What are the limits of free speech? We may have arrived at them

Political operatives on the far right have long spoken about their ambition to shift the “Overton window”. The aim is to “mainstream” ideas long considered unthinkable, through gradual, step-by-step radicalisation and repetition – especially on hot-button issues such as immigration, sexuality, race and identity.

If challenged, commentators respond by appealing to “free speech”, accusing their critics of denying this basic liberal right.

The career of former Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson represents a case study in the success of this political strategy in the United States. As his recent interview with Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper highlights, the Overton window seems to have shifted so far that it now includes the extreme right in ways that were unthinkable as recently as a decade ago.

The interview on Carlson’s YouTube channel raises unsettling questions about the visions of history and politics all of this “free speech” is opening us towards, and how democratic debate could possibly be benefited by this process.

Careering free speech

Carlson has a history of promoting baseless claims. In late 2021, he exercised his freedom of speech by producing a three-part documentary alleging that the riot of Trump followers at the US Capitol on January 6 2021 was a “false flag” FBI operation, the true aim of which was to vilify the MAGA movement.

He has pushed COVID vaccine conspiracy theories and promoted the “great replacement” conspiracy theory on more than 400 shows. Long restricted to the extreme right fringe in Europe, this “theory” suggests that progressive elites in Western nations promote non-European immigration for their own political advantage, with the sinister ambition to “replace” the “white race”.

Carlson was ousted from Fox News in 2023, shortly after the cable network’s $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for spreading disinformation about the 2020 election. His own emails admitting Fox’s dishonesty were used as evidence in the case.

Then came 2024. In February, Carlson visited Russia, becoming the first Western journalist to interview President Vladimir Putin since the start of the Ukraine war. Carlson allowed Putin to air his rationalisations for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, without any real challenge.

Carlson then sat down for his YouTube channel with Russian neofascist Aleksandr Dugin. Dugin is a pro-Putin intellectual who was once fired from his academic position for urging his countrymen to “kill, kill, kill” their Ukrainian neighbours. He has expressed admiration for the Waffen SS – the most radical military arm of the Nazi SS – and decried the “Jewish elite”, which he proposes runs the US. In 1996, Dugin called for “an authentic, real, radically revolutionary and consistent fascism” in Russia, “borderless as our lands, and red as our blood”.

Shortly after his interview with Dugin, Carlson hosted Cooper, who proposed that British prime minister Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the “chief villain” of World War II.

As for the Holocaust? Cooper challenged almost everything “mainstream” historians agree about Nazi atrocities. He claimed the Nazis’ hands were tied due to food shortages after Hitler invaded Soviet Russia. Since Churchill had refused to admit defeat after the fall of France in 1940, the Nazis were effectively blockaded. This left them with a choice between slowly starving the millions of “prisoners” their invasions bequeathed them and the more “humane” measure of “finishing them off quickly”.

These views, which have long circulated in neo-Nazi circles, are demonstrably false. They transparently serve to sanitise Hitler’s atrocities.

Bipartisan concerns

With his interview with Cooper, Carlson’s journey to the farthest reaches of the political right finally seems to have sparked bipartisan concern. Alongside condemnation from the White House, criticism came from some conservative lawmakers, including New York Republican Mike Lawler, who commented:

Platforming known Holocaust revisionists is deeply disturbing. During my time in the State Assembly, I worked with Democrats and Republicans to ensure all students in New York received proper education on the Holocaust, something Mr Cooper clearly never had.

Conservative political theorist Leo Strauss once opined that Weimar Germany collapsed because its liberal freedoms allowed Nazism, with its craven appeals to base hatreds, to proliferate. The shift of the Overton window in the US to include the far-right makes his warning newly unsettling.

We have slowly arrived at a place where a commentator of enormous influence, who is close to a presidential candidate, is platforming a fan of Heinrich Himmler’s SS and neo-Nazi talking points.

The problem here is arguably not only that Carlson is hosting extremists such as Dugin and Cooper, but that he presents them to his many followers as courageous truth-tellers, whose views have been “forbidden” by censorious elites. He extolled Cooper as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States”. Elon Musk posted on X in praise of Carlson’s interview, before quietly removing the post.

The same wide-eyed sympathy characterised Carlson’s exchanges with Putin and Dugin. Little wonder the latter celebrated his interview as a great tactical victory. Carlson had, in effect, given Dugin’s ideas an entrée into the US, from which Dugin himself remains banned.

To what end?

The pressing question all this raises is just what good can possibly come from opening the Overton window to ideas which generations of people since World War II have known to be toxic and incompatible with the political values of nations such as the US and Australia, which Carlson visited earlier this year.

In response to this question, formulaic outrage about the right to freely express any and all ideas, including the most hateful and patently false, really doesn’t cut it. In political scientist Robert O. Paxton’s definition, fascism is characterised by:

obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

There is nothing in such a militant perspective consistent with the basic principles of democratic countries: social pluralism, the rule of law, multiparty politics with the peaceful transition of power, and the protected liberties of citizens – including freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech and its enemies

John Stuart Mill argued for freedom of speech on the grounds that the contest of opinions is needed to discover and share the truth. This classic liberal defence of free expression faces inescapable challenges, however, when it comes to the opinions of avowed enemies of “liberalism” such as Dugin and Cooper.

They are people who deride concerns about individual rights and protections. They assert the demands of the mythologised “ethnic community”. They conceive of politics as a war or struggle for domination.

Proponents of far-right views have, at best, a conditional interest in seeking the truth. Mill’s conception of a pluralistic public sphere of competing voices is anathema to them, if they attain power. They have no interest in fostering an independent-minded population capable of holding leaders to informed account.

The far right accepts the need to lie, suppress information and “strategically” present its position to different audiences. Such dishonesty is an instrument in the existential struggle. Its shameless deployment is a sign of strength and fidelity to the higher “truth” of the cause.

All of this suggests deep “free speech” reasons for scepticism about the formulaic appeal to this liberal value being used to mainstream the ideas of Dugin and Cooper. Liberal democracies champion toleration. Yet as philosopher Rainer Forst has shown in a classic study, this toleration necessarily requires the clear-sightedness to identify, and the forthrightness to oppose, principled intolerance and the promotion of group hatred.

The time is surely past for the postwar complacency that far-right politics “could never happen again” in new forms. This is a time when a US vice-presidential candidate has happily shared a stage with Carlson after his Cooper interview.

The same candidate now owns his willingness to “create” stories about immigrants to spread fear and division before a national election whose results his party has again committed to challenging should they lose.

It is time to outspokenly defend democratic values and institutions against their foes, rather than let the disingenuous appeal to “free speech” be used to undermine them.

Matthew Sharpe has previously (2012-17) received Australian Research Council funding as part of a team which worked on religion and political thought.