The Free Press Free Speech Con

Despite all the “free speech” advocates dominating online political discourse, it’s been nearly impossible to find a consensus understanding of the “free speech” they are proffering. The term itself implies something that is simultaneously obvious and illusory. P. E. Moskowitz’ book The Case Against Free Speech starts with a sort of obvious contradiction: free speech is a nonsense construct that has never, and will never, have substantial, context-free meaning, and also all people should have the right to say whatever they want. 

The question for Moskowitz is who has access to speech, what kind of speech is allowed, and for what purposes are people free to speak. In recent years, as the mantle of “free speech” shifted from the left to the right, the ACLU has come under fire from the right’s free speech martyrs for its progressive bent: are you just here to defend free speech, without partisanship? But Moskowitz shows that was never the ACLU’s agenda, it was here to defend communist labor organizers and their ability to speak truth to power, not just the baroque exercise of expressing opinions. But if we are trying to locate speech as a decontextualized, amorphous context, the concept may have little utility since we do not all have the same access to platforms, particularly when an average person cannot compete with the speech-capabilities of someone like Rupert Murdoch (particularly after Citizens United where money is the legal twin of speech).

The “heterodox” sphere, best characterized by Bari Weiss and her publication The Free Press, is almost entirely based on the notion that the left has become censorious enemies of free speech, with their pronouns and wokeness, and that people like Weiss need to lead us back to the complex world of liberal free speech codes and tepid sanity. This idea has motivated an entire sector of the media, from psychologist Jonathon Haidt to talk show host Bill Maher to the Intellectual Dark Web and podcasts like Block and Reported and the Fifth Column, all of which attempt to return centrist “common sense” to a world allegedly gone mad with ideological extremism. The Free Press (TFP) was built to capture these voices in one place, except when we take a look at what they publish, and Weiss’ own career, something curious appears that should have been obvious from the start: the type of speech they defend depends on what is being said and by whom. More than this, while Weiss, the heterodox scene, and TFP claim to correct for the extremes, they default to the right, even when logic presumes their “free speech first” principle would pull them leftward.

Case in point: Mahmoud Khalil, the former Columbia student and previous spokesperson for Columbia University Apartheid Divest recently arrested in preparation for deportation. Khalil is a Palestinian-American, and the hyphenate is important: he is a permanent resident on a Green Card with a wife (who is about to give birth) who is a citizen. Khalil has not been alleged to have committed any crime, and yet he is now subject to deportation for what they labeled as “pro-Hamas” activism. A number of journalists scoured Khalil’s output, which was extensive since he was a spokesperson for the Columbia student encampment in support of the ceasefire in Israel-Palestine. He made anti-genocide statements. There is no evidence of “pro-terrorism” rhetoric or support for Hamas or other terrorist movements, and certainly nothing available that shows evidence of collusion or criminality. He talked about how Jewish and Palestinian liberation was bound up together. He said he believed colonized people have the right to resist their dispossession. And that was enough. 

“My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza,” said Khalil in a letter written from jail, where he also acknowledges that the genocide has commenced with the abdication of the ceasefire. “It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom.”

For the “free speech absolutists,” which is how The Free Press’ writers typically describe themselves, Khalil’s should have raised alarm bells. For these free speech warriors, speech is a signpost of American freedom completely detached from all political context. Speech is an absolute, up to and including hate speech, bizarre speech, and lying speech, all of which are the metric by which you determine a free society. So the notion that the rules of immigration would be abrogated for what is admittedly unpopular speech would be a categorical offense: Weiss should be up in arms. 

But when we read The Free Press, its contributors, and Weiss, its Editor in Chief, they seem to have taken a different position. On The Free Press's “Fight Club”, the Israeli Palestinian Senior Fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign affairs Hussein Aboubakr Mansour argued that Khalil should be deported. It's obviously why Weiss chose him: he is heterodox in his own right since he takes a rabidly pro-Israel position that is incredibly scarce for people of his background. His biography lists him as the child of a “jihadi family” and his work is caked in David Horowitz-level fears over Islamization. He echoes the idea that “radical Islam” is the fuel of the Palestinian fire rather than their dispossession, a position that, despite having no traction amongst actual experts of the conflict, was taken up by “new atheist” Sam Harris on the podcast of The Free Press at the beginning of the war. Mansour is now a pro-Israel lobbyist at time when the U.S. has bankrolled the most violent moment of the entire Israeli-Palstinian conflict. Mansour argues it is simple national security issues, as if this newly minted Master’s in Public Policy is a danger to the state because of his demands for Columbia’s divestment. 

