“538” founder and exile Nate Silver is now opining on substack and doing very well, thank-you, but he still is an infuriatingly biased progressive pretending to be objective. His topic in “Free Speech Is In Trouble” is the 2024 (?) college free speech rankings from a College Pulse/ FIRE survey of over 55,000 undergraduates across a wide range of colleges and universities. The results are pretty clear and ambiguous: most self-identified progressive students don’t believe in free speech and want those who don’t conform to woke ideology silenced or intimidated. This poses a serious threat to the culture and democracy.

See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? But Nate, being Nate, repeatedly buries the lede and distracts from that conclusion. Oh, he says it, sort of, many times, but it’s always stated in an equivocal manner bordering on deceitful.

At the top, Silver says, “And after seeing the latest polling on what college students think about free speech, I don’t concern over “cancel culture” or the erosion of free speech norms is just some moral panic. In fact, I think people are neglecting how quick and broad the shifts have been, especially on the left.”

Not “especially” on the Left, Nate: on the Left—you know, your team. He says, as a summary of the results,”College students aren’t very enthusiastic about free speech. In particular, that’s true for liberal or left-wing students, who are at best inconsistent in their support of free speech and have very little tolerance for controversial speech they disagree with. ” Why state a generality that isn’t true? It isn’t “college students,” it’s progressive, woke students who have little commitment to free speech. “But this looks like a major generational shift from when college campuses were hotbeds of advocacy for free speech, particularly on the left,” he says a bit later. It’s not a generational shift, it’s an ideological shift and a values shift, on the Left.

He keeps doing this throughout the incredibly long essay; the length also turns what should be an exposé into a convoluted, unnecessarily equivocal slog that ensures few will read the thing and encourages denial from Nate’s progressive fans. “Students have low tolerance for even mildly controversial speakers,” is a subhead, but again, it isn’t students, but students whose political views mirror Nate’s. A majority of conservative students would not ban any speakers from their campus regardless of their topics (among the examples the survey presented hypothetically). A small minority of the self-identified liberal students, however, said they were willing to allow those advocating conservative positions to be heard. See?

Nate eventually admits that the attitudes of conservative college students on campuses haven’t changed very much from the results of past surveys, but tolerance for opposing views has crashed on the Left. Yes, that does threaten free speech, but Nate’s fog hides the blame. One thousand, four hundred and sixty-seven words into this opus, Nate finally has the guts to deal with the real issue openly, which isn’t “college students,” but progressive college students. His subheading: “Why did the campus left turn against free speech?” Again, I don’t think it’s all that difficult a question: colleges have been indoctrinating students into Marxism for decades, and Marxism does not thrive in environments where critics can point out its flaws, delusions, and uniformly disastrous history. But nothing is simple to Nate, so he gives us these answers in drip, drip, drip fashion:

Reason #1: Woke ideas are popular on campus and are considerably less tolerant of free speech than traditional liberalism.

In other words, what I just said.

Reason #2: Normie Democrats are turning against free speech because of concerns over misinformation.

He writes, “Rank-and-file Democrats have shifted on the question too and now strongly prioritize restricting false information over protecting freedom of information.” Nowhere in the section does Silver point out that what the Left calls “misinformation” is frequently just information that they want to ignore, distort, or make sure the public doesn’t learn about, like, say, the origins of the pandemic and Hunter Biden’s laptop. Nate’s omission on this score is itself misinformation. Shame on him.

Reason #3: The younger generation is risk-averse in general

Nate says, “If you think controversial speech can cause harm — from psychological trauma to actual, literal violence — you might conclude that it’s not worth the risk.” Nate doesn’t mention that the risk-aversion is also a boon to the censors on the Left, because all but the boldest of conservatives are afraid to risk social cancellation.

Reason #4: The United States may be reverting to the mean

Statistician to the core, Nate fishes this rationalization out of the air. The theory: U.S. free speech values are extreme by world standards, so it’s inevitable that they would drift toward the rest of the fearful, censorship-prone world. What a crock: this is another way to excuse the group that has been extolling European values and condemning the U.S. for being out of step on a full range of issues for, again, decades.

Your pals and party don’t like the United States, its culture and its history, Nate. Face it, don’t obscure it.

Reason #5: The adults in the room are often hypocrites

Weak. Yes, conservatives are not always consistent in defending speech, but progressives are remarkably consistent in opposing it, and that’s the primary problem. I don’t recall any conservatives or Republicans saying the the First Amendment doesn’t include “hate speech.”

In the end, Silver makes some valid points and provides some useful analysis, but he’s too afraid of losing subscribers if he comes right out and admits what he’s hiding in his wordy weeds. This is the problem with writing a subscriber opinion newsletter. The desire to make money inevitably creates a conflict with honesty and integrity.

Now in the case of Ethics Alarms, losing readers who can’t tolerate what they don’t want to believe hurts my ego and my traffic, but it doesn’t cost me money. Thus I can forge boldly ahead, unlike Nate, and live by the motto of my late, wise former college room mate, who returned from Vietnam a cheerful, perpetually-stoned nihilist, and whose reaction to any threat, risk or challenge was, “Fuck it, right?”

Right, Andy.