There is a concerted effort underway lately by so-called dissident or “anti-woke” liberals to police speech on the right, declaring certain opinions or ideas taboo, unworthy of a platform, beyond the pale of acceptable discourse.
Although couched in the language of morality and principles, this effort isn’t really about fending off rising right-wing racism and antisemitism, much less saving western civilization. It’s about power.
Over the past decade, the media landscape has been destroyed. Through its own corruption and duplicity, the corporate press has lost credibility and influence — to the tremendous benefit of conservative voices and outlets. But this has left a vacuum, and anti-woke liberals like Bari Weiss and Douglas Murray, whose politics and policy preferences mirror the mainstream Democratic Party from 30 years ago, are trying to position themselves as arbiters of acceptable discourse on the right.
Like the center-left of the 1990s, Weiss and Murray are admittedly far more reasonable than today’s radical left on issues like free speech, which Weiss’s publication, The Free Press, has made a cornerstone of its brand, so far to great success. But Weiss and Murray, just like mainstream Democrats of the ‘90s, have two big things in common with the radical left of today.
First, they’re liberals, and modern liberalism, then and now, has no moral or religious core, and hence no limiting principle for what we should or shouldn’t tolerate. If a consensus worldview were to emerge around what Weiss and The Free Press are advocating for, maybe it would reset the clock by a decade. But without some rooted vision of the good, anchored in traditional morality, we’ll just end up right where we are now, with an establishment left pushing for things like transgender ideology in the classroom and abortion-on-demand.
On this front, the likes of Weiss and Murray can offer little in the way of civilizational grounding, despite their habitual invocations of it, because what’s going to save the West is a return to the foundations of western civilization itself, which is to say the Christian faith, and not mere exhortations towards it. Weiss and Murray are either unaware of this fact or unwilling to accept its implications. (More on that later.)
The second thing they have in common with mainstream Democrats of the ‘90s is that they’re determined to exclude actual conservatives from the conversation by painting them as extremists and radicals, the better to position themselves as the pragmatic and reasonable ones whose gatekeeping is necessary “hygiene” for the right.
That’s the term Murray used in a recent podcast with Weiss bemoaning the difficulty of imposing taboos on the right while also denouncing the taboos imposed by the left. “Over the past decade, maybe longer, the left was in the business of making everything taboo,” said Weiss. “Even biological reality became taboo. And the reaction the cultural right is having … is, no no, you guys said everything is taboo, we’re making nothing taboo.”
What nonsense. No serious person on the right is saying that nothing should be taboo. It’s not a question of whether or not to have taboos but which ones to have and, importantly, who gets to decide what they are. Weiss and Murray clearly think it should be “reasonable” liberals like them, not conservatives who espouse traditional morality, whom Weiss tries to label “far right.”
This kind of straw man argument has become a habit for Weiss. Back in February, she gave a speech that repeatedly inveighed against the supposed racism and fascism percolating through the “far right,” which is her euphemism for the traditional or mainstream right. Tellingly, she gave no concrete examples, relying instead on vague generalities. “While the left, long sympathetic with Stalin, today sympathizes with modern-day Nazis in the form of Hamas — this new right eulogizes the original ones,” she wrote. “And in rehabilitating Hitler they are not merely demonizing Jews, but demonizing America, Britain, and the millions who fought and died to preserve our freedoms.”
Does Weiss name a single influential media figure on the right who eulogizes the Nazis? No, she doesn’t — because she can’t. No such media figures exist on the right, and everyone knows it.
Yet having set up this straw man, Weiss declares that the solution is strict gatekeeping, that “if a political movement does not police its ranks, does not draw lines, if it neglects to protect its borders, if it does not defend its sacred values, it cannot long endure.” In making this argument, Weiss is implicitly making a case that she and her publication should be the ones to police the ranks of the ascendant political and cultural right.
This is more or less exactly what Murray said to Weiss on her podcast: “The fact that people have been kept out of the conversation who should have been in the conversation does not mean that absolutely everybody should be given the platform to spread untrue things.”
It was a sentiment he also expressed in a recent Joe Rogan podcast debating Dave Smith about the Israel-Hamas war. Supposed experts like himself, whose views are informed and respectable, who know what they’re talking about because they’ve personally been to Israel, should decide who gets platformed and who doesn’t. At one point, Murray sneered at Smith for not having traveled to Israel himself, as if that’s a prerequisite for voicing an opinion about the war. Never mind that in that same podcast, Murray himself asserted some historical falsehoods about Hitler and antisemitism in 1930s Germany. So much for spreading “untrue things.”