Similarly, Jed Rubenfeld argued in TFP that we have all got it wrong and, actually, Khalil doesn’t have the legal right of free speech. This kind of argument is being echoed across right-wing press like Tablet Magazine, The National Review, Breitbart, and Fox News. In a more neutrally toned report at TFP, Gabe Kaminsky, Madeleine Rowley, and Maya Sulkin all seem to echo the government's claims that Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 may allow for Khalil's arrest and deportation since the law stops someone in possession of a visa from endorsing or espousing "terrorist activity or persuades others" to do the same. No evidence of Khalili doing any of this was offered. This piece was then cited in a Democrat-run investigatory document into Trump’s conduct, suggesting that the piece itself was somehow central to holding the Trump administration’s feet to the constitutional fire. But, in reality, the piece fails to offer any true defense of First Amendment principles other than to say that a debate is to be had. This is effectively bait and switch: the moderate Democrats suggest they are offering evidence in Khalil’s defense when the article fails to do so, and TFP’s staff’s claim that their inclusion in a Democrat-driven document somehow shows proof of their bipartisan neutrality. The headline, which reads “The ICE Detention of a Columbia Student Is Just the Beginning” is likely the only reason the piece was cited since it the only part of the article that holds any relevance to the report.

Mark Goldfeder, who TFP labels as a "constitutional law expert" validated that not just Khalil, but other pro-Palestinian protesters, could be legally deported. He cited the 1904 Turner v. Williams' case that determined deportation could result if immigrants espouse views that others believe make them an "undesirable [addition] to our population." It’s worth noting that this very same case was used to deport disproportionate numbers of Jews during the First Red Scare, where Jewish anarchists were scapegoated using thinly veiled antisemitic rhetoric.

But what TFP has done consistently, and what their brand is built on, is a kind of faux debate this article rests on. These contributors had “all kinds of opinions” about Khalil, including those that thought he deserved access to freedom of speech. But when you take a look at what his “defenders” are saying, the claim of multitudinous perspectives and speech absolutism falls flat. 

Alan Dershowitz, unsurprisingly, was brought in by TFP to write that while Khalil deserves the right to say his piece, he simply doesn’t deserve sympathy over his incarceration and pending deportation for that speech (it’s worth noting that Khalil is from a refugee family and Dershowitz is worth millions of dollars). He launches into a classically Dershowitzian diatribe, comparing Khalil, who we should remember is being deported for protesting what has widely been discussed by experts as a genocide affecting his community and family, to Nazis. He cites the 1977 Skokie Illinois case where the ACLU defended the right of the American Nazi Party to march through a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors. Khalil handed out pamphlets about divesting from companies profiting off of the killing of his family. 

"Khalil claims a First Amendment right to demonize Israel. Meanwhile, the Nazis claimed the right to march through Skokie, glorifying the Holocaust and demonizing its survivors. The difference is not in the First Amendment, under which the Nazi claims are stronger. It is in the way in which too many students, civil libertarians, and the media are treating Khalil now, as contrasted with the way the Nazis were treated back then," writes Dershowitz. 

The crux of Dershowitz’ argument is that Khalil was engaged in “antisemitic hate speech” (let’s be clear, there is absolutely no evidence of this presented in the Dershowitz article or anywhere else), and that Khalil should therefore be denied public support. But this argument reveals the free speech con immediately: without support, no one has access to speech. The only way that speech can be actualized is if someone has the resources and supporters available to help amplify that speech, whether in the form of publicity or money or activists rallying on a Columbia University quad. Khalil is being supported because what is happening to him is both egregious and emblematic of Trump’s assault on civil liberties, and without that support there would be no way to defend free speech, his or anyone’s. A defense of Khalil, and sympathy for his plight, is a categorical defense of speech, not out of a simple abstract principle, but the fact that what happens to Khalil could happen to us. This is what sympathy literally means, to incur the feelings of another person’s suffering under the acknowledgement that little separates us other than mundane circumstances of birth. Dershowitz, as a long-time attorney (he defended other great proponents of free speech, like Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane), knows this, so he fudges the definitions to create an outline of free speech that is toothless in the face of dispossession: Khalil should have free speech, but no one should fight to ensure it. 

