Abstract
Manufactured, divisive and destructive outrage over supposed ‘woke’ issues has long been building in the UK, fomented by think-tanks, media and politicians. To understand the relationship between culture wars in the US and the UK, the interests that lie behind them, and what can be learnt from US resistances to corporate donor influence, Liz Fekete interviews Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola, authors of Free Speech and Koch Money: manufacturing a campus culture war (Pluto Press, 2021). Wilson and Kamola analyse the situation in terms of a plutocratic class’s counter-revolution against progressive gains in labour, civil rights and consumer and environmental protections. Though corporate leaders do not hesitate to make use of figures on the alt-Right and those who promote racial science, the authors argue that culture wars are ultimately related to the need to unchain wealth from any regulatory or other constraints.
Keywords
Introduction
The US-based heavy industry tycoon Charles Koch is the fifteenth richest man in the world with an estimated wealth of $70 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index 2022. Not content with amassing wealth and building one of the largest private companies on the planet, Koch wants political influence. Bringing together corporate donors around organisations such as the Atlas Network (a partnership of 502 think-tanks in ninety-nine countries 1 ), Koch seeks to create an integrated pro-corporate network which includes academic centres, think-tanks, lobbying groups and litigation outfits. Enthused by rightwing libertarian ideas and intent on unchaining capital from the restraining hand of regulation, coroporate-backed networks such as Atlas try to foment a counter-revolution against progressive gains in the field of labour and civil rights and consumer and environmental protections. Ploughing huge sums of money into provoking outrage and manufacturing free speech crises on college campuses, as Wilson and Kamola explain in their foundational study, 2 is key to their political strategy. While Free Speech and Koch Money deals with corporate donor networks in the US, a final chapter on the ‘Free Speech International’ documents transatlantic connections, including between the US and the UK, via rightwing think-tanks like the Adam Smith Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, Policy Exchange, Centre for Policy Studies and Spiked Online, some of which have been criticised by Transparify for their ‘highly opaque’ funding streams. 3
Since the manufactured culture wars and anti-woke campaigns that Wilson and Kamola had described in the US, the attacks on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the civil rights of trans people, in particular, are now firmly part of the mainstream in the UK, I sought out Wilson and Kamola for further discussion (via email exchanges in August 2022). I wanted to learn from their firsthand experiences of assisting students and faculty in the US to develop resistance strategies to destructive culture wars so as to draw out possible lessons to apply in the UK and elsewhere.
Noisy and destructive outrage over so-called ‘woke issues’ has been building up in the UK ever since 2019, when the Conservative party promised in its election manifesto to ‘strengthen academic freedom and free speech in universities’. Central to the manufacture of such outrage are organisations and individuals with links to the Koch network. A sister movement to the pro-Trump youth movement Turning Point US, which was funded by close allies of Koch, was also set up in the UK in 2019. Other initiatives with alleged links to the Koch network are Spiked Online, the Free Speech Union, and the Battle of Ideas charity. The Christian legal defence organisation, the Alliance Defending Freedom, financed by corporate donors in the US and characterised by the Southern Poverty Law group as a hate organisation for its efforts to recriminalise homosexuality and defence of the sterilisation of transgender people, has also set up a branch in the UK where it claims to have influenced the drafting of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill. Following Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s ousting as leader of the Conservatives, the leadership race of both Liz Truss (Foreign Secretary) and Rishi Sunak (former Chancellor) has seen anti-woke and culture issues once again pressed into service, with the latter proposing to extend the definition of ‘extremism’ to those who ‘vilify Britain’ and display ‘an extreme hatred of our country’.
Black commentators have warned that talking about slavery could be a crime under such a law − and with good reason. In October 2020, free speech champion Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch sought to import the US attack on CRT, implying during a Commons debate on Black History Month that teachers who use CRT or talk about white privilege could be prosecuted. Shortly after, the Department of Education attempted (unsuccessfully) to prevent schools from using resources critical of capitalism, explicitly mentioning in its guidance that the materials of groups like Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion would fall under the ban. And recent investigations raise the question whether the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, which is set to limit academic freedom and weed out progressive views on campus, particularly relating to racial justice and the teaching of Britain’s imperial history, was drafted with the assistance of a network of academics in Cambridge University’s Divinity Faculty linked to the Free Speech Union, 4 as well as the Republican billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, whose influences in the UK are further discussed below.
