The free speech event that wasn't

Bari Weiss came to town last week for an event titled "Where Do We Go From Here? The Future of Free Speech on College Campuses." It was built around a screening and discussion of a new short documentary on the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, which began sixty years ago this month. And, reader, it was weird.

I went because I wanted to hear how Weiss was going to square a celebration of one of the signature student protests of the 20th Century with her adamant opposition to basically all modern protest movements, including the one that has swept college campuses this year. I also wanted to hear if she would break her usual pattern of having nothing to say about the surging illiberalism on the right, led by the GOP presidential candidate, whose closing argument for a return to the presidency is a pledge to seek retribution against his political enemies and use the military against dissenters on the “radical left.”

As it was, the talk at the University of Virginia was held just about three hundred yards from the field where, in May of this year, heavily armored phalanxes of state and local police beat, maced, and trained their guns on a small group of peaceful protesters as they tore their tiny Gaza solidarity encampment to the ground. If that context didn’t come up in Weiss’ post-film conversation with her moderator, former Indiana governor and Purdue University president Mitch Daniels, I planned to ask about it during the Q&A myself.

The first thing to note about this “free speech” event was that it was closed to the general public; open, according to the UVA Box Office, to “UVA students, faculty and staff members and for invited guests of the sponsors only.” Those sponsors were “Think Again” and “the Heterodox Academy” — two organizations focused on promoting reactionary perspectives and right-wing faculty at UVA under the guise of demanding “viewpoint diversity.” I managed to score a ticket anyway, only to arrive and find an atmosphere of intense security: multiple checkpoints, metal detectors, plainclothed and heavily armed security, and a ban on opaque bags, as if a visiting head of state were in town. Inside I’d say the small auditorium was about half full, made up of some students but mostly older, wealthy-looking, white invitees and alumni.

The historical event that this talk was supposed to celebrate was a series of sit-ins and a building occupation at the University of California, Berkeley, in late 1964. It began when UC Police arrested Jack Weinberg, a former mathematics graduate student who was sitting at a table distributing leaflets and collecting donations for the Congress of Racial Equality, one of the principal organizing forces of the Civil Rights movement. Berkeley’s administrators, led by University of California President Clark Kerr, had banned unauthorized tabling in a failed effort to keep politics — especially radical politics — off campus. Weinberg, not being a current student, was to be charged with trespassing. (That’s the same charge leveled at most of the pro-Palestine protesters arrested this year, including those detained at UVA.)

But before police could take Weinberg away, thousands of students surrounded the police car, preventing it from moving. It sat for thirty-two hours — with some students climbing on top of the car as a platform to make speeches — until the charges against Weinberg were dropped. Two months later, many of those same protesters occupied the university’s administration building, Sproul Hall. For two days, they staged a sit- and teach-in. Joan Baez performed in the lobby. In the middle of the third night, police stormed the building arresting some 800 students. Amid the backlash, Berkeley loosened its restrictions on political activity, paving the way for the anti-Vietnam War, women’s liberation, and other protests that would come to define the decade that followed.

The documentary aired at Thursday’s event was titled Bodies Upon the Gears. That’s a reference to the most iconic speech from the 1964 protest, delivered during the Sproul Hall sit-in by one of the protest’s principal leaders, then 22-year-old undergrad Mario Savio. Written and directed by Paul Wagner, a lecturer in the UVA drama department, it was co-produced by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE — the conservative-libertarian alternative to the more historically left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union, which has in many ways supplanted the ACLU in the minds of college administrators, and, more importantly, the right-wing politicians who oversee them.

(If you need to know anything about FIRE, it’s that they named UVA the No. 1 school in America for free speech this fall — four months after UVA President Jim Ryan ordered the police to crush the anti-genocide protest, and mere days after the university buckled under pressure from Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin and other state officials to end a campus tour that highlighted the formative role slavery played in both the building of the university and the life of its founder, Thomas Jefferson.)