It’s worth remembering that while Dershowitz often presents himself as speaking for American Jews, he is out of step with where most Jews sit on the issue of Khalil’s deportation and Trump’s assaults on civil liberties. A huge swathe of Jewish organizations put out statements horrified by the treatment of Khalil, including officially Zionist ones like Reconstructing Judaism and Zioness, and it was opposed in an April 15th letter by numerous Jewish organizations representing three out of the four major Jewish movements.

In a recent episode of “Honestly,” The Free Press’ podcast, Weiss hosted a number of people debating the deportation of Khalil. No one on the show (Weiss included) actually made any decisive statement about the threat to speech that Khalil’s deportation suggests, but she did give even more space to Mark Goldfeder from the National Jewish Advocacy Center who has filed a lawsuit against Khalil (and many, many others) to argue that Khalil was providing material support for Hamas. The case suggests that somehow Columbia University students are responsible for the suffering and death that six families of Israeli hostages faced, as well as alleged mistreatment by two Jewish students. He outlines his case on the show in a fashion that displays mostly that he knows very little about the politics of the Middle East or Palestinian resistance, getting basic facts wrong and conflating different movements into one, undifferentiated mass. Mostly, he seems to think that handing out fliers is the same as coordinating with, or funneling money to, a foreign terrorist organization. He then outlines a conspiracy theory that has become popular on the right that the Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine chapter relaunched in advance of October 7th and could be working directly with those who carried out the attacks. This is a claim his case depends on and one that has begun to filter across the political sphere, with the implications being that somehow Hamas and other overseas operatives are controlling a small student activist group on a university campus. Goldfeder’s argument is simple: the activism seen by Khalil and others is probably what Hamas wants, and therefore it is not speech or activism as such, it is criminal behavior that should be considered treasonous and is directly responsible for the loss of Jewish life. Beyond the heavy conspiracy theories Goldfeder seems to rely on, his argument would have wide implications by suggesting that any domestic activists engaged in international solidarity work should be legally liable for the crimes of the worst actors in a foreign conflict. Weiss does little to place this outsider perspective in proper context, which would be to say that this is a fringe opinion that has little bearing on most legal opinions or the perspective of the majority of American Jewish organizations. Despite branding herself as a brave truth teller who refuses the allure of conspiracism, she does little to point out the outlandish claims Goldfeder uses to make his case and instead validates his frantic beliefs about student activists. The fact that Goldfeder has been allowed to appear not just as an expert, but as a leading Jewish voice, is again not the marker of moderation or astute centrism, but as a way for The Free Press to move the Overton Window and to suggest that the criminalization of campus activism is a reasonable position in the American political debate. 

The False Image of Objectivity

The presentation of faux debate is the same tactic TFP has taken on other issues, such as publishing an article the same day asking whether or not the recent Venezuelan deportations, which were blocked by a court order that Trump ignored, were unconstitutional. This kind of question is a direct abrogation of TFP’s entire claim to existence. Instead of calling balls and strikes they refuse to assume any fact as evident and instead inject every remarkably clear political issue into a manufactured ring of partisan debate, as if having loud bloggers argue over minutia is how you get to a stable factual reality. We know the Venezuelan deportations are unconstitutional, hence the hundreds of articles mentioning it as a clear constitutional crisis and citing the evidence of why. The Free Press is not discovering a novel approach by offering this model of indecision, but instead is furthering the notion that all issues are purely subjective and that stating facts as though they are facts is antithetical to a free society. Most issues (or issues that engage the political left) get this treatment from TFP, who rarely assumes constitutional liberties are under threat unless blue haired undergrads or Middle Eastern professors are the ones in charge. TFP and its celebrity voices generally assume that the powerful deserve our veneration while chastising everyone from low-level staff at publications (such as Moynihan’s assertion that Vice was taken down by low wage workers) to teachers advocating for COVID safety precautions. 

When an issue is debatable, such as whether the “left has gone too far,” then it’s stated as self-evident. If it is roundly true, such as the fact that Musk is currently dismantling our entire social safety net, then it can only be solved by erudite argument. It’s worth noting that TFP actually decided that the Venezuelan deportation situation was not a constitutional crisis, making them one of the few publications in the country that thinks civil liberties are safe. Thank hashem the press is finally free.

