Three years before Elon Musk performed a Nazi salute on the stage of a Trump inaugural event and then proceeded to coordinate an administrative coup of the United States government, he bought Twitter as part of a purported mission to “restore free speech,” both to the platform and to American discourse more generally. His actions since—silencing critics, reinstating politically aligned voices, and encouraging bigoted lies and right-wing extremism to flourish—suggest he had other motivations.

Mark Zuckerberg has invoked free speech as a justification for his decision to end fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, even as Meta’s policies censor information based on vague “community standards” while frequently amplifying hateful messages and suppressing what it decides is “political” content. Donald Trump peddles similar lines, declaring in his address to Congress that he’s “brought back free speech in America”—and then soon thereafter initiating a campaign to illegally arrest, incarcerate, and deport people who protest against US and Israeli war crimes in Palestine, while threatening to criminally prosecute private organizations that might advocate for diversity, equity, or inclusion.

If we attend to the effects of these billionaires’ actions rather than simply the surface of their rhetoric, it is clear that they—like many of their peers, from “good billionaires” like Bill Gates to outright rogues like Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos, and Patrick Soon-Shiong—have turned appeals to free speech into a tool for consolidating power, masking their expanding control over politics and the public sphere behind the guise of open discourse. In the process, they have turned a broad array of key civic institutions over which they have slowly bought control, including news media and Ivy League universities, into their own personal puppets.

Free speech is often framed as a universal good and an inalienable democratic right. Yet, as linguistic anthropology and the sociology of knowledge show us, concepts do not simply exist. They act, and they act politically. To understand how, we must look past debates about what free speech means and instead examine what free speech discourse currently does.

The idea of free speech does more than describe a set of rights; it constructs a moral and political framework that shapes our perception and serves particular interests while obscuring others. In our contemporary political context in which a small set of ultra-wealthy individuals control our media networks, appeals to free speech are increasingly mobilized to abet the rise of oligarchy by masking the structural inequalities that determine who can speak, who is heard, and whose speech shapes public discourse.

At its core, free speech discourse rests on a fiction: the notion that all individuals have equal capacity to participate in public dialogue. In reality, the ability to speak and be heard is profoundly shaped by disparities in wealth, social capital, and institutional access. A billionaire with control of a media empire has vastly more power to influence public discourse than an average citizen, let alone someone marginalized by poverty, racism, or gender inequalities. Yet free speech discourse treats these unequal conditions as irrelevant, focusing instead on abstract principles of rights and liberties. By doing so, it perpetuates the illusion that the public sphere—as it exists in reality, not just idealized theory—is a level playing field where ideas and people compete purely on their merits.

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Those whose rhetoric and claims are propagated are, within this ideological frame, said to be the most intelligent and persuasive—the natural winners in the fabled “marketplace of ideas,” a phrase whose explicitly capitalistic overtones are telling. In reality, as figures like Musk and Trump illustrate, they are typically simply the most ruthless, privileged, entitled, reckless, and loud. The most essential personal characteristic for both getting rich and exerting public influence in the US is an eagerness to screw over and sacrifice other people for one’s own gain, and then to claim this is a mark of genius rather than a sign of just being an asshole with banal daddy issues.
 

Ideals and Illusions

The tension between idealistic suppositions behind free speech discourse and its real-life use as a tool of domination has characterized the concept since its inception. The modern notion of free speech can be traced back to the Enlightenment, when figures like John Milton, John Locke, and later John Stuart Mill argued for the value of open debate as a foundation of truth and liberty. In 1644, Milton’s Areopagitica called for the abolition of censorship, framing it as an affront to reason and divine truth. Locke’s emphasis on individual rights in the late 17th century laid further groundwork for the idea of free speech as integral to personal liberty. These ideas reached their most systematic expression in Mill’s 1859 treatise On Liberty, which championed free expression as not just a private right but also a public good essential to human progress.

But even in these foundational examples, free speech was never truly universal, always instead operating as a pseudo-universal principle to conceal particular interests. Locke himself, in A Letter Concerning Toleration, for example, explicitly excluded atheists and Catholics from his vision of who should be accorded the right to free speech. Similarly, early American invocations of free speech—enshrined in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution—emerged within a society where the rights of women, enslaved people, and Indigenous communities were systematically denied. The speech that was “free” was, in reality, only that of wealthy white Protestant men.

