politics

Self Censorship Is Actually Good

Being an asshole is a choice.

I once had a coworker whose husband was a heavy drinker. You might say this guy had a drinking problem, or an unhealthy relationship with booze, or whatever you say when someone is clearly drinking too much.

This guy would show up at holiday office parties and you could smell the booze on him. His wife, my coworker, would tell stories about her husband getting plastered at family events and at restaurants, recounting these incidents in a joking way, though you could detect her underlying shame and embarrassment. He was a friendly guy – a happy drunk. But we all knew something wasn’t quite right.

One day, five or six of us sat around the office lunch table and talked about the weekend – we love our weekends, don’t we folks – and Game of Thrones or whatever else we were watching in the Golden Age of TV. The topic of drinking came up and in a back and forth about booze tolerance, I said something along the lines of: “I don’t know how anyone buys a six pack and crushes it in one sitting.”

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The coworker cast her eyes down. I could see her trembling, fighting tears. Sick to my stomach, I apologized. It was too late: My coworker stormed out of the lunch room. No one would look at me; we all knew what I had done, condemning her alcoholic husband with an offhanded comment in mixed company.

I wished very much that in that moment, while the thought about six-packs formulated in my head, that I had shut the fuck up, or in right-wing parlance: I wish I had self censored.

There’s a new poll floating around social media claiming that 43 percent of white men in the United States are “self-censoring their speech at work, with two in three zoomer bros (18-29) saying they are “too afraid to voice their opinions at work for fear of being fired.” Poor babies.

This polling – conducted by some sort of right-wing organization – is a variation on a theme: White guys in the US have had no choice but to fully back the effort to end multiracial American democracy because they can’t say slurs without personal and professional consequences. What’s implied by this absurd claim is that these men would have considered backing Democratic candidates if only those Democrats had been cool with white guys saying shitty things about racial and ethnic minorities and women and of course LGBTQ folks.

Look what you made me do, they say in one voice. You made me become a fascist.

"Millions of guys facing discrimination or hostility, walking around on eggshells too anxious or scared to speak out," Tim Samuels, a far-right podcast host, said of the poll’s findings. Samuels has apparently produced a five-part podcast series called White Men Can’t Work, detailing how diversity programs have discriminated against white men because they now have to compete with people of color and women who are equally or more qualified.

The idea that free speech is saying whatever you want whenever you want is wrong on a fundamental level. This is what’s termed “reckless speech,” and it in no way should be protected by the First Amendment, as Mary Anne Franks argues in her excellent book, Fearless Speech. Free speech was meant to empower the powerless against the powerful, not to provide protection for society’s privileged members to hurl invective at the unprivileged and marginalized. The American right – and parts of the left – have twisted the idea of actual free speech into an unrecognizable mess that tells Americans they should have the right to say any insulting thing any time they want to anyone online or in real life. "It's a free country, I can do what I want," they say, just as I said as a young, stupid child.

Scratch the surface of this corroded idea of free speech and you’ll find what’s bugging white guys who say in recent polling that they are being tread upon, that they are the victims in need of government relief. These men desperately, for reasons they can’t quite articulate, want to use racial slurs, and they want to use these hurtful, loaded terms without losing their jobs and their friends and their wives and kids. They want their racist cake and they want to eat it too.

So let’s be as real as possible about what a white guy means when he says he’s being censored, or that he’s self-censoring: He can’t say the n-word. As Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said last year, “We know what they want to say.”

We Need (Much) More Self Censoring

There’s real societal value to self censorship. Watching your words and how they might affect people around you is a pro-social exercise that should be encouraged in every facet of modern life. Instead of flooding the home or the workplace or your social gatherings with toxicity, you should monitor your inner dialogue and filter out the parts that will hurt people based entirely on their immutable traits. You should be nice. You should not be an asshole. It's not a big ask.

Maybe you hold the Manosphere-centric belief that women can’t drive: It was implanted in your brain at some point – maybe during your childhood – and you’ve sought evidence that this is a scientific fact, that women are inferior drivers. Girls be drivin’, you say, but they shouldn't be. Maybe you’ve taken this another step and developed the belief that ladies shouldn’t be legally allowed to operate a car, and just to be safe, they shouldn’t be allowed to leave the home without permission from their husbands. And they certainly shouldn't be allowed to vote, or at the very least, women should be forced to support the candidate of their husband's choosing. Perhaps you talk about this with your equally-backward bros and you laugh and nod and wish everyone could be as enlightened as you are thanks to a fascist podcast host who hates women.

But when you’re at happy hour with coworkers of various races and genders and sexualities, you think twice about doing the Women Can’t Drive bit because you fear alienating these folks and perhaps costing yourself financially and socially. This kind of self censorship is an unmitigated good. It’s called professionalism, and it’s required of grownups (I am once again asking right wingers to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and take some accountability for their actions). There is no downside whatsoever to stopping oneself from sharing such fucking awful thoughts and beliefs. And yes, there absolutely should be punishment for offending and demeaning people based on their immutable traits. Society can’t function without constant self censorship. Restraint is key to a society that works.

