The woke right is real — and it might be worse than the woke left

There was a time, not long ago, when freedom of speech was the hill the American right said it would die on. President Trump ran for office painting himself as the antidote to censorship, the man who would rescue the country from the claws of political correctness, and restore open debate in a climate where saying the wrong thing could cost you everything.

To millions of Americans, especially those exhausted by speech codes, campus dogma and corporate HR tyranny, he seemed like a necessary correction.  

Fast forward to today, and that very administration is now actively attempting to deport international students for protesting against Israel’s war in Gaza. Hundreds of millions in federal funding are being threatened and withheld from Ivy League universities. 

Why? Because young people, many of them Jewish themselves, dared to oppose a war Trump supports. The justification for this is wrapped in the language of “fighting antisemitism” — a noble-sounding cause, if you don’t look too closely. But once you do, the contradictions are impossible to ignore. Even mainstream Jewish organizations have expressed alarm at the sweeping, punitive measures being used to silence students. Groups that have spent years fighting real antisemitism are now warning that what Trump is calling antisemitism is, in many cases, just protest. Dissent. The very thing he once claimed to defend.  

There’s a kind of grotesque poetry in that. The same rhetorical contortions once used by the woke left — semantic shape-shifting, moral panic, accusations that shut down argument rather than invite it — are now being used wholesale by Trump’s own administration. 

The champion of free speech has become a champion of selective speech, the kind that flatters the regime and shames the rest into silence. I ask readers to imagine if Joe Biden had attempted any of this — if his administration had moved to deport pro-Israel student activists, threatened Harvard over demonstrations, or equated protest signs with hate speech. Right-wing media would have had a collective stroke. They’d be setting up tripods outside every courthouse, shrieking about Marxism, totalitarianism and the end of the First Amendment. 

But because it’s Trump, and because the narrative suits the agenda, the outrage evaporates. What would’ve been tyranny last year is now framed as “decisive leadership.” The hypocrisy is blinding. And yet much of the right, especially its media class, continues to cheer it on, not in spite of the absurdity, but because of it.

This is not about being pro-Israel or anti-Israel. Reasonable people can — and do — disagree about the war in Gaza. What matters is that the debate be allowed to happen at all. That students, academics, and yes, even foreign nationals, retain the right to challenge the decisions of powerful governments without being branded as threats and hunted down by immigration agents.

But that’s not the climate we’re in. In place of debate, we now have decrees. In place of arguments, we have accusations. Dissent isn’t answered; it’s punished. And the people who once made their name defending free thought are, at best, silent. At worst, complicit.  

It didn’t have to be this way. There was a moment, a brief one, when the intellectual right seemed genuinely interested in rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure of Western liberalism — truth-seeking, open debate, the courage to question. But those instincts have been swallowed by tribalism. By the belief that anything goes, as long as it’s your side doing the silencing. 

The irony is that some of the very same voices who decried cancel culture are now doing the cancelling. Some of the same pundits who once warned about “snowflakes” are now melting down over protest chants. Some of the same outlets that claimed universities were too fragile for dissent now support stripping those universities of their funding for tolerating the wrong kind of speech.

Freedom of speech was never supposed to be a partisan value. And the method for defeating bad ideas was never intimidation. It was argument. Better speech and better ideas. Sharper reasoning. Public accountability. That’s how people once confronted actual ideological threats — communism, fascism, theocracy. We didn’t gag people. We out-argued them. And when we failed to do that, history was not kind.

Trump’s administration doesn’t appear to grasp this. Or worse, it does and simply doesn’t care. What matters now is control. The narrative must be pure, the critics purged, and the lines of debate drawn so tightly that the only permitted voices are those who praise the master.  

John Mac Ghlionn is a writer and researcher who explores culture, society and the impact of technology on daily life.