When an issue is debatable, such as whether the “left has gone too far,” then it’s stated as self-evident. If it is roundly true, such as the fact that Musk is currently dismantling our entire social safety net, then it can only be solved by erudite argument. It’s worth noting that TFP actually decided that the Venezuelan deportation situation was not a constitutional crisis, making them one of the few publications in the country that thinks civil liberties are safe. Thank hashem the press is finally free.

Weiss herself has been strategically silent, but it’s not entirely surprising that TFP not taken the position their alleged strident free speech bonafides would suggest. TFP has been perhaps the most consistently pro-Israel American publication since October 7th, which it locates as one of the issues the left “gets wrong” and therefore an essential issue in the thought-cluster that composes the “heterodox” sphere. When you think of the heterodox world that The Free Press is the flagship of, the strategy is to assume often far-right wing positions while suggesting the speaker remains in the camp of the liberals (or the center), such as excessive transphobia or panic around “wokeness” or college student misbehavior. Unquestioned defense of Israel and domestic panic over antisemitism tends essential to this project, part of where they separate their liberalism from the actual political left. 

TFP writer (and hysterical Israel apologist) Eli Lake has been less silent, however, and has actually stuck to his free speech branding besides being one of the most stringently reactionary voices on the war. Lake has consistently flipped the script on the genocide allegation, suggesting it is actually Palestinians that are the genocidal ones, going so far as to lead public debates stating as much. But as he states in the conversation with Mansour, “The arguments for Israel’s defensive war against genocidal terrorists is strong enough that it can withstand the loathsome speech of those who take the other side.” Similarly, TFP contributor Michael Moynihan took to his podcast The Fifth Column to, after calling Khalil a series of insulting names, say that he has misgivings about this attack on speech. And yet, none of these figures came out and identified the arrest and deportation plans with nearly the vigor that they have the use of pronouns, the threat of student activists, or the danger of kids using Instagram. And all of them qualify even tacit defenses of Khalil’s rights with personal condemnation, allegations of virulent antisemitism, and claims he supports murder, none of which is carried by the evidence and seems designed to several any potential empathy their audience might experience. Frankly put, Trump’s attack on the speech of American residents simply was not incredibly important since the person in question did not fit their political pedigree. 

Weiss is not the first person to mobilize a free speech con to build her brand, it is a hallmark of successive generations of right-wing grifters. But she is one who has simultaneously made it her niche while coming with an extravagant history of opposing it in other cases. Her pro-Israel politics emerged when she was, herself, an undergraduate at Columbia and she campaigned for pro-Palestinian faculty to be fired and silenced (something overwhelmingly common on university campuses). While Weiss famously left the New York Times over her belief that they did not respect the speech of dissenting opinions, and as Middle East Eye pointed out, she regularly attacked people who were doing exactly that, offering dissenting opinions about Israel-Palestine. He blasted Jewish cartoonist Eli Valley as an antisemite, she compared Linda Sarsour to racist politician Steve King, and she said she was bullied despite the fact that the records are relatively clear that there is nothing that will get a commentator "cancelled" then coming out as pro-Palestine. Her claim to be free speech’s champion has always been qualified, even when she frames herself as an absolutist. It’s not a surprise to see a right-wing ideology hiding behind her costume of free speech obsessiveness, but it is increasingly the brand that those who take a particular center-right tact on significant culture war issues use to ascribe their divisiveness with the universal legitimacy that the First Amendment tends to lend.

This two-sided approach to speech, to venerate the concept when it serves her politics, on the hand, and to see little issue with the categorical attack on speech for her opponents, on the other, has traced through her entire work with the “Heterodox” sphere she is often sainted as a leader of. The crowning achievement of this movement was the creation of the University of Austin, an unaccredited college launched by intellectual dark web figures and controversial internet “intellectuals” and activists like Islamophobic author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Portland State University professor and hoaxer Peter Boghossian, and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker. The school would allegedly just teach academics without all the ideology and student activism they believe ruined the ivies. The point was free speech and scholarship, to celebrate “classical liberalism” and cultivate an educated and open society. This is why it was strange when the school was recently shown to be cozying up to Vicktor Orban. The Nation reported that the school has locked down a dozen academics, including seven board members, directly tied to Orban's regime, the same one that has staged an unprecedented assault on education and pulled the schools under his direct control. The school has been alleged to hold a right-wing bias, to have a tendency to simply attack other institutions rather than build up its own pedigree, is funded by pro-Trump billionaires, none of which lends credit to the argument that this is a neutral institution that will reclaim high education from bias (it’s also $32,000 a year for an education lacking in accreditations, which means federal student loans are unavailable and that the student body likely leans wealthy).