Research has definitively shown that pro-social behaviors are not just good for society, but good for the person adopting these behaviors. Researchers at the National Library of Medicine found in 2023 that a "positive correlation was found between pro-social behavior and psychological well-being." Trying not to be a total asshole in public can have a trickle-down effect too. "The bystander effect is interesting research that shows the situational factors of helping. People who feel socially responsible are more likely to help than people who do not feel social responsibility."

Importantly for alpha dudes who might say their caveman instincts mean they have to be assholes and everyone has to deal with it, the researchers didn't find any gender differences between "helping behavior." Being as asshole is very much a choice.

The whole thing is farce; in no way are white men the victims of discrimination. The entirety of the anti-DEI backlash is based on a bad faith interpretation of diversity efforts in the workplace and in government. If one (intentionally) interprets a dedication to diversity as systemic racism against white people, DEI is the same as Jim Crow – official policy designed to favor one group over another. The bad-faith take on DEI must carve out any and all historical context so it appears to be racially-motivated discrimination. That six Supreme Court conservatives and dozens of conservative federal judges have decided to view DEI through this bad-faith lens, we’re seeing that retrenchment of white supremacy as official policy of the U.S. government. All it took was a little bad faith and powerful people willing to embrace that rotten, dishonest interpretation.

The trailer for Samuels’ podcast series includes a white man who worries that his workplace’s DEI program will require him to enroll in a reeducation camp. Another one of Samuels’ guests calls DEI “madness” and “mass hysteria” that gripped the nation after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. The entire podcast – like so much fascist media these days – is little more than a recrimination of the brief moment of racial justice reckoning that defined 2020. The fascists have been on a BLM/DEI/COVID Revenge Tour ever since, and every single nightmare policy hatched by the Trump regime can be traced to the right’s fury over the pro-democracy, anti-fascist surge that came to life that summer and culminated with the election of Joe Biden a few months later. The right was briefly forced to gaze upon the nation’s original sin. They found it unpleasant.

The Real Driver Of Self Censorship

The charge that the American left – a handful of Harvard academics and three hundred posters on Bluesky – is forcing the self censorship of white men in America is the direct opposite of what’s really happening during this second Trump term.

In every facet of American life, people in the 2020s have learned to employ never-before-seen levels of self censorship around conservatives who operate in a system of unreality generated by social media algorithms that have plunged us into a post-truth era. We’re all scared as shit to say something that’ll trigger our MAGA parents or grandparents or cousins or neighbors. Sometimes we can’t even guess what will draw their ire because we can’t imagine the ocean of disinformation in which they swim every day. Can I talk about my cat? Are cats woke now? You never know.

Folks on Bluesky were clear about one thing: Radicalized Republicans are the primary reason for self censorship in the workplace.

Unless you want to get into a maddening, blood pressure rise-inducing exchange with a MAGA cultist whose primary news source is Catturd2, you know not to mention anything even vaguely political. Tell a MAGA chud that it’s awfully damn hot today and they’ll say global warming is a vast anti-American plot perpetuated by the socialist Clinton family meant to enslave the American population. Tell them it's cold and they'll say, see, I told you the climate thing was a hoax. Ask them about the game last night and they’ll tell you they don’t watch pro sports anymore. Too woke, they say. Mention that you enjoy food from another country and watch in horror as the conversation devolves into a racist diatribe against woke tacos or whatever. Talk about vaccines and they will test whether their house key sticks to your magnetic blood.

Tell them your child or niece or nephew did or said something comical or charming that betrayed gender norms and see the MAGA chud's brain short circuit. Your daughter played with a toy truck? She's been indoctrinated by Communist Leader Miss Rachel Mao. Mention that you're not feeling well and get ready for a torment of health misinformation pumped into their brains my crunchy, fascist Instagram influencers. These people, after so much brainwashing, are incapable of being normal.

I have an unfortunate trove of experience censoring myself for fear of triggering Republicans because my dad over the past five years has morphed into his final red pill form. There's not a single topic we can discuss without me guarding against the conversation veering into political waters for fear of confrontation. Not even football is safe anymore. My dad sees a quarterback thank god during a postgame interview and commends the player's bravery for being an outspoken Christian in a nation where Christians are persecuted by radical atheist politicians. I'll say dad, every quarterback in history is an evangelical Christian and football is a sport steeped in Christian nationalism, and he'll reject that reality and present his own, in which he and CJ Stroud and Patrick Mahomes are pitiable victims of a brutal anti-Christian regime dominating the land. So no more football talk unless I want to hear about the Houston Texans quarterback taking a brave stance against a repressive American government.

Probably there is more self censoring than ever today. People happily consuming oceans of fascist propaganda have left us no choice.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social