This article explores the interrelated ideas of free speech, repressive tolerance, and the friend-enemy distinction, with relevance to recent moves by the Trump Administration, which in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing has designated Antifa a terror organisation, and cut ties with the ADL and SPLC.
Free speech and the paradox of tolerance
Sir Karl Popper had an idea called the paradox of tolerance, which in brief was that if a society is too tolerant – if it tolerates intolerance – then the intolerant will “take over” and society won’t be tolerant any more. Therefore, to prevent this from happening, tolerant societies must ensure the intolerant are NOT tolerated.
Popper’s insight however begs the question as to what counts as intolerance, and here there is a disagreement: classical liberals traditionally subscribed to the idea of “viewpoint tolerance”, according to which all different viewpoints must be tolerated. This paradigm, very roughly, was dominant in modern Western societies up until the 1960s when the countercultural movement effectively waged a culture war to topple viewpoint tolerance from its culturally hegemonic position and replace it with the notion of “repressive tolerance”.
The most important thinker here is Herbert Marcuse. In his essay Repressive Tolerance (1965), Marcuse explicitly inverted the liberal idea of viewpoint tolerance, arguing that tolerating conservative or “reactionary” speech sustains oppression, and that only “progressive” ideas deserve tolerance. Under repressive tolerance, some viewpoints must NOT be tolerated because they are deemed INTOLERANT viewpoints – politically correct terms like racist, sexist, homophobe, xenophobe, anti-Semite and so on were introduced to circumscribe, stigmatise and suppress these allegedly intolerant views.
What we must do to ensure free speech is to shift the dominant paradigm back to viewpoint tolerance, but in order to do this, we have to be intolerant of intolerance of different viewpoints, which logically necessitates being intolerant of politically correct censorship and cancel culture. This is the correct lesson to take from Popper’s paradox of tolerance – to not tolerate censorious speech or behaviour – to cancel the cancellers in other words. This is not hypocrisy, but optimisation for free speech within real world constraints.
The friend-enemy distinction
When repressive tolerance is used to suppress certain viewpoints, by labelling them “intolerant” and censoring them, it is essentially creating a friend–enemy distinction: some are “friends” of the dominant norms, others are enemies to be silenced. The cultural enforcement of political correctness thus reproduces the very illiberal dynamics that it claims to oppose. Recognising and countering this is essential for defending liberal democracy.
In recent times, progressives have taken to claiming some formulation of: “the friend-enemy distinction is illiberal and anyone who uses it is an enemy of liberal democracy”. However, this is self-refuting: by declaring some people “enemies,” the speaker has already adopted the friend-enemy logic they denounce. That move is logically incoherent – it attempts to outlaw a mode of thought while using that mode to do the outlawing. The result is not a principled defence of liberalism but a rhetorical trick that corrodes the norms of argument and mutual recognition liberal politics depends on. When a doctrine eliminates the possibility of criticism, persuasion, and compromise, it ceases to be a defence of liberal democracy and becomes the opposite.
Because this stance destroys the conditions for reasoned public life, it falls into the set of “intolerant” views Popper suggests should not be tolerated, or perhaps Popper didn’t quite suggest this, but at any rate I AM.
In short: repressive tolerance is an intellectual and political threat to liberal democracy that must be dismantled by argument, civic pressure, and, where necessary, institutional and legal checks.
Recent Trump Administration actions
The Trump Administration has actually taken real steps toward doing this in recent weeks. Firstly, by deeming Antifa a terror organisation (both domestic and foreign) and secondly through the FBI ending its partnerships with the ADL and SPLC. These organisations are key parts of a system of NGOs in the US that enforce the cultural hegemony of repressive tolerance. Here is how it works: the ADL and SPLC identify individuals and organisations they regard as “hateful” and publish their names on “hate lists”. They then shop this information around to governments, civil society organisations, big tech platforms, businesses, and elsewhere, arguing that censorship, sanctions and various types of personal costs be levied against these individuals and groups because of their views.
But what “hate” really means in this context is advocating for ideas that are politically incorrect and contrary to the values and aims of the progressive counterculture, Jewish elites and Israel – i.e. ideas that are:
- Racist – like that idea that there are scientifically verifiable differences between races in factors like average IQ, impulse control and time preference that explain the variance in socioeconomic outcomes between races.