In Free Speech and Koch Money you describe an organised counter-revolution by arch-libertarians and free marketeers who are seeking to reverse decades of progress made by movements for social justice. Organised networks, funded by a plutocratic libertarian class, are fomenting culture wars and manufacturing a crisis over free speech. Could you summarise briefly the main attributes of these networks, and how they function in the US and internationally? Where the New Right – or libertarian Right as you term it – is involved, debates in the US often travel to the UK. Can you perhaps give us insights into the way US and UK donor networks and think-tanks might overlap?
Thanks for that question. In our book we focus on the Koch Donor Network. This highly secretive group of donors meets twice a year, at seminars organised by Charles Koch. These seminars bring rightwing and libertarian political operatives, organisations, politicians, and media personalities together with wealthy donors. These donors are interested in passing legislation that not only secures their wealth, but also promotes a radical libertarian agenda. Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains, has aptly called it ‘property supremacy’, i.e., capital totally freed from government; total control over one’s own money and property, for individuals and corporations, with any taxation considered coercive and oppressive. It’s radical free-market capitalism without the constraints of democratic oversight. Many of these donors are in industries that are extractive and thus highly regulated, including fossil fuels and finance. And, therefore, the mantra that any form of government regulation violates individual freedom, and is therefore a form of Stalinist take-over of America, is highly attractive in terms of setting the policy agenda that follows from it.
This donor class has then set up philanthropic organisations that fund a network of academic centres, think-tanks, lobbying groups, media outlets, litigation groups, data analytics firms and targeted political outreach groups. As a result, these donors are able to create an echo chamber large enough to be mistaken for mass popular mobilisation. We’re seeing that right now. The Black Lives Matter movement – an actual democratic uprising demanding a fundamental reckoning with racial and economic inequality – is being actively undermined by a moral panic about ‘critical race theory’, or CRT. This sudden weaponisation of CRT was cooked up in Koch network think-tanks, spread through Koch network media outlets, and effected by parents at school board meetings with talking points and legal support from Koch network mobilisation groups. 5 Now politicians backed by the same donors are advocating bills that criminalise the teaching of CRT. Why? Because the kind of criticisms being advanced by movements such as Black Lives Matter – as well as labour unions, climate activists, public health advocates and others – are seen as a fundamental threat to the libertarian ideology that justifies their pro-corporate policies. After all, if structural racism, climate change or pandemics are complex problems that require concerted social responses, then that requires government action. Which requires taxation and regulation. Which cuts against both their bottom line and the libertarian ideology used to justify their obscene wealth.
However, we think it would be a mistake to think of this donor network as solely interested in profit. It is also radical, not just self-interested. Radical in the sense that the goal is to fundamentally transform society. For me, that revelation came when I read that the political economist and libertarian activist Murray Rothbard told Charles Koch he needed to read Lenin, because Lenin knew how to capture the state. 6 I think it’s helpful to think of Charles Koch and many of the donors and political activists around him as true revolutionaries. They want to seize the state, in order to replace it with their libertarian fantasy land. Pundits and academics, however, often miss this. They like to think of the political positions put forward as a gentle exchange of ideas among people holding differing views. Parlour talk, like the New York Times editorial page. Charles Koch, however, wants to remake the world in his image. And he understands that ideas – and academic ideas in particular – are an essential part of making that happen. It is about turning their ideas into action.
As we discuss in our book, their guiding organisational strategy – the Structure of Social Change – places academics and the production of ideas (the ‘raw material’) at the centre of their political strategy. Instead of funding a hodgepodge of groups, the Koch Donor Network funds a highly integrated network of coordinated groups whose aggregate effect is the industrial production of political change.
What was so enlightening about the book is the way you see ‘outrage’, or rather the deliberate manufacture of outrage over free speech, as also part of the vital ‘raw material’ that Koch networks can refine into usable form. Taken up by pressure groups and amplified in the media, it becomes grist for further action by libertarian litigation outfits hoping to sue colleges or push for new legislation.
