Athens thread becomes more than a literary flourish.
Holmes reread Mill’s On Liberty at Laski’s suggestion. Mill’s theory of the culture of free speech helped reshape Holmes’ understanding of where to draw the constitutional lines of free speech.
“Free speech culture” was not a trendy excuse for censorship but the intellectual pathway by which a leading jurist—nudged by a younger radical who himself faced social and institutional backlash—helped lay the groundwork for modern First Amendment doctrine.
The lesson is blunt: the American constitutional story of free speech is inseparable from conflicts over private retaliation, professional sanction, and reputational ruin. White’s attempt to quarantine “culture” from “law” amounts to historical amnesia.
A Principled Bottom Line
Criticism of cancel culture is not a plea to coddle the powerful, nor a demand to canonize the “first speaker.” It is a plea for a consistent liberal ethic that rejects both state censorship of dissent and institutional purges in the name of safety, purity, or orthodoxy—especially in universities and cultural institutions that cannot function without open inquiry. These norms sit comfortably alongside full-throated protection for protest and criticism, coupled with a refusal to normalize tactics aimed at silencing and punishing rather than persuading.
Rather than a recipe for grift and bullshit, this ethic is the foundation of a resilient theory of free speech — informed by history, practical experience, and the feedback loop between culture and law.
From Athens’ parrhēsia, to Grote’s defense of dissent against majority tyranny, to Mill’s warning against “social tyranny,” to Holmes’ Mill-inspired turn toward a “free trade in ideas”—the throughline is simple:
Constitutional protections of free speech rest on broader civic commitments that are easier to lose than to rebuild. Once the civic commitment crumbles, the constitutional protections follow.
White is right to worry that bad actors will launder repression through free-speech lip service. But instead of sneering at the notion of “free speech culture,” we should insist— relentlessly — on the real thing.
Jacob Mchangama is the Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech and a research professor at Vanderbilt University. He is also the author of Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media and The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom (forthcoming with Jeff Kosseff).