Nick Fuentes has now appeared on the Tucker Carlson, Steven Crowder, and Piers Morgan shows. The conservative world is fractured over whether conservatives should defend such appearances in the name of open dialogue. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, has drawn fire for defending Carlson’s interview with Fuentes. For progressives, whether it’s appropriate to defend Carlson is not really the question. The real question is whether Fuentes and his ilk should ever be platformed at all.
The flashpoint for conservatives, as usual, is Israel. Fuentes identifies with the “America First” tradition and argues that Zionists wield excessive influence over US foreign policy. I disagree with Fuentes on a range of issues, including his views on Israel, but giving him a platform is in keeping with the free speech tradition that, among other things, makes America a model for the world to emulate. We know that progressives don’t believe in this proud tradition. But conservatives? I thought they had taken a liberal turn in the face of progressive authoritarianism. Defending Carlson should be reflexive. That it’s not is troubling.
As a man in his sixties who has followed politics all his life, I remember a time when—even for highly controversial figures and ideas—the value of open dialogue was broadly recognized as a core feature of a free society. Freedom of speech and the airing of opposing views were not merely tolerated but actively encouraged, especially by those who saw themselves as defenders of democracy as a republican proposition (that is, anti-majoritarian). This was before the rise of what is now called “safetyism”—the idea that certain viewpoints are so dangerous they must not be publicly aired at all. Beyond the legitimacy of its stated goal of protecting people from harmful art, images, and works, safetyism immediately raises a deeper question: who decides which ideas are “too dangerous” to be heard—elites, or the public itself?
Whether American society is more open today than it was in previous generations is an easy question to answer. From roughly the 1950s through the 1970s, it was markedly more open. I recognize that there was censorship during this period and especially before (e.g., the Hays Code—formally called the Motion Picture Production Code—the dominant movie censorship and content regulation system in the United States from the early 1930s to the late 1960s). America cycles between periods in which disagreeable expression and speech are more or less tolerated. But from the late 1960s through the 1970s, expression in America was free-wheeling. But it was not to last.
The establishment of the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) in 1985—founded by a group of politically connected women (including Tipper Gore, Susan Baker, Pam Howar, and Sally Nevius) to increase parental awareness of explicit content in popular music—was not the first manufactured panic around perceived harmful expression. However, the PMRC was not a one-off; it was the harbinger of a re-emerging censorship regime: the modern speech-code movement. These codes accompanied the growing hegemony of antiracist ideology, feminist theory, and multiculturalism. By 1990, well over a hundred U.S. colleges had formal speech codes regulating “offensive” or “demeaning” speech. Speech codes spread across American institutions, public and private.
Social media platforms were established within an already embedded culture of safetyism. At first, however, they emphasized free expression as their primary value proposition. Then, around 2013–2015, the idea of “trust and safety” emerged, and within only a few years, it came to govern content moderation along ideological and political lines. The result was stifling. While there has been a partial return to openness in recent years—especially since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, rebranded it as X, and allowed formerly deplatformed figures to reenter the social media space, prompting other platforms to follow suit—the backlash over Fuentes’s high-profile appearances demonstrates how incomplete that recovery remains. The habits of deplatforming and no-platforming still prevail in public institutions and popular sensibilities.
The case of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, illustrates this shift with striking clarity. Rockwell was an avowed neo-Nazi who openly celebrated Adolf Hitler and promoted explicit racial hostility. Yet in the 1950s and 1960s, he appeared on national television, spoke on university campuses, and debated prominent public intellectuals. To younger observers, socialized in the context of today’s platforming norms, Rockwell’s media presence would feel shocking; many contemporary figures who are far less extreme face far greater institutional barriers. Whatever one thinks of Fuentes, he is no George Lincoln Rockwell. His adoration of Hitler is a fascination with pomp and circumstance and a “great man” sense of history (he admires Josef Stalin for similar reasons). Rockwell was hardcore. He was the real deal.
In Rockwell’s era, mainstream hosts such as David Susskind were willing—even eager—to confront extremist voices in public. Susskind invited Rockwell onto his show despite openly despising him, arguing that the public had a right to see such figures in the clear light of day. To be sure, Carlson and Morgan are willing to confront Fuentes publicly (even if Carlson chose to do so after interviewing Fuentes). But the fallout from Rockwell’s television appearances was not accompanied by the same pearl-clutching surrounding Fuentes’s more public exposure. Indeed, Rockwell’s campus appearance at Brown University was defended not only by civil libertarians but by administrators who regarded free expression as a core academic principle. Given the panic over Charlie Kirk’s presence on university campuses, it’s obvious that the tolerance for disagreeable ideas has sharply eroded among a great many college students. Not that students didn’t protest Rockwell; however, in the face of those protests, the prevailing assumption was not that students must be shielded from offensive or dangerous ideas, but that a democratic society proves its strength by allowing such speech to occur.