In fact, the book seeks to contextualise this historically, demonstrating that this anti-statist, anti-civil rights libertarianism has deep roots. For example, after the US Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which mandated school desegregation, a number of white folks who benefited from segregation condemned this decision as an act of judicial – and governmental – overreach. The Civil Rights Movement was met by incredibly robust organising on the Right, aimed at rolling back desegregation. Organisations like the virulently anti-communist John Birch Society, of which Charles Koch’s father was a co-founder, saw the Civil Rights Movement as an existential threat to American capitalism. And they harnessed the language of ‘free markets’ and ‘free choice’ to justify the continuation of segregation, but without having to rely on explicitly racist language. Economic choice – namely, the freedom of parents to choose their kid’s school – became a useful vernacular for maintaining white supremacy.
Charles Koch grew up in this milieu. And became fascinated with free-market philosophers, and the Austrian school of economics in particular. He spent the 1970s setting up libertarian study groups and hosting conferences, funding libertarian intellectuals, and building the Libertarian party. A watershed moment came in 1980, when his brother, David, ran as the vice president of the party, and got absolutely crushed. Even after dumping millions of dollars into the campaign. After this loss, they began to re-evaluate their political engagements. The Koch brothers concluded that, rather than influencing politics downstream, at the ballot box or by lobbying individual legislators, they should conceptualise social change as an industrial process. They funded academic centres, think-tanks, voter mobilisation groups, legal organisations, media outlets, data analytic firms, a whole gamut of institutions, each with its own specialisation. And when an issue came up – defeating Obamacare or preventing the regulation of carbon emissions or pushing anti-union policies in state legislatures or promoting anti-CRT legislation – these organisations jumped into action, working together but giving the impression of mass support.
Doesn’t their weaponisation of free speech put us in something of a quandary? After all, as progressives, we would want as much freedom of speech as possible. For our readers could you clarify what you mean by ‘absolutist free speech’, a term you often use in the book, and how it differs from social justice concepts of free speech.
Like a lot of ideals in US politics, the boundaries of free speech have been warped beyond their initial intent, pushed to absurd limits beyond the needs of the vast majority of people. For example, such extreme interpretations of speech have established absurd legal precedents like equating speech to money and corporations to people, allowing unchecked corporate spending in elections. US Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United v. FEC have established the notion that the political ‘speech’ of corporations can’t be regulated. 7 These same legal precedents about political speech have been used to attack labour unions, claiming that labour unions using dues money to support candidates is a violation of a worker’s political speech. At the same time, the free speech moral panic has been used to justify a flurry of laws that crack down on lawful protesters.
So, when we describe free speech ‘absolutists’, we are partly referring to people who justify expanding anything that can be construed as speech no matter how questionable the justification or how destructive the outcome.
And, it should be noted, that this free speech absolutism is highly hypocritically held. For example, it’s quite common for professors who speak out against structural racism to face an outrage machine and targeted harassment organised by many of the same players, and without a hint of irony. Free speech absolutism for me, but not for thee.
Totally, and on top of that, there is also a very real sense in which the moral panic is cultivating its own version of absolutism but this time among progressives whose idealisation goes back to the free speech movement of the 1960s. It isn’t a coincidence that the far Right is invoking an ideal that has been held closely by progressives for decades. A naive romanticisation of free speech is quite effectively enabling the far Right’s weaponisation of free speech, offering themselves up as unwitting allies in the culture war. Part of this may be due to the way the US differs from the UK in its regulation of speech. The US allows anything short of violence to be tolerated, even if it systematically incites racial hatred. This has allowed hateful and violent ideologies to proliferate unchecked. Progressives in the US have celebrated the protection of free speech, including a begrudging protection for Nazis and fascists. These progressive ideals have been co-opted by corporate interests and hate-mongers, both of which flourish with the further deregulation of speech.
Another term you often use, to describe some think-tanks and groups on campus, is ‘astroturf’ – what do you mean?
The phrase comes from a particular brand of artificial grass, Astroturf. In the political context, it refers to an effort that gives the false appearance of being a bottom-up, grassroots effort by citizens, when instead it is a top-down effort backed by a large private interest. Astroturf groups create the illusion of popular support for something to provide cover and support for lobbyists, as well as providing highly visible public pressure on decision-makers.
The Koch Donor Network has excelled in creating organisations that specialise in astroturf. For example, the anti-Obama Tea Party movement within the Republican party that appeared to have started as a few people with silly costumes standing on street corners. But it was groups backed by the Koch network that provided full-time paid organisers, infrastructural support, media and institutional contacts to harness anxiety and outrage into a political weapon that could be used to stall Obama’s highly popular political agenda.
