Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

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The signatories have spent years attacking free expression. A particularly acute case is when it comes to things like advocating for the end of israeli occupation in palestine, but there are many others. Whining about BLM is a particularly common approach for Thomas Chatterton Williams.

The signatories have generally continued to complain about censoriousness from the left even while the right wing is detaining people for their speech, insisting that media personalities be fired for their speech, insisting that people (including naturalized citizens) be deported for their speech, cancelling grants because they are too "woke", and straight up passing laws banning the teaching of certain topics in secondary and postsecondary school.

Weiss herself is a participant with UATX, a expressly right wing university that has fired people for not being sufficiently critical of DEI efforts.

Weiss also has a long history of efforts to stifle the public debate that the signatories claim to support. The first thing that got her notoriety was an effort to get various professors at Columbia fired for their speech.

I think you're really off base. A quick search about what Williams has said about censorship on the right seems to undermine your one non-weiss example [1]. There were more than a hundred signatories from across a fairly wide political spectrum (and the letter itself was anti-Trump). The handful of signatories that I follow have squarely denounced right wing censoriousness - I'm open to hearing that I'm seeing a non-representative sample, but you didn't provide any useful info on that front.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/woke-right...

Notice how this article frames the entire thing as caused by the left and happily ignores the fact that what is happening under Trump is not new. Were the excesses of the left the cause of the Stop Woke Act in Florida? The right has been screaming about firing professors since God and Man at Yale was published. In my opinion, this is not anything resembling a serious accounting of the threats to speech from the right.

And you can compare this article against the entire book that he published about the left's flaws this year. On one hand we've got an article critical of the right that finds the need to smuggle criticisms of the left in constantly and on the other hand we have a complete manuscript. You tell me where Williams is focusing his attention.

In terms of the actual topic, I would be shocked if Williams approved of spiking the CECOT 60 mins story, if it is in fact politically motivated as many suspect. And I'm not particularly a "fan" of Williams or anything, though I've heard him on a couple of podcasts.

But you're also making this point about all signatories being hypocrites because you seemingly have a big bone to pick with the amount of blame Thomas Chatterton Williams portions to each side.

So, can we see him writing about how this was a bad thing?

Williams is a public intellectual. What goes on in his mind is of much less importance to public discourse than what he writes.

Let me be clear. I believe that Williams is a hypocrite and I believe that the large majority of the signatories on the harpers letter are hypocrites. I mention him specifically because he was one of the people who actually wrote a lot of its text rather than just signing it, which makes him of particular interest for this discussion.

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