They All Signed the Harper's Letter. Where Are They Now?

Bari Weiss speaks onstage during a book club event with Peggy Noonan on November 19, 2024. in New York City.(Noam Galai / The Free Press via Getty Images)

It’s been five years since Harper’s published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” a cri de coeur signed by 153 public intellectuals that warned against threats to freedom of expression from both the right and the left. “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” the letter proclaimed. While it acknowledged that such threats have often emanated from “the radical right,” it focused the bulk of its concern on censorious campaigns from within liberal cultural institutions: “Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.”

Reginald Dwayne Betts, one of the letter’s signatories, told The New York Times that he had been particularly troubled by the forced resignation of the paper’s opinion editor, James Bennet, a month earlier, a decision many other signatories had also criticized. The summer of 2020 was defined by the George Floyd uprisings—the high-water mark of social justice activism during Donald Trump’s first term—and Bennet’s sacking was arguably the highest-profile example of what the signatories of the letter, and many to their right, might call “cancel culture.” In hindsight, the letter signaled a major shift in intellectual discourse: Less than a decade into the “Great Awokening” that signatory Matthew Yglesias identified as having begun around 2014, a swath of mostly liberal writers were declaring en masse that wokeness had already gone too far.

A few months later, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump. The elite culture of the Biden years would be notably more unfriendly to “woke” speech-policing than that of the previous decade. This “vibe shift” could be seen in the fascism-­curious downtown Manhattan arts scene known as Dimes Square; in the lucrative anti-woke Substack empires built by formerly mainstream journalists (including Harper’s letter signatory Bari Weiss, who left the Times in protest of the Bennet firing); and in the rise of a “popularist” wing of the Democratic Party that cautioned against identity politics and radical positions like “defund the police.” Cultural elites to varying extents embraced the backlash against Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and trans activism—a backlash pioneered by right-wing activists like Christopher Rufo and generously subsidized by the Silicon Valley oligarchs who would go on to fund Trump’s 2024 campaign. The Harper’s letter wasn’t the first example of this backlash, but the sheer range of its signatories—including some respected voices on the left, like Noam Chomsky—and the seeming reasonableness of the text itself marked what would turn out to be a durable shift.

Flash-forward to 2025. The backlash against wokeness is the core of Trump’s second administration, and it’s being used to justify an assault on free speech unequaled since the McCarthy era. Trump has banned diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives throughout the federal government; has used the levers of the state to compel universities and other elite institutions to do the same; and has repeatedly jailed legal residents for engaging in what was once protected speech—usually speech in defense of the human rights of Palestinians. But as In These Times noted in April, just under a quarter of the Harper’s letter signatories have spoken up for the detained Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil and other victims of Trump’s unconstitutional crackdown. (Those who have include progressives like my fellow Nation columnists Jeet Heer, Katha Pollitt, and Zephyr Teachout.) For the large majority—notably including Weiss, a leading champion of Israel’s war on Gaza—Trump’s reign of terror has apparently been less objectionable than the irritating undergraduate and entry-level scolds of the 2010s.

If these erstwhile free speech champions were only guilty of hypocrisy—or bad faith—they would hardly be worth writing about now, but in many ways they helped lay the groundwork for Trump’s second term. Consider the column for which Bennet was ousted, which was among the inspirations for the Harper’s letter: a Republican senator, Tom Cotton, calling for the use of military force to violently suppress free assembly (in protest of lethal police violence, no less). Cotton recently described Khalil as “a pro-Hamas foreigner” and scoffed at the idea that he has any rights worth defending. From the start, the speech being defended was advocating the violent, top-down defense of existing social hierarchies—which in 2025 is not the least bit abstract.

Some of the Harper’s letter signatories who spent much of the Biden era bemoaning the excesses of the woke left, among them Anne Applebaum, Jesse Singal, and Thomas Chatterton Williams, have also condemned Trump’s attacks on free speech. While this is honorable and certainly preferable to the alternative, all of them should examine their role in helping to build a broad elite consensus that has functioned mainly to legitimize Trump’s actions. Around the same time as the Harper’s letter, a popular meme started circulating online in which the comedian Tim Robinson, dressed in a preposterous hot dog costume, insists he is “trying to find the guy” who crashed a hot-dog-shaped car. Today, amid the wreckage of America’s academic and cultural institutions, far too many intellectuals are still trying to find that guy.