They All Signed the “Harper’s” Letter. Where Are They Now?

Five years have passed Harper “Cri de Coeur, signed by Cri de Coeur, signed by 153 public intellectuals who warned against the threat to freedom of expression from the right and left, has published a “Letter on Justice and Public Debate.” “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is becoming more constrictive every day,” the letter declared. He acknowledged that such threats often emanated from “radical rights,” but he admitted that he focused on most of his concerns on censorship campaigns from within liberal cultural institutions. Peer-reviewed academic research.

Reginald Dwayne Betts, one of the signers of the letter, said New York Times He was particularly plagued by the forced resignation of James Bennet, the paper’s opinion editor, a decision that many other signatories criticised. The summer of 2020 was defined by the George Floyd uprising (high water levels of social justice activities during Donald Trump’s first term), and Bennett’s looting was undoubtedly the best example of the letter signatories and what many might call “cancellation culture.” In hindsight, this letter showed a major change in intellectual discourse. The signature, Matthew Iglesias, identified as beginning around 2014, led to a “great awakening” of less than a decade.

A few months later, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump. The elite culture of the Biden era would not be particularly friendly to voice policies that have “wake up” than in the past decade. This “shift in atmosphere” will allow you to notice the downtown fascism of the Manhattan art scene known as Dimes Square. In a lucrative anti-awakening empire constructed by former mainstream journalists ( Harper Bali Weiss, the signer of the letter, has left The era protesting Bennett’s shooting); and in the rise of the wings of Democrats who warned against the politics and radical positions of identity, such as “refunding police.” Cultural elites to different spheres have embraced backlash against Black Life Matter, #MeToo, and transactivism. It was pioneered by right-wing activists like Christopher Lfo and gene-free granted by Silicon Valley Oligarhi, who fund Trump’s 2024 campaign. Harper The letter was not the first example of this repulsion, but marked what proved to be a durable shift, with the vast range of signatories, including some respected voices on the left like Noam Chomsky, and the rationality of the text itself.

Flash forward until 2025. The backlash against Wokeness is at the heart of Trump’s second administration and has been used since the McCarthy era to justify an attack on unequal freedom of speech. Trump has banned diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the federal government. They used state levers to force universities and other elite institutions to do the same. He then repeatedly imprisoned legal residents for his once protected speech, a speech defending the human rights of Palestinians. but, In these times In April, it is listed in less than a quarter of that Harper The letter signatories spoke to Mahmoud Khalil, a detained Colombian student, and other victims of Trump’s unconstitutional crackdown. (People like my peers who include progressives Nation columnists Jeet Heer, Katha Pollitt, and Zephyr Teachout. ) For the majority, including Weiss, the leading champion of Israeli war with Gaza, Trump’s terrifying rule was clearly less offensive than the 2010 stimulating faculty and entry-level Scold.

If these former free speech champions were only a crime of hypocrisy or evil, they wouldn’t be worth writing now, but in many ways they helped lay the foundation for Trump’s second term. Consider the line where Bennett was exiled. Harper Letter: Republican Sen. Tom Cotton calls for the use of military force to violently curb free rallies (even less in protest of deadly police violence). Cotton recently described Halil as a “prohama foreigner” and scoffed at the idea that he has a right worth defending. From the beginning, the advocated speeches advocated for violent, top-down defenses of existing social classes. This is not abstract at least for 2025.

some Harper The letter signatories who spent much of the Biden era lamented the excess on the left and left. Among Anne Applebaum, Jesse Singal and Thomas Chatterton Williams, they also condemned Trump’s attack on free speech. This is an honor and certainly more favorable than alternatives, but they all need to consider their roles that will help build the broad elite consensus that worked primarily to justify Trump’s actions. At about the same time Harper The popular meme, the letter began to circulate online, where comedian Tim Robinson, dressed in a ridiculous hot dog costume, claims he was “trying to find a man” who crashed a hot dog-shaped car. Today, in the wreckage of American academic and cultural institutions, too many intellectuals are still trying to find the man.