A lot of the most destructive libertarian free speech interventions on campus you write about – the ones that feature prominently in the media – focus on students of colour and trans students. Do you see these as separate, discrete attacks, or is there some thread in libertarian thinking that connects attacks on racial and sexual minorities?
That is a keen observation and an important question. I think the libertarian Right’s hostility to those who take questions of race and gender seriously is highly instructive. Unlike the religious Right, in which the condemnation of difference is grounded in theology, for libertarianism the threat is deeply ideological. Libertarianism is predicated on the claim that we should all have the opportunities to make our own individual choices, and to maximise our individual utility as we see fit. These arguments, of course, are grounded in a highly idealised understanding of individual freedom. There is no place to understand ‘the social’ in libertarian thought. And anyone who does argue, for example, that one needs to understand the social construction of race and gender is considered a ‘cultural Marxist’ (whatever that means). For libertarian ideology to make any sense whatsoever, one cannot engage the social. After all, if one takes seriously the ways in which structures of race and gender are simultaneously meaningful and socially constructed, then libertarian ideology can only be seen for what it is – an absurd world view based on a set of philosophical abstractions that do not actually bear out under close scrutiny. In short, taking race and gender seriously poses an existential threat to libertarian ideology.
One of the reasons we’re seeing the Right mobilise so ferociously in the past year against ‘critical race theory’ and against the rights for trans people is because the most simple claim that ‘my life is largely (or partially) shaped by forces outside of me’ is a fundamental rebuke to the basic claims of libertarianism. After all, if hundreds of years of history shape the construction of race and gender, informing everything from wages to life expectancy, then the libertarian fantasy that everyone should be free to make their own choices crumbles. Furthermore, understanding race and gender as socially constructed means that complex social issues – like racism and transphobia – require solutions that require collective responses, including solidarity, mutual respect, and even bending the state to intervene in ways that make people’s lives better. All things the libertarians detest. However, after the protests in 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, arguments about structural racism that had circulated in activist and academic circles for decades went mainstream. It freaked plutocratic libertarians out. And what we’re seeing now is an organised, well-resourced and ‘all-hands-on-deck’ counter-revolution to the claim that social problems need social solutions. If large sections of society begin to see race and gender as socially constructed, it becomes impossible for their radical version of libertarianism to be seen as anything other than a thin, and empirically false, ideology that exists primarily to serve the interests of the wealthy. After all, climate change, poverty and pandemics are also complex social problems. And the libertarians fear that people will begin to demand social solutions to these social problems as well.
It is really alarming to read in your book that the plutocratic libertarian donor class is strongly invested in supporting long-discredited ideas around eugenics, racial science, particularly the claims, by the likes of Charles Murray, of genetic racial and gendered differences in levels of intelligence. 8 I know you’ve been following controversies here around racial science, the first involving the journalist and ‘free schools’ advocate, Toby Young. In fact, Young set up the Free Speech Union to oppose ‘cancel culture’ shortly after he resigned from the board of the Office for Students, the government’s higher education regulator. There had been an online petition, even supported by leading Conservative MPs, to get his appointment rescinded – and shortly after his resignation it was revealed that he had attended a conference on eugenics and intelligence attended by white supremacists. 9 That was back in 2018. More recently a second controversy has involved theologians at the Divinity Faculty of University of Cambridge, who have hosted both Charles Murray and the conservative psychologist Jordan Peterson who seems to support Murray’s positions on race, gender and intelligence and is something of a hero on the alt-Right for his views on gender identity. The Cambridge theologians’ free speech crusade has allegedly been supported from its inception by Charles Vaughan, chief of staff at Thiel Capital, a venture capital fund that provides strategic and operational support for Peter Thiel’s investment initiatives. 10 Do you think there are any lessons we can draw from these controversies?