The documentary was, accordingly, a re-editing of one of the 20th Century’s most famous countercultural protests into something more adaptable for conservative nostalgia. After opening with a rendition of the protest spirtual “Wade in the Water,” the film underemphasized the central role played in the FSM by radical and left-wing groups like Students for a Democratic Society, the Young Socialist Alliance, and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Meanwhile, it exaggerated the nominal role played by right-wing groups like student supporters of then-Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.¹  

The filmmakers made sure to emphasize the good manners of the protesters, such as student leader Savio asking for permission and removing his shoes before climbing on top of the police car — ignoring the fact that they were egregiously (and rightfully) breaking the law by the thousands. And unless I missed it, the film completely omitted the occupation of Sproul Hall and the mass arrests that followed, perhaps for fear that they would invite obvious comparison to more recent and still controversial events.

In fact, as the essayist, historian, and literary scholar Louis Menand argued a few years ago, despite the name, the aims of the protest weren’t fundamentally about free speech at all:

(This is, by the way, how it almost always works, regardless of what particular politics or kinds of speech the activist favors. As I and others have often written before, there is no such thing as a free-speech absolutist.)

If the FIRE-funded documentary sanitized and libertarianized the Free Speech Movement, Weiss just ignored it completely.

If you’re unfamiliar with Bari: she’s a journalist, businesswoman, and one of the most successful grifters in a country that’s increasingly run by them. She started her public life trying to get her professors fired for their views on Palestine and Israel—under the guise of fighting for “academic freedom.” She wrote a book on antisemitism but professionally ignores the surging antisemitism on the global right. She poses as a disappointed liberal but came up through conservative media. Hired as an editor by the New York Times opinion desk at the behest of her mentor, Bret Stephens, she tried to get fired for being “anti-woke,” failed, then quit anyway.

Weiss bankrolled her self-cancellation into a series of grifts. These include a multimillion-dollar Substack newsroom called The Free Press that champions police crackdowns on speech; and a reactionary, as-yet-unaccredited liberal arts college with fewer than one hundred students called the “University of Austin,” funded by the fascist tech mogul Peter Thiel, GOP megadonor Jeff Yass, and Harlan Crow, the conservative activist famous for having effectively purchased Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Weiss was also a key player in Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files,” a project that, despite not uncovering the alleged conspiracy between the "Deep State" and Twitter’s previous management to harm Trump’s 2020 election bid that was promised, helped Musk justify dismantling the platform's moderation policies, now known as X.

In other words, Weiss is 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. If this sounds a lot like Donald Trump’s political project, that’s because it is. Not that his name came up during the event in any meaningful way.

In the post-film discussion, Mitch Daniels asked Weiss about the pro-Palestine and anti-genocide protest movement that started at her alma mater: “If you’d been president of Columbia last spring and then the previous fall, what would you have done differently?”

“Differently? Oh wow. I love that question,” she said. She thought for a moment and said: “Enforce the law.”

This got sustained applause from the invitation-only crowd. She then went on a rant about the student occupation of Hamilton Hall, the Columbia administration building, this spring — emphasizing damage to school property and the fact that a few employees were taken by surprise and briefly trapped inside. (Weiss misidentified the best-known example, a maintenance worker named Mariano Torres, who was captured in a viral photograph pinning a protester against the wall. Bari called him “Mario,” and claimed the protester was “pinned against the wall with the janitor,” which makes no sense.)

This is, again, extremely funny: “Enforcing the law” and criminalizing a student occupation of an administration building was precisely what Berkeley President Clark Kerr and the University of California Police were doing in 1964. It is also quite literally what the Free Speech Movement was protesting against. A competent moderator would have pressed her on that contradiction, but Daniels let her go on.

Weiss then offered her next point, a philosophical one:

This is why I think she just didn’t watch the movie. Because the filmmakers had to ignore the politics underlying the FSM (politics that in 2020 would have been called — shudder — “woke”), they had to offer an alternative rationale for the protest. The one they gave was opposition to the UC President Clark Kerr’s philosophy of the university as a kind of Fordist mass-production line, one that takes students as raw material and builds them into ideal citizens. They didn’t get this idea from nowhere: In Mario Savio’s most famous speech of the sit-in, he rejected the idea that the university was a factory meant to build its students into anything.

That is what Savio means by “the machine” in the most famous part of the speech — the one that is not only the centerpiece of the film but gives the film its title:

In other words, after watching a whole movie celebrating the Free Speech Movement, at an event meant to claim the mantle of the Free Speech Movement for 21st Century reactionaries, Bari Weiss’ answer for how she would handle protests as a university president was to be exactly like Clark Kerr.

