The New Woke Right Wants Its Own Safe Space

Self-professed “free-speech absolutist” Elon Musk. Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

In the 2010s, a certain kind of social-justice activist took a hard turn against the mainstream media. The rancor was of a different flavor than the Chomskyan critiques of corporate media and the consent it allegedly manufactured. It wasn’t so much that conventional journalists were too moderate for them and not sympathetic enough to their causes, though that explained some of their anger. It was more that the concept of journalism itself — independent reporters appearing at public events to gather facts, speak to individuals, and take photographs — was somehow a threat to these activists’ well-being.

This sentiment might have been best encapsulated by Melissa Click, a University of Missouri communications professor who tried, a decade ago, to forcibly stop a student journalist from filming a racial-justice protest on campus. Caught on-camera asking for “muscle” to block the student who was merely recording a public event, Click became emblematic of the “woke” left run amok. She would apologize, but the controversy represented more than one hotheaded professor attempting to foolishly police the coverage of one campus protest.

Rather, it spoke to a growing consensus among a certain segment of the activist class that media coverage itself could be harmful or even destructive. First Amendment concerns and the concept of a public domain had to be, suddenly, subordinate to the feelings of individual activists. The left’s growing skepticism of free speech as an inherent value — even the ACLU had evolved from an organization that defended the right of the Ku Klux Klan to march in public to one that, during Donald Trump’s first term, began to reject the argument that the right wing needed civil-liberties protections — paved the way for conservatives to reinvent themselves as First Amendment warriors, or at least those more committed to free expression.

Now, with Trump ascendant and Elon Musk dominating both the website formerly known as Twitter and the federal bureaucracy itself, conservatives have begun to adopt many of the same pathologies as the old social-justice class. Conventional journalism that identifies the members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) or exposed who might be the mother of Musk’s latest child is reimagined as a grievous attack on a weaker, more vulnerable party that needs special protection — or what might have been called, not so long ago, a safe space.

Reporting on DOGE, for example, has been recast as “doxing,” even though the young engineers and activists recruited to aid Musk’s efforts are performing extraordinarily public work, implementing cuts and staffing changes that impact tens of thousands of federal employees and alter how most Americans interact with a government funded with their tax dollars. “The so-called New York Times outs 45 people working for DOGE,” fumed Byron York, the chief political correspondent for the conservative Washington Examiner, in response to a Times report identifying by name numerous members of Musk’s DOGE team.

The writer Geoff Shullenberger has referred to this trend as the “bizarro awokening,” with complaints of doxing replacing what was, on the old liberal Twitter of the 2010s, typically tagged as harassment. Before Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, the platform was remarkably influential with activists, celebrities, politicians, pundits, and journalists, many of them on the left. There was an aristocracy of verified “blue checks” who could wield their clout to blast those who went against whatever popular consensus existed at the moment. That aristocracy, thanks to Musk, is largely dead, swapped for conservatives who have mostly paid for blue-check verification badges and parrot whatever Musk and Trump spew out. They are no more committed to free expression than the “woke” left and furiously try to stamp out any criticism lodged at their dear leaders. Just as Twitter did eventually become real life, the manias of X now bleed out into the physical world: The president of NYU’s chapter of the College Republicans was forced to resign earlier this month after she was quoted telling Vanity Fair that Barron Trump was “sort of like an oddity on campus.” Cancel culture lives!

As Trump inevitably falters — his poll numbers are already slipping, and if Republicans enact devastating social-safety-net cuts, Democrats will have plenty to campaign on in the midterms — expect conservatives to further close ranks and panic, straining to stamp out whatever dissent they find in their midst. The witch hunts for anything resembling “DEI” are already more extreme than any of the liberal speech policing found at the height of the social-justice era. One college in Michigan has already preemptively banned readings from a variety of non-white writers (as well as George Orwell, ironically enough) out of fear that the Trump administration might pull their federal funding.

The dispiriting reality of our contemporary political discourse is that neither ideological faction cares much for free expression. The values inherent in the First Amendment are trampled on or outright discarded whenever it becomes convenient for one political party. Perhaps, in time, there will be a shift and these sort of destructive inanities will come to an end. It’s all quite exhausting, at the very least.