Yeah, the Peter Thiel stuff is scary. There is actually quite a bit of ideological overlap, with people calling Thiel the new Koch (although that title probably now goes to Barre Seid with his $1.6 billion cheque to Leonard Leo!). One difference, however, is that the Koch Donor Network operates in fairly predictable ways. They set up ‘philanthropic’ organisations to fund their political machinery because they can claim tax write-offs. But, in doing so, they also leave a paper trail. Likewise, they are interested in building a political machinery that they control. Which is why they’ve often opposed Trump, even if they benefit from his tax cuts and deregulation. Charles Koch is an engineer. He’s interested in building a rational machine that can not only produce social change at an industrial scale but a machine that he remains in control of. The Thiel Network, in contrast, is much more elusive and more comfortable with Trumpism. And unlike Koch, Thiel has also always been a culture warrior and, what we would now call, a rightwing troll, even back in his college days at Stanford. His book The Diversity Myth (1995) would fit nicely on a shelf next to any number of alt-Right thinkers. Plus it’s clear that Thiel doesn’t have the same kind of intellectual consistency as Charles Koch. For example, Koch’s commitment to his radical libertarianism also means that he funds think-tanks opposed to US foreign interventionism and supports prison reform (of course, in the name of privatising prisons . . . but at least he still sees mass incarceration as governmental overreach). Thiel, in contrast, is the founder of Palantir, an American software company that specialises in big data analytics which exists to surveil citizens and depends on government contracts for much of its revenue. Thiel covertly funds litigation strategies (such as Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit which ended up bankrupting the gossip blog Gawker which outed Thiel as gay 11 ) as well as traditional political candidates, Dark Web outlets 12 and social media influencers, and other forms of cultural and political interventions, often without leaving the same kinds of fingerprints. 13 Prior to the 2016 election of Trump, for example, Thiel used his Silicon Valley clout to pressure Facebook into not taking steps that would constrain the ability of rightwing, alt-Right, and pro-Trump accounts to spread disinformation on the platform. 14
I’d like us to talk a bit more about some of the groups that are active in the UK. One group you focus on in terms of transatlantic connections is Spiked Online, which launched the ‘Down With Campus Censorship campaign’ in 2014, also releasing Free Speech University Rankings. It undoubtedly helped create the groundswell for the introduction of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill. Another of the ‘astroturf’ groups you write about is the pro-Trump student movement Turning Point US. In fact, a sister organisation was formed in the UK to much fanfare, but it does not seem to really have got off the ground. Can you give us any insights here?
As far as Turning Point UK goes, it is hard to say. They appear to still be operating and agitating in the UK. It seems harder to sell their identical brand of outrage in other countries, as most of the anecdotes used to justify the free speech ‘crisis’ come from the US. There seems to be much more scepticism, despite the international portrayal of a crisis, but don’t count them out just yet. When combined with the efforts of other kinds of groups, they are potentially laying the groundwork for the kind of dangerous anti-democratic efforts seen in the US on January 6, 2021. In the US, Turning Point USA was a breeding ground for other groups with more dangerous ideology.
Similarly, there are other groups operating in the UK that are fronts for a similar brand of libertarian ideology. There is a web of organisations and outlets which is essentially a front for a small group of revolutionary libertarians that the Koch foundation has begun supporting for their culture war shenanigans. Groups like: Spiked Online, Manifesto Club, Academy of Ideas, Institute of Ideas, and Battle of Ideas. These organisations were founded by a small network of people affiliated with a publication called Living Marxism that shuttered in 2000, people like Frank Furedi, Brendan O’Neill, Claire Fox, Fiona Fox and Mick Hume. The Charles Koch Foundation has funded Spiked Online’s US counterpart and the Legatum Institute, both of which are perpetuating the free speech crisis narrative in the UK. Spiked US received $280,000 from the Koch foundation between 2016 and 2018, and the Legatum Institute received $102,000 between 2019 and 2020 from Koch and Donors Trust.
Another avenue of influence over campuses in the UK is the growing flow of US money onto UK campuses. Our book describes the problem with corporate and far-right donors on US campuses, namely their pursuit of influence over the programmes so that they can be leveraged for maximum political effect. The free speech crisis can also be seen as providing cover to these donor-funded activities, namely providing blanket protections for any and all speech, which includes far-right ideology but also more under-the-radar research funded because it furthers a donor’s political or financial interests.
Of the hundreds of universities funded by the Koch foundation, most are in the US, but the UK is now the second largest recipient with a growing number of recipients in 2019 and 2020, the most recent year tax data is available. According to the Charles Koch Foundation’s tax filings, Kings College, London, received $106,200 (2014–2019), Pembroke College, Oxford, $1,000 (2017), University of Surrey, $41,767 (2019–2020), University of Birmingham, $65,000 (2019–2020), University of Manchester, $8,000 (2020), and University of Oxford, $428,000 (2019).