- Sexist – like traditional Christian idea that the man should be the head of the family, or the obvious and scientifically verifiable idea that there are important biological differences between men and women.
- Homophobic – like the traditional view that homosexuality is immoral or that marriage is between a man and a woman.
- Xenophobic – like opposition to immigration on the grounds that it undermines national identity, values, and culture, creates inter-ethnic conflict, destroys social trust, and is against the interests of traditional ethnic majorities.
- Anti-Semitic – like the view of one of the preeminent scholars in the field of international relations – John Mearsheimer – that the Israel lobby has too much power in American politics and influences US foreign policy in ways that mean the US does what is in the interests of Israel, but is sometimes against the interests of ordinary Americans. Or more recently that certain readings of the Bible, since they are implicitly or explicitly critical of Jews, should be considered illegitimate.
All the above views are either factual or moral claims I think are true. In a free society the truth should be sayable, and in a Western country stating basic Christian moral claims should not be rendered beyond the pale.
What about Antifa? Antifa operates as an informal enforcement arm of repressive tolerance. Its members use coordinated intimidation, property destruction, and targeted violence to silence political opponents identified as “hateful”. They often disrupt lectures, rallies, and demonstrations, dox opponents online, and justify their actions as “anti-fascist defence”. This amounts to a quasi-policing role – an extra-judicial enforcement mechanism that punishes dissenters from progressive orthodoxy without due process.
So political correctness is like fake laws, the hate lists are like fake “most wanted” lists that law enforcement maintains, and Antifa are like fake beat cops that bash identified haters or breachers of political correctness. Taken as a whole this is an extra-judicial system that is employed to enforce repressive tolerance and advance the interests of progressive ideology, Jews and the state of Israel. It effectively usurps the government’s monopoly on the creation of laws and use of force, or at least walks right up to the line in terms of what they can get away with.
The existence of this extra-judicial system within the US, and similar structures inside other Western countries should simply not be acceptable – it is contrary to viewpoint tolerance and free speech, is a vector for foreign influence, rigs democracy in an unfair way, and usurps the government’s monopoly on lawmaking and use of force.
The war on Western civilisation
These three organisations – the ADL, SPLC and Antifa – play an important role in enforcing repressive tolerance and progressive hegemony over politics, but there are many other organisations in America and elsewhere in the Western world that perform similar roles. These organisations, global networks, and the billionaires who fund them should be investigated and actions taken to dismantle their influence and remove the collective threat they pose – because what I am asserting is not merely that they limit free speech and push a leftist agenda: they promote mass immigration, denigrate our traditional culture and religion, encourage homosexuality, gender confusion and other sexual perversions that reduce birth rates and cause a raft of social and mental health problems, promote genocidal antiwhite animus, and more. They attack us at almost every level – demographically, culturally, morally, spiritually, financially, reproductively, and so on. All things considered, these organisations and the collective apparatus they represent pose an existential threat to Western civilisation.
I think we are morally obligated to work to counter that threat.
Bringing back REAL conservatism
Before it is a political ideology, conservatism is a basic human disposition: it is love of one’s own – love for one’s own people, culture, and way of life, and a desire to protect them. Many good people are “conservative” in this way – perhaps even the majority of the population.
Repressive tolerance systematically delegitimises conservatism, demonising love for one’s own people as parochial and racist, the defence of traditional values as unscientific bigotry, and, more recently, the desire to protect these things as “violent extremism”. To use a bit of technical jargon, this whole thing, I am convinced, is “a crock of shit”.
It is an either/or situation as regards conservatism and repressive tolerance – either:
- We have repressive tolerance, in which case openly stating conservative views will be considered illegitimate, and people will be censored, stigmatised and suppressed for doing so (perhaps also occasionally assassinated); or
- We enforce viewpoint tolerance, which means treating it as illegitimate to delegitimise and punish conservative views for being racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and so on… and we take the necessary steps to prevent people from doing it.
Those are the options. Only 2 is consistent with free speech, the existence of REAL conservatism, and the survival of Western civilisation.
This article originally appeared on The Zeitgeist and is republished by The Noticer with permission.
Header image: President Donald Trump hosts a roundtable on Antifa-inspired terror (The White House).