It wasn’t only Susskind who took on controversial figures on broadcast television. The broader media environment of the mid-twentieth century reflected a tradition of openness and the free exchange of ideas. Mike Wallace’s pioneering interview program in the late 1950s routinely hosted radical figures. Wallace’s aggressive questioning and willingness to push the boundaries of public debate reflected a deeply held assumption of the era: that open exposure, not suppression, was the best antidote to hateful or dangerous ideas. William F. Buckley, the host of Firing Line, was also willing to bring on controversial figures. Broadcasters and university leaders trusted the public to be resilient. They believed that extremism lost its power when stripped of mystery and confronted in public. In this view, the danger lay not in allowing extremists to speak but in hiding them—and thereby granting them a forbidden allure.
Today’s norms are fundamentally different; the question remains whether these norms are organic or manufactured—and whether that matters. While legal protections for speech remain largely intact, our dominant institutions have become profoundly risk-averse. To put the matter bluntly, our sense-making institutions have taken on an authoritarian and elitist character, treating the public less as citizens to be informed than as a population to be managed. Platforming is no longer viewed as a means of exposing and defeating bad ideas, but as an implicit endorsement—or at least that is the perception that has been cultivated. Digital platforms, media firms, and universities increasingly operate on the premise that exposure itself constitutes harm. In a fragmented online environment, where clips circulate without context and algorithms amplify outrage, institutions suggest that exposure to ideas is too dangerous and that suppression is safer—and they claim the authority to decide which ideas and personalities are worthy of suppression.
As a result, individuals whose views fall far short of Rockwell’s—whether merely heterodox or sharply conservative (labels that presume progressivism as orthodoxy)—often face barriers to public participation that did not exist half a century ago. The contrast between Rockwell and contemporary figures like Fuentes makes this unmistakable. In today’s climate, Fuentes is systematically excluded from mainstream media, deplatformed by major tech companies (X just reinstated his account, which was banned in the summer of 2021), and treated as beyond the pale even in spaces historically devoted to dissent. Whether one approves of his views is beside the point. The institutional response reveals how tightly the boundaries of acceptable discourse have narrowed; Fuentes, alongside other figures such as Alex Jones, remains banned on YouTube.
Some will argue that this comparison does not establish a simple story of decline but merely reflects changing philosophies of openness. The argument goes like this: mid-century America tolerated a broader range of public speech because it believed democratic resilience required exposure rather than insulation; contemporary society prefers a protective model, one that prioritizes harm reduction and the prevention of inadvertent legitimation. This is true as a description of prevailing hegemony. But openness in a democracy is not a principle that can be endlessly redefined. A society is either open or it is not. The earlier era feared authoritarian suppression and trusted sunlight as the best disinfectant. That is the definition of an open society. The present era fears misinformation, radicalization, and destabilization—and therefore seeks to manage public discourse by restricting it. By definition, that is a closed society. Its explicit aim is to prevent certain ideas from ever being openly discussed. Presuming the majority wants it that way does not change the fact.
When modern defenders of censorship confront the challenge that America was freer in the past, they dissolve the question into competing definitions of freedom. However, if freedom means a broad arena of public debate in which even the most odious views may be confronted openly, then mid-twentieth-century America was, in this crucial respect, a freer society. If freedom is redefined as a social environment carefully shielded from destabilizing or hateful ideas, then no-platforming—whether through rules or shaming—becomes a method of protection. But this latter conception does not match the historical meaning of freedom in Western societies. No-platforming does not protect freedom from within—it replaces freedom with managed thought.
Put another way, the censorship regime echoes George Orwell’s starkest warnings: it risks creating a society in which the appearance of safety and knowledge substitutes for genuine understanding. Recall the slogans in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Freedom is Slavery.” “Ignorance is Strength.” Invoking Orwell’s slogans may sound dramatic; Airstrip One is not our reality. But the substance of his argument prevails: without access to information and the right to be an informed participant, we remain essentially ignorant, subject to the control of those who dictate speech and shape thought. To be kept in the dark by those who want to keep us there is an essential element in servitude. And while we can still hear Fuentes if we want to, some wish we couldn’t, and it’s worth worrying about them before they prevail. Because if we don’t, then they will.
freedom and reason 