Can we turn to what’s happening at the new ‘anti-woke free speech private start up’ college, the University of Austin. Its launch was announced after your book was published and we know that many of its high-profile lecturers have links to Koch-affiliated institutions and that Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, is a partner. All this makes the warning in your book, that the real intent of corporate donor networks, for all their championing of free speech, is to create a ‘parallel academy where ideas, including bigoted ideas, which were soundly rejected in actual academic fields are revived and widely circulated’, prophetic. Actually, for us in the UK, the news about the formation of the University of Austin dovetailed with a highly mediatised controversy involving Professor Kathleen Stock. Stock resigned from Sussex University, where, she says, she was targeted by students and victimised by the university staff’s trades union over her views on gender identification, including her insistence that individuals cannot change biological sex, 15 shortly before announcing her new lectureship at Austin. But to get to my question. Despite the fanfare that surrounded the launch of the University of Austin, we haven’t heard anything much since. Has it been a flop, or is there more to this than meets the eye?
Yeah, University of Austin. That was a thing. I see the University of Austin as a trial balloon for a different strategy. So far, the goal has primarily been to create beachheads of libertarian thought at existing and reputable institutions. The Koch network understands that the main thing they get from an affiliation with a university is legitimacy. To have faculty developing all kinds of libertarian legal, philosophical, or ‘economic’ theories – but to be able to say they were developed not by partisan think-tanks but by faculty members at University of Arizona, Utah State, or my own institution Trinity College in Hartford, CT – is really useful. I see University of Austin as an attempt to do for libertarianism what Liberty University and Hillsdale College have done for Christian conservatives, i.e., create an entirely parallel set of academic institutions.
The problem was that announcing plans for an institution that didn’t actually exist cuts against the legitimacy question. When it became clear what this ‘university’ actually was, many of the academics who initially joined, likely wooed by the free speech talk, started to cut bait. Leaving the project seemingly in disarray, and with only the more fringe-y folks still on board.
It’s also expensive to run your own university! Koch understands this. That’s why the Koch Donor Network provides a few million dollars here and there to transform free-standing libertarian think-tanks, maintained with donor money, into academic centres on campus. This means the states of Arizona and Utah now pay for the maintenance of these Koch-affiliated academic centres, rather than the donors. That not only makes financial sense but also means that those think-tanks are now treated as legitimate academic centres.
I have no idea if the University of Austin was ever a sincere enterprise, or just a sophisticated trolling operation. It looks like it is starting to host actual events? However, I do think that it exemplifies the ways in which the Thiel network isn’t particularly interested in, committed to, or capable of building the same kind of institutions that the Koch Donor Network is. However, they are interested in injecting and platforming the most sensationalist ideas, draped in the language of free speech.
I think it is important to discuss legislation and regulation in the UK and how this differs from the US. In 2019, President Trump signed an executive order threatening a withdrawal of federal funding from institutions that failed to protect free speech. Though we don’t have a presidential system in the UK, there are clear parallels. The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, currently going through parliament, is designed to remove institutional barriers to the expression of racist and bigoted views on campus. The strengthening of the powers of the supposedly independent higher education sector regulator, the Office for Students (OfS) 16 is also cause for concern, given the proposed introduction of a new statutory tort, for breach of the duty to ‘actively promote’ freedom of speech, which will be policed by OfS. 17
And now we also suspect that some of those involved in the ‘Thiel network’, already discussed, as well as the Christian litigation outfit, the Alliance for Defending Freedom, were an influence on the drafting of this free speech legislation. 18 Drawing on your US experience, would you have any advice for us about the role the OfS might play in policing progressive social justice movements? Could you also draw lessons for us on two recent controversies surrounding the OfS, the first being the short-lived appointment in 2018 of Toby Young of the Free Speech Union to its board, and more recently, the revelation that OfS director Lord James Wharton (who ran Boris Johnson’s 2019 campaign to succeed Theresa May as prime minister) participated at the US Conservative Political Action Conference’s (CPAC) inaugural meeting in Europe. This conference, which is highly influential within the Republican party, took place in Budapest and foregrounded the dangerous ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory. 19
In the US, free speech has been used to produce a tremendous amount of legislation aimed at letting politicians drastically regulate progressive speech on campus while deregulating far-right and corporate speech. The development of free speech and academic freedom policies is best left to the universities themselves, rather than regulated by crusading politicians of the moment.
