Where the right’s defense of free speech ends

In God and Man at Yale, the 1951 book that made William F. Buckley famous, American conservatism’s founding father argues that academic freedom is premised on a fiction.

While professors claim that they are merely attempting to equip their students with the tools necessary to comprehend the world and succeed in it, they are in fact engaged in conveying a particular set of truths and values to their students — meaning, at the time, liberal and socialist values. In response, Buckley argues, university trustees and administrators should “banish” favorable discussion of such ideas from the classroom, replacing them with a curriculum that emphasizes the eternal truths of Christianity and capitalism.

In some ways, the Trump administration’s aggressive approach to college campuses directly echoes Buckley’s ideas. They are making transparently ideological demands of universities like Harvard and Columbia, and threatening to withhold funding if they don’t comply. They have also adopted what looks a lot like a systematic policy of deporting foreign students who participate in pro-Palestinian activism.

The Trump administration goes even further than Buckley in two critical respects.

First, Buckley explicitly rejected government interference in the affairs of private universities — the sort of thing that Trump has been doing throughout his second term. “I should bitterly contest a preemption by the state of the duties and privileges of the alumni of the private institutions themselves to guide the destinies of the schools they support,” Buckley wrote.

Second, Trump has added a layer of ideological hypocrisy.

Buckley explicitly rejected the idea of campuses as free speech zones, but the president has long claimed to be defending exactly this principle — saying in 2019 that “taxpayer dollars should not subsidize anti-First Amendment institutions.” Indeed, the notion that there is a free speech crisis on campus that must be addressed has become a mainstream conservative position in the era of “wokeness” and “cancel culture.”

Yet, Trump’s current approach to universities is a dire threat to the First Amendment. The breadth of the threat became painfully clear last week, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio openly bragged that he was revoking visas of hundreds of pro-Palestinian students in retaliation for their political beliefs and activism.

The conservative position on higher education and free speech is thus profoundly muddled. While nearly everyone on the right believes that left-liberal domination of the campus is a problem — in fact, has been a problem since the 1950s — there is no obvious consistent position on why this is a problem or what role the government should have in solving it.

The case of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts graduate student who was snatched off the street by unidentified DHS agents, has brought these tensions into full view. Ozturk was in the United States on a valid student visa; her only apparent “crime,” so far as we know, was writing an op-ed critical of Israel’s war in Gaza in the Tufts student newspaper.

Ozturk’s case is important not only because it’s an especially egregious abuse of power, but also because it provides a clear test for the various factions of the modern right.

Do they truly care about free speech, or was that a convenient talking point right up until they obtained the power to create a new campus orthodoxy? Do they agree with Buckley, that the state should stay out of private university affairs, or get on board with Trump’s increasingly aggressive approach? Do they really think that targeting hundreds of students like Ozturk, as Rubio suggested he was doing, could be squared with any kind of commitment to limited government and individual rights?

The reactions from right-of-center publications divide into roughly four camps, aligning on a spectrum ranging from vocal approval to outright abhorrence. Yet the former was far closer to the center of gravity than the latter.

1) The illiberal nationalists. This group endorses Ozturk’s arrest on the grounds that noncitizens do not have the same free speech rights as Americans and, thus, should be deported when they engage in speech the administration finds harmful.

As a matter of First Amendment jurisprudence, this is largely false: The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that noncitizen residents have constitutional protections, including First Amendment rights (with only very limited exceptions). The illiberal nationalists do acknowledge this, but they argue that the court was simply wrong — in conflict with the morally correct interpretation of the law.

“The Supreme Court’s twentieth-century rulings are incorrect,” Ben Crenshaw writes in American Reformer, a Christian nationalist publication. “Non-citizen foreigners are under the goodwill and censure of US law, but cannot claim the full range of its benefits until they become citizens.”

The illiberal nationalists reject both the campus free speech argument and the Buckelyite vision of limited government. They believe the state has the right and responsibility to shape the American polity along their preferred lines, including by interfering in the management of private universities and curtailing allegedly dangerous speech.

2. The whataboutists. These articles focused less on the actual question of whether it was right to deport Ozturk than the alleged sins or inconsistencies of Trump’s liberal critics, on campus or otherwise.

Writing at The Federalist, a staunchly pro-Trump outlet, John Daniel Davidson spends most of his word count attacking Never Trumper David French for the alleged hypocrisy of criticizing Ozturk’s deportations while also having worked at a publication that helped Facebook fact-check arguments about abortion during the 2020 election.

“French worked as a senior editor at an outlet that was paid to justify Big Tech censorship of pro-life views. It’s reasonable to conclude that he doesn’t care about free speech, no matter what he says about it now,” Davidson writes.

The weakness of Davidson’s guilt-by-association move aside, his evasion of the substantive question is striking. Davidson does not weigh in on whether Ozturk specifically deserves deportation; he just speaks in generic terms about “the president’s new policy of revoking the visas of foreign nationals who agitate for terrorist groups like Hamas.”

Ozturk didn’t actually do this: Her op-ed doesn’t even mention Hamas. But that doesn’t matter. For the whataboutists, the key issue is always the sins of their enemies. Ozturk, academic freedom, basic civil liberties — these are all merely collateral damage in the war on the left.

3. The see-no-evil crowd. Evasion is also the key feature here. These people and publications simply chose not to say anything about Ozturk, despite a longstanding and preexisting interest in issues relating to campus politics, immigration, or Israel-Palestine. This was, in my research, the most common response from major right-wing outlets.

Take the Daily Wire, the Ben Shapiro-founded media empire that has made the campus culture war and Israel-Palestine two of its primary foci. While the site publishes at a truly astonishing clip, the only mention of Ozturk’s case is a passing reference in a March 31st news roundup — in which the author describes her as “a Turkish national [whose] visa was revoked after the State Department found she ‘engaged in activities in support of Hamas.’”

That one line is the entirety of the Daily Wire’s coverage — which, of course, amounts to no real coverage at all.

Whatever the reason for this silence, it speaks volumes about their commitment to alleged free-speech principles.

4. The principled objectors. I couldn’t find many of these from conservatives other than people who were already Never Trumpers, but they do exist.

The clearest example is a column from Jeffrey Blehar at National Review. Blehar, whose official position on the 2024 election was that Trump and Harris were equally bad, appears to be genuinely appalled by Ozturk’s arrest.

“To capriciously eject people from the country without warning merely for publishing an unpopular political opinion in a student newspaper is, no matter what Trump’s defenders or special pleaders may beg, utterly abhorrent,” Blehar writes. “The idea that foreigners who are here on valid visas should live under fear that their every political opinion might become grounds for sudden incarceration in Louisiana or El Salvador is inhumane and close to un-American in spirit.”

This is, I think, the right reaction — and it deserves to be commended unreservedly. That it was published in the magazine Buckley founded, the closest thing to a house organ for the pre-Trump GOP establishment, is also notable.