Anthropologists, philosophers, and linguists have long noted that language is not a neutral vehicle for ideas but a form of social action that both reflects and reproduces power relations. Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of linguistic capital highlights how the ability to speak persuasively or authoritatively is contingent on one’s position within a field of power. In a society marked by stark economic and social hierarchies, those with greater access to resources also possess greater capacity to define what counts as legitimate and valuable speech.

Freud’s concept of illusion—a belief sustained not because it is true but because it fulfills a psychological need—helps further illuminate the ideological function and broad appeal of free speech discourse across class and gender lines. The idea of free speech as a universally accessible right satisfies the democratic ideal of equality while ignoring the material realities that make such equality unattainable. This collective illusion reassures individuals of their agency within the public sphere, even as structural conditions render that agency all but meaningless for the vast majority of the population. This is a key part of why free speech discourse is so pervasive: We want to believe in it because we want to believe in ourselves, and the more our power to shape our lives and communities is taken from us by rising oligarchic power, the more intense this desire becomes.

The political effects of free speech discourse are not limited to the privileging of elite voices. They also include the delegitimization of efforts to challenge these hierarchies. Under our increasingly fascist political conditions, calls to regulate the mass dissemination of falsehoods by media-owning billionaires, hate speech, or corporate monopolies are frequently attacked as threats to free speech. The Trump regime is embracing this tactic with, for example, its Department of Justice threatening to criminally investigate any traces of “DEI” (Trump’s term for non-white people) in private organizations’ policies, staff, or practices. While such “investigations” have no basis in law and should easily be defeated in court, they reflect the perverse invocation of “anti-discrimination” to enable the targeting of gender and racial minorities—and anyone else—who might dissent against Trump’s increasingly fascist regime.

This strategy by far-right actors shifts attention away from the structural conditions that distort public discourse and reframes critiques of inequality as discriminatory against white, straight, and rich people. The result is a double bind: Marginalized groups are told to compete in a public sphere that is systematically weighted against them, while any attempt to level the playing field is cast as an attack on liberty itself.

Moreover, the discourse of free speech often functions as a moral alibi for oligarchic power. By championing a supposed principle of uncensored expression, billionaires can present themselves as defenders of democracy even as they consolidate control over the institutions that mediate public dialogue.
 

Linguistic Power and University Discourse

Repression-abetting uses of free speech discourse extend beyond corporate and media elites. They are also deployed and propagated by the very institutions that claim to most pivotally foster the production of knowledge: American universities.

Elite universities, with their vast wealth and prestige that fuel careers and intergenerational legacies, rely heavily on the myth of meritocracy and the illusion of objective, unbiased knowledge to maintain public—and political—support. They assert that intellectual authority and social position are earned through talent and rigor, ignoring the fact that deep inequality—tangible and symbolic—prevents many of those with the most exceptional capacities from even entering their gates.

Universities claim to be spaces where knowledge is pursued without political bias and from a stance of “political neutrality.” In doing so, they obscure the reproduction of unequal and unearned power embedded within their own systems and the fact that they are designed to protect the status quo, from legacy admissions to billionaire donor-determined research programs and hiring decisions. By championing free speech in the abstract, these institutions promote the idea that all ideas, regardless of their origin, are equally valued and evaluated. But, as any Black, brown, or trans student or faculty member at an Ivy League university can testify, the ability to be heard as an authoritative voice within academic and public forums is not evenly distributed.

Recent events at Harvard University provide a useful illustration of how selective appeals to free speech and associated manipulations of antidiscrimination policies can serve to obscure power dynamics and perpetuate inequality. In January, Harvard settled two Title VI lawsuits alleging that it failed to adequately address antisemitism on campus. As part of the settlement, Harvard agreed to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which controversially defines many widespread criticisms of the Israeli government, its illegal and perpetually expanding colonial settlements on Palestinian lands, and its violent treatment of Palestinians as examples of antisemitism.