As for CPAC, a telling example of their international expansion can be seen in Australia where they help to bridge the global far-right movement. 20 It was a similarly telling nexus of corporate speech and hate speech. These networks of power and hate are consolidating their ideology and strategies. As we examine in the book, there is a concerted effort to replicate the US free speech ‘crisis’ in other anglophone countries, and so it is important to know that those efforts are a prelude to a far-right political offensive on higher education.
As far as strategies go . . . It’s always important to follow the money. Nafeez Ahmed at Byline Times has done remarkable reporting doing exactly this, looking into Toby Young, the Office of Students and Thiel money on UK campuses. I think following the money is especially important because it shifts the framework out of a culture war frame and focuses on the political interests positioned to benefit from whipping up a campus culture war.
So, CPAC Hungary in May was quite shocking and, in general, the American Right’s love affair with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is deeply disconcerting. The fact that Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, and American Conservative blogger Rod Dreher and others are tripping over themselves to be seen with Orbán and praising him as offering a political future to emulate is, frankly, frightening. But it’s also not surprising to see that Jack Posobiec, an antisemitic media personality who became famous for promoting the Pizzagate Conspiracy, was also invited to speak at CPAC Hungary. 21 In fact, I think CPAC is a perfect metaphor for what is happening to the libertarian Right in general. After all, the American Conservative Union (ACU), which hosts CPAC, was initially created by Conservative-movement founders, including William F. Buckley Jr., Frank S. Meyer and others. And CPAC has been a vehicle for pushing more libertarian views into the mainstream. But now this infrastructure built by wealthy corporate plutocrats is firmly in the hands of the Trumpist culture warriors. Or, more accurately, the wealthy plutocrats who think they can still harness the political energy of the cranks and crazies.
In 1976, Charles Koch presented a paper in which he pointed out that sometimes the libertarian movement could spread its ‘radical ideas . . . gradually and tactfully’, but other times these ideas could be ‘advocated starkly for shock value’. I think we’re seeing that phenomenon play out. The real energy on the Right is in the shock and awe of culture war attacks (and an absolutist vision of ‘free speech’ helps stoke that form of politics). But now the infrastructure built by plutocratic libertarians is also quite comfortable platforming and amplifying advocates of authoritarianism, racism, conspiracy theories, homophobia. Even if those who built the infrastructure are uncomfortable being affiliated with the Jack Posobiecs of the world, they aren’t doing much to condemn, for example, the great replacement conspiracy that is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. Not only that, they likely know that they benefit from this kind of talk.
Finally, whether we are students, social justice activists or professional workers within civil society organisations, what advice can you give us about how best to avoid getting caught up in draining culture wars, and free speech conflicts – is it possible to change the terms of debate?
In general, my advice is to be even more willing to articulate and defend your view of the good life and be willing to really fight for it. Personally, I want to see widespread political and social responses to the hard economic, racial, ecological and social crises facing our communities and our planet. And I have an optimism that there are solutions to these crises, but they require good people working together in creative, dynamic and radically new alternatives to push society in the direction of equity and justice. Now, imagine if your primary goal was preserving your own wealth and your own fragile and narrow vision of the world. And imagine if you saw everything that threatened your wealth and worldview as an existential threat. The road to serfdom, if you will. You would take drastic measures to protect all that you hold dear. Unfortunately, we don’t have the same resources, or the same fifty-year head start, but we do need the same energy, certainty, commitment and long-term organising as the Koch network. This organising is, of course, already taking place. But being aware of the organised interests arrayed against us, the resources these groups possess, and the networked nature of that infrastructure is really important. To make sure that we’re not blindsided in ways that derail that organising work.
In terms of responding to campus culture war politics in particular, I think it is really important to trust students and educators. Many aspects of the university most hated by plutocratic libertarians – such as ethnic and gender studies – were created because students, then deemed too radical, demanded that their colleges and universities be responsive to their lived experiences. Likewise, many Koch-funded organisations are actively fighting against what they caricature as campus-biased response policies, which are often created in response to student demands that they do not have to experience explicit racism and sexism every time they walk across campus. Likewise, when students protest rightwing and fascist speakers, it is often because they are the ones who have to live in the dorms and eat in the dining halls with people who imbibe these toxic ideas. However, the free speech and culture war framing assumes two equally sincere sides.