In another ridiculous moment, Weiss tried to compare 2024’s student protesters disfavorably to those of 1964 by saying the students then “were waving American flags” and protesting for principles that are “uniquely American.” Whereas, as she put it: “on campuses [today] where the people who imagine themselves to be the inheritors of the people you just saw in that film are waving the flags of terrorist organizations and cheering on the behavior — I guess you could call it the Terrorism of America's Enemies.” She and Daniels agreed that “the simple distinction between speech and conduct” could have been used to ban the protests before they really got underway.

It might surprise Weiss and Daniels (and probably nobody else) to learn that almost the exact same criticisms were leveled at student protesters in the 1960s — some of whom would, in fact, wave the flags of the North Vietnamese Communists and express solidarity with the Viet Cong, which was indeed considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government at the time. Indeed, the FBI surveilled and interfered with the FSM organizers’ lives through its notorious COINTELPRO program, until the program was declared illegal in the 1970s. As Tom Hayden later wrote: “Mario was demonized as a virtual Fidel Castro, with the Berkeley hills as his Sierra Maestra. Here is J. Edgar Hoover from a 1966 memo: ‘Agitators on other campuses take their lead from activities which occur at Berkeley. If agitational activity at Berkeley can be effectively curtailed, this could set up a chain reaction which will result in the curtailment of such activities on other campuses throughout the United States.’”

Ronald Reagan launched his political career in California promising “to clean up the mess at Berkeley.” He said in a 1966 speech, as paraphrased by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History that …

Weiss could have saved time and just read the Gipper’s speech instead.

At another point, Weiss claimed that university students are “aggressively punished” for “microaggressions,” while being allowed to protest for social-justice causes — including, presumably, Palestinian freedom — as much as they like. (She admitted at another point that she had done no pre-reading on the campus she was visiting, saying, “I’m so curious what’s been going on at UVA over the past year.)

But easily the most stunning moment of the night came when Weiss invoked the infamous August 2017 Nazi torch rally at UVA, in which the Nazis — some of whom were wearing Trump’s Make America Great Again hats — chanted “You will not replace us!” and “Jews will not replace us!” before beating counterprotesters at the foot of a statue of Thomas Jefferson while police looked on.

Weiss did not remark on the fact that in the wake of the torch rally, then-UVA President Teresa Sullivan affirmed “the public’s right to access open spaces, including the rights of the marchers who assembled on our Grounds last night,” as well as their “First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly.” Nor that those rights to speech and assembly flew out the window when it came to the pro-Palestine protesters this year.

What Weiss did say was this: She claimed that the pro-Palestine protesters were both more violent and pernicious than literal Nazis — Nazis who marched, just seven years ago, past the very lecture hall where we were sitting. After having listened to Daniels and Weiss moan about a supposed epidemic of right-wing self-censorship for an hour, I performed perhaps the most intense act of self-censorship of the night.

The coup de grâce came at the end of the talk, when the free speech event concluded without taking a single question from any of the attendees. Instead, social psychologist and Heterodox Academy co-founder Jonathan Haidt was invited to the stage to read notes from some private colloquy held earlier in the day, and to shower praise on Weiss for all her successes “before the age of 41.”

And indeed, judging from the applause and the smiles on the faces of the organizers, the event probably was a success. Some wealthy alumni and reactionary professors got new talking points. Everyone was inspired by a contextless clip from a protester’s speech from sixty years ago that doesn’t threaten anyone anymore. No one challenged Weiss on her neo-Kerrian approach to campus speech. Nor did anyone press her on what she would do to protect threatened speech if an authoritarian Trump regime came to power again in January — a regime that counts among its supporters, by Weiss’ own boastful admission, some of her staffers on The Free Press. Where do we go from here, indeed?

1  In fact it was an attempt by the head of the California Goldwater delegation, former senator William Knowland, to get the university to ban students from distributing anti-Goldwater literature and soliciting donations for anti-Goldwater candidates at tables at the edge of the campus that kicked off the initial speech restriction that summer, which culminated in Weinberg's arrest — a fact assiduously omitted by the film.