David French Doesn’t Actually Care About Free Speech At All

Lately, it’s become fashionable for Never-Trumpers like David French to denounce the president’s new policy of revoking the visas of foreign nationals who agitate for terrorist groups like Hamas. It’s un-American, we’re told, to hold guests to a certain standard or to remove hostile foreigners from our country.

This past week, French posted on X that “we can absolutely and totally dispense with the idea that Trump’s Republican Party defends free speech. We’re witnessing one of the most comprehensive attacks on political speech since the Red Scare.”

Setting aside that the Red Scare was mostly justified (by the 1950s the Soviet Union had, in fact, infiltrated Hollywood, academia, and even the U.S. government), there’s a couple of things to say about this trend. First and foremost is that French in particular doesn’t really care about free speech, despite his opportunistic bloviating about it now.

How do we know that? Because French was happy to work for a publication, The Dispatch, that was paid by Big Tech to censor disfavored opinions and arguments. 

Back in October 2020, just two days after Facebook announced it would be censoring the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story, Facebook censored two advertisements from the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List, claiming their video ads contained “partly false information” about then-Democratic Presidential Nominee Joe Biden and VP Nominee Kamala Harris’ views on late-term abortions.

The ads in question were labeled “partly false” by an “independent fact-checker” hired by Facebook “to look carefully into claims from elected officials, reports from the media, and disinformation on social media to help you understand what’s true and what’s not.” Who was this independent fact-checker? None other than The Dispatch, where David French was then a senior editor.

According to The Dispatch’ fact-check of SBA List, Biden and Harris could not be said to support late-term abortions because “neither candidate has voiced support for abortion ‘up to the moment of birth’” — as if the standard is that a candidate has to say those exact words to be considered a supporter of late-term abortions.

By any reasonable definition, however, Biden and Harris are obviously supporters of late-term abortion. Their records prove it. On the campaign trail in 2020 they both repeatedly argued for passing federal legislation that would, as Biden frequently put it, make Roe v. Wade “the law of the land,” which is shorthand for unrestricted abortion up to the moment of birth. Even before the 2020 cycle, both Biden and Harris supported bills that would have removed state abortion restrictions or made abortion legal after viability in cases needed to protect “health,” without ever defining what “health” protections might entail.

(Days after Facebook took the pro-life videos down because of The Dispatch’s fact-check, and after The Federalist reported on the outlet’s role in the censorship, Editor and CEO of the Dispatch Stephen Hayes issued a statement claiming the fact-check had been prematurely published, that it was still in a “draft form,” and that the “partly false” rating wasn’t warranted. However, as my colleague Jordan Boyd noted at the time, Facebook “requires fact-checking tags to be directly assigned by a person, which means that this ‘partly false rating,’ along with the link back to the Dispatch’s article, was personally approved by someone at the Dispatch or Facebook.”)

So French worked as a senior editor at an outlet that was paid to justify Big Tech censorship of pro-life views. It’s reasonable to conclude that he doesn’t care about free speech, no matter what he says about it now.

The other thing to say about this trend of Never-Trumpers clutching their pearls over the Trump administration revoking visas and deporting foreigners who support terrorists is that foreigners are not entitled to the same free speech protections as American citizens. They are guests here, and we allow them to come based on the presumption that they will conduct themselves in accordance with our laws and customs. Whipping up campus protests on behalf of Hamas, or shutting down access to public spaces as part of a political demonstration, is not acceptable behavior for a noncitizen we have allowed into our country — even if the same behavior might be legal for a U.S. citizen.

The counterargument you’ll hear to this is that free speech rights are not something that’s created or granted by the U.S. government. Such rights come from God, they preexist the social compact. They’re the same for citizens of the United States as they are for citizens of a foreign country, so we in America have to respect the God-given free speech rights of every foreigner on U.S. soil.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it ignores or misunderstands what a country is and who it’s for. It’s no doubt true that freedom of speech is not something created and granted by the U.S. government to its citizens. We Americans have always understood that this right comes from God, while government’s role is simply to secure it.

But secure it for whom? Not for every person in the world, nor even for every foreign national who happens to be physically present on U.S. territory. Our government exist to secure natural, unalienable rights for American citizens, who instituted our government in order to secure those rights for our people.

The disconnect for men like French comes in thinking that America is something it’s not. Specifically, it grows out of a misguided belief that America is a disembodied idea, a set of universal propositions to which anyone can assent. If that’s what you think America is, then of course you’d wind up thinking that every person who comes here, on however a temporary or provisional basis, has the exact same rights and privileges as an American citizen. Because after all, what’s the difference between them? If America is at root a universalist Enlightenment project, then the free speech rights the government secures for citizens must also be secured for every foreign national inside our borders.

But if America is something more than an idea, something more than an experiment in universalism, if we’re a nation comprised of a specific people with a shared past and a common future, then the government’s posture toward noncitizens is and should be very different than it is toward citizens. After all, our government exists for its citizens, to secure their God-given rights, not the rights of everyone on earth or even everyone physically present in our country.

One of the dangers in adopting the view of America as an idea is that it ends up pitting the will of the American people against the universal rights-claims of everyone on earth, or at least every foreign national on our soil. According to this way of thinking, it’s possible for someone like French to talk themselves into the position that the Constitution requires us to ignore the will and interests of American citizens in order to vindicate the universal rights of foreigners whose allegiances lie elsewhere.

That is to say, universalism of this kind ends up enshrining into law a fake process neutralism that erodes the idea that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. After all, who cares what the governed want when the God-given free speech rights of foreign Hamas apologists are at stake?

This distinction, between America as an idea or America as a nation, is the most important national debate of our time. It is the hinge on which nearly all public policy debates are going to turn. 

So when you see people like David French rending their garments about free speech for foreign student visa-holders under Trump, understand that they have a distorted understanding of America that’s incompatible with how most Americans have understood it for most of our history. And remember, too, that French in particular doesn’t really put much stock in actual freedom of speech — not even for his own countrymen.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.