Why are these liberals obsessed with policing the right? The simple answer is that they’re politically homeless. They’re not conservative or Republican or even center-right. They don’t belong to the right at all but to the left. Having been kicked out of Democrat power structures for being anti-woke liberals, they have glommed onto the right by claiming common cause against the woke left. They’re unassimilated political immigrants to the right; their only interest is in altering the right’s political culture rather than conforming themselves to it.
The specific way they want to alter the right’s political culture is by insisting on a slightly watered-down leftism disguised as process neutralism, the purpose of which is to shut down all criticism from the right of their liberal morality and neocon foreign policy.
But process neutralism is a fiction. It eventually leads, as anyone can see at this point, to a steady erosion of the morality and principles that undergird western civilization. Weiss and Murray are fond of invoking things like rule of law, inalienable rights, the doctrine of imago Dei, and so on. Weiss calls them civilizational and foundational values, and so they are.
But neither Weiss nor Murray are in any position to defend these civilizational values because they don’t really believe in them — or they believe in them only insofar as they themselves have narrowly defined them. They think they should be the ones who determine what’s taboo and what isn’t, that they should define the norms and values of western civilization — and also decide just how far we can stray from them.
Here’s what I mean. In a speech to the Federalist Society in late 2023 about the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Weiss waxed poetic about the West, our shared values, and the threats to our civilization. She was there to make common cause with conservatives against the pro-Hamas barbarians demonstrating on college campuses. In an aside, she jokingly said, “In recognizing allies, I’ll be an example. I am a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice. I know there are some in this room who do not believe my marriage should have been legal. And that’s okay, because we are all Americans who want lower taxes.”
It was a laugh line in an otherwise serious speech, but it was telling, not least because of what immediately followed it: a statement about who Weiss considered her true allies to be. “My allies are people who believe that America is good. That the West is good. That human beings — not cultures — are created equal and that saying so is essential to knowing what we are fighting for,” she said. “America and our values are worth fighting for — and that is the priority of the day.”
This is the illusory process neutralism Weiss thinks will save us. Nothing but empty platitudes without form or substance. She dismisses with a laugh issues like gay marriage and abortion, then invokes “America and our values,” as if we should all agree with her definition of what those American values are.
What about the conservatives who believe that American values and the West are good because we are still — at least for now — Christian? That among our values is the belief that marriage can only exist between one man and one woman, and that our laws and customs should reflect that? Or that every human life, including the unborn, deserve protection under the law? Or what about the very mainstream view among conservatives that public policy should favor heterosexual unions over homosexual ones? Given Weiss’s own very public “marriage” to a woman, it’s reasonable to conclude that for Weiss, these conservative beliefs about marriage are or should be taboo, lumped in with all the Nazi apologists she sees around every corner on the right.
Put another way, how far should we be allowed to trample on the moral and civic norms of western civilization without endangering it? For Weiss, the answer is simple: exactly as far as she herself has done, and no further.
But it doesn’t work like that. Surely Weiss is smart enough to see the unbroken line that runs from the sexual revolution of the 1960s, to the breakdown of marriage and the family in the decades following, to Obergefell and the immediate persecution of dissenters like Jack Philips, to the transgender insanity that she now decries as a bridge too far.
Weiss and Murray and all the other anti-woke liberals claim to want to save western civilization from the barbarians on both the right and the left that would destroy it. But in fact they have no plan to save the West because they refuse to be honest about what western civilization is, what holds it together, and why it’s breaking apart. They want to wind the clock back to 1995 and are unwilling to consider that that won’t be enough, that by then the damage had been done, and that we might need to wind the clock back to 1925, or even earlier.
The same intellectual bankruptcy that brought down our institutional gatekeepers is plain to see in charlatans like Weiss and Murray. They pretend to be defending civilizational norms, when in fact they have little use for them personally — and no plan to safeguard them with their phony process neutralism.
Theirs is the arrogance of our erstwhile censors on the left, who believe they can declare what is and is not taboo, and silence all those who disagree. It’s time for the right to see their little game for what it is and realize that they’re not on our side after all.