The rest of the heterodox sphere has been just as uneven as Khalil’s case garnered attention, even when publishing in other outlets. Many Free Press contributors known for chastising what they see as opposition to free speech on the left, had no compunction about celebrating a legal permanent resident being deported for speech. “This isn't ignorance of immigration law. It's a belief that being in America is a basic right, not the greatest privilege. And it comes from the same lunatics who flooded this country with millions of illegal migrants,” said Free Press contributor Liel Leibovitz, hours before also arguing that Israel should annex Palestinian land for each dead hostage found. And despite The Free Press’ claim to uphold journalism standards, they recently published Andy Ngo who, besides seeming to believe the world is covertly run by Muslim immigrants and a vast Antifa network, has now been prattling on about “trans terrorism” because sometimes trans women exist and so does terrorism. Ngo makes no claim to defend the rights’ of free speech when it comes to Khalil, saying that he is a terrorism supporter (no charges of any sort have been leveled against Khalil) and that he “violated the terms of his green card,” another claim with basis in established fact. 

Weiss, the heterodoxshpere, and The Free Press are, as Jeffrey Katz described, “an important node in American political life: a pseudo-liberal who launders billionaires’ money into a project painting universities and the ‘radical left’ as the greatest threats to democracy, weakening liberal resolve and providing cover for crackdowns by the fascist right.” This is the function of what Aaron Huertas called “reactionary centrists,” liberal who fetishize moderation and compromise even when it means that it undermines any claim to principle they have ever offered. “They think the middle is where they’re supposed to be regardless of where the sides stand in a debate, but they can’t quite explain why,” writes Huertas. “If you point out their political biases and the effects of their political advocacy, you’ll get a blank stare, a denial, or simply have accusations of bias thrown back at you.”

But Huertas might be missing something here. For figures like Weiss and The Free Press, can it really be said that they are simply feckless liberals who stan for free speech until it becomes too difficult or requires them to take a stand? It actually seems like they are taking a decisive position, one that is dictated by the politics of the speaker rather than the principle of speech. Instead, could it simply be that The Free Press’ con is what the right has done along: they call it free speech and liberal values when it is simply a rhetorical game to punch left and defend institutions of power? This is what has kept them in financial solvency, something proven by the fact that all these “brave truth tellers” are sending their kids to private schools (but definitely not these antisemitic campuses like Columbia or Harvard). They are not failing to fight for their principles, they are loudly and enthusiastically putting those principles on display.

This becomes obvious when you look at the larger schema of what stories The Free Press chooses to run. If we were to even compare the number of stories about campus antisemitism or the alleged crimes of the left against the number analyzing the arrest of Khalil, which is a case of clear government overreach and a portent of an escalating assault on our civil rights, readers could easily walk away assuming that Jew-hatred at Columbia is the most pressing threat to freedom in 2025. The Free Press has focused on disagreements over what NPR runs rather than the fact that Trump has labeled collective bargaining rights a threat to “national security,” that the President has let the richest man in the world hollow out the federal government, that Trump is pulling money from universities for vague ideological reasons, or that there are literal sting operations around the country where human beings are being rounded up and deported. 

This disparity in coverage reveals more about The Free Press than any individual article because it calls into question their central reason to be: the idea that TFP is cutting through the noise to offer clear-eyed journalism with an eye towards freedom of speech. Instead, the heterodoxsphere’s goal seems to be to move liberals further to the right and attack any social movement that has the ability to actually fight for the rights they say they cherish, and TFP’s editorial agenda is subservient to those ends. More than anything, TFP seems horrified that anyone would actually speak out on an issue, that they would organize in their community or workplace, or that they would actually have enough faith in humanity to fight for a better world. It’s better for them to overstate the threat of campus leftism than the verifiable attacks on immigrants because doing so allows them to appease affluent liberals (their new financial base), maintain access to power, and continue to present themselves as iconoclasts running against the grain. 

Weiss is free to run an ideological outlet, there are plenty of those on the market, and The Free Press’s success shows there is a market for it. But don’t pretend you are free speech absolutists when, in reality, you are there to chastise the left and defend the powerful.