The university’s decision has sparked a heated debate: Supporters argue that it protects Jewish students from discrimination, while critics—including Jewish students—warn that it stifles legitimate and important critique of Israeli policy. It is already being used to suppress principled political speech, suspend educational programs, and target Jewish and Israeli faculty who are critical of Zionism and of the equation of Jewishness with loyalty to the Israeli state. Under Harvard’s new antidiscrimination policy, several of my own publications, for example, including on medical ethics in the journal The Lancet and magazines like The Nation, or simply calls to condemn and stop war crimes, could be defined as antisemitic. As I recently learned when I was compelled to pull a coauthored article out of production hours before publication by the threat of retaliation by administrators, even senior Harvard faculty can no longer publish critiques of US-Israeli violence against Palestinians without being prepared to face serious reprisals from bureaucrats fearful of provoking Trump’s ire and threats to federal funding.

This controversy encapsulates the tension at the heart of free speech discourse. By adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, Harvard is invoking the rhetoric of antidiscrimination to justify a policy that will suppress dissent and critical dialogue meant to protect vulnerable people who have been—and continue to be—violated and murdered by Israel with U.S. government support. And it should escape no one that this move came after 15 months of intensive imperial ideological pressure applied by billionaire donors like Ken Griffin, Len Blavatnik, and Bill Ackman, who have repeatedly called for harsh repression of student protests and campus speech criticizing Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians.

Today, people like former president of the university Larry Summers are using the IHRA definition of antisemitism to publicly harass colleagues by calling on Harvard to discipline faculty who acknowledge basic historical realities like the Nakba and to clamp down on campus events that could potentially include criticism of the Israeli government. Following Summer’s recommendations, interim dean David Cutler and president Alan Garber have since done so. In such an environment that unironically claims veritas as its motto, no one with any commitment to truth, history, or human rights should feel safe or free on campus.

This sordid episode in Harvard’s history reflects with unusual clarity how elite institutions routinely wield the language of free speech and antidiscrimination not to protect marginalized voices and views but to consolidate control over which perspectives are deemed acceptable so as to further empower rich, white imperialists. Harvard’s actions exemplify a broader trend in which free speech is weaponized to privilege the interests of powerful stakeholders—whether they be donors, political lobbies, or administrators—at the expense of students, faculty, and actual open dialogue and the possibility of critical thought.

By promoting the myth of a meritocratic, unbiased academic sphere, elite universities reinforce the notion that knowledge production is divorced from the political and social power that underpins their endowments and obscure one of their core structural functions: the reproduction of class and racial inequalities along with interwoven imperial policies. This performance not only distorts the public’s understanding of free speech but also reinforces the legitimacy of those in positions of power—academic, corporate, and political—who rely on these illusions to maintain their control.

It is no coincidence that many of the oligarchs and their minions—from Musk and Trump to JD Vance, Ackman, and Christopher Rufo—who are now repressing meaningful rights to free speech and dissent are products of the very elite universities they are now attacking. In building their reputations and institutional capital by suppressing critiques of inequality and accountability, elite universities have actively created the reactionary agents driving the destruction of American education.
 

Liberating Free Speech From the Billionaires

Free speech discourse today does not merely fail to address inequality; it actively reproduces it. By focusing on the formal right to speak rather than the material conditions that enable or constrain speech, it naturalizes a profoundly unequal status quo. Abstract invocations of free speech distract from the fact that what truly determines whose voices shape our now-hollow society is not the freedom to speak nor the merit of ideas but simply possession of the power to force others to listen to you.

Reimagining free speech in a way that challenges rather than entrenches oligarchy requires shifting the focus from abstract rights to material realities. It means recognizing that speech is not free when access to the means of communication is monopolized by the few, nor when systemic inequities silence the many. A democratic vision of free speech would demand not only the absence of censorship but also the active redistribution of resources and ownership of the media platforms that constitute the public sphere.

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” wrote A.J. Liebling in 1960. Although today the printing press has largely given way to its digital descendants, the truth of this observation remains. Until a genuine democratization of media is realized, free speech discourse will continue to do what it has always done: reflect and reinforce the power structures of the society in which it operates. For the possibility of democracy in a deeply unequal nation increasingly controlled by billionaires, that’s not an encouraging reality.