However, the strategy of the Koch-funded political machinery has long been to manufacture the ‘other side’ – create an argument to undermine those positions they disagree with for ideological reasons. If climate scientists conclude that climate change is man-made, they fund scientists to say the opposite. If the majority of voters support policies that you oppose, claim voter fraud and limit who can vote. On the one hand, this two-siderism is used to create the semblance of rational debate and reasonable disagreement. But it is also used to paint those they disagree with, such as calling professors who teach feminism or teach about race, the enemy. And this Manichean culture war rhetoric is getting really, really overheated. But you can’t engage these claims as if they are arguments that can be won logically. The goal is not to win a parlour game but to fundamentally transform society. And behind it? A massive political strategy designed to win political power and to impose a worldview the plutocratic libertarians prefer. Engaging within this culture war framework is not just exhausting, it also ultimately gives credibility to claims and positions that do not deserve such attention. Or that only exist because of the massive infrastructure that keeps zombie libertarian ideas alive, long after they’ve been discredited. Despite railing against ‘handouts,’ it is fair to say that plutocratic libertarians have created their own welfare state to support their preferred version of Austrian economics – even as these ideas are widely discredited, even by the most mainstream neoclassical, free-market economists.
On campuses, for example, students, faculty and administrators have spent decades judiciously addressing the complicated issues of balancing academic freedom and free speech, against the needs of students, and the public mission of the institution itself. It’s often incredibly difficult to get these issues right. And some institutions do it better than others. However, navigating these important ethical, political and intellectual issues takes considerable time and patience, and negotiation. However, the same donors who want to completely deregulate political speech are also using their networked infrastructure to deregulate speech on campus. It’s important to ask what they stand to gain out of extending the precedent that ‘money is speech’ beyond the sphere of political spending to include spending on campus, whether funding dissident scholars, student groups, or outside speakers. However seemingly inefficient colleges and universities might be, the point is that they are best governed by the norms that they have established internally over time, not transformed to match a sudden, manufactured ideal. They are – or should be – places of constant mediation, debate, review, critique. However, in the name of ‘free speech’, corporate interests are deeply invested in influencing what speech is regulated.
I also think it is important not to be too abstract about this. For example, we have been talking about ‘neoliberalism’ for decades now. Those kinds of discussions are useful, but tend to make the anti-democratic, anti-poor, often racist and homophobic policies of certain people in power seem as if they are a natural machination of ‘neoliberalism’. Rather, the political landscape we are living in today is the result of political machinery built by wealthy corporatists who were frightened by the democratic victories won through the hard organising of young people, people of colour, LGBT+ people. The organising of unions and working-class people and students. Because the corporate libertarians don’t have numbers on their side, they use their resources to build the appearance of public support. And put in place the policies that we then call ‘neoliberalism’. Structures are built by people with names. Name them.
For example, one could tell a story of the CRT moral panic that centres on concerned parents showing up to school board meetings to demand greater choice in what their kids read in school. And we could debate whether these parents really understand what CRT is, and whether CRT is actually being taught in their kid’s school. And conclude that they are largely delusional, and that there’s no ‘there, there’ to anti-CRT organising. Or, we could tell the story of FreedomWorks, which astroturfs the group ‘Building Education for Students Together’ (BEST), which organises many of these activists – who are often not even parents – to attend these meetings, and spout conspiracy theories about CRT manufactured in Koch-funded think-tanks, which have been amplified in Koch-funded media outlets. Don’t give the content of their claims any more credibility than they deserve. Instead, focus on revealing the political machinery. In other words, always follow the money.
Footnotes
Liz Fekete is Director of the Institute of Race Relations, and author of Europe’s Fault Lines: racism and the rise of the Right (London: Verso, 2017).
Ralph Wilson is the founder of the Corporate Genome Project and co-founder and former director of UnKochMyCampus.
Isaac Kamola is Associate Professor of Political Science at Trinity College, Hartford, and founder of the Faculty First Responders, a project that monitors the rightwing harassment of faculty, 
. They are joint authors of Free Speech and Koch Money: manufacturing a campus culture war (London: Pluto Press, 2021).