Bill Ackman: Nazis On ExTwitter Are Just The Price Of Free Speech; But Marxist Theory Or Anti-Israel Claims On Campus Are Beyond The Pale

Too Much Free Time

from the selective-free-speech dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about about another “free speech absolutist” and Elon Musk buddy (and investor in ExTwitter), Bill Ackman threatening to file a SLAPP suit over reporting he didn’t like. He’s still promising such a lawsuit against Business Insider, and when it comes, it seems unlikely to succeed. He’s yet to show any actual false statement of fact made about his wife Neri Oxman, he just doesn’t like the way she was portrayed.

Earlier this week, NY Mag’s Intelligencer published quite a massive profile about Ackman, that has quite a few eye-opening stories in it, including one in which his wife had asked him to stop tweeting about her, and he pushed back by pointing to the memes which are mocking him for being the ultimate “wife guy” online.

Oxman, for her part, wasn’t sure what to make of her husband’s chivalrous tweeting, which had drawn even more attention to the allegations. (Through Ackman’s spokesperson, she declined to comment for this story.) Ackman wrote on X that the pressure from the Business Insider stories “could have literally killed her” and that he had seen others commit suicide in similar circumstances. “She was in a pretty dark place,” Ackman told me, adding that he tried to nudge her toward finding a silver lining: “I’m like, ‘Look, you didn’t do anything wrong; we’ll get this fixed,’ and ‘Actually, the more negative press, the -better. Once we turn this around, it’ll be good for your company.’” He wasn’t sure the pitch had landed — “There were times when she said, ‘Please don’t tweet anymore’” — but he defended himself by pointing to memes online suggesting he had become a hero to wives everywhere. “There’s a meme going around that apparently I’m causing a lot of marriages to have trouble,” Ackman said. “Like this one where a husband emails his wife, ‘Honey, I did the dishes.’ And she’s like, ‘Big fucking deal. Did you see what Ackman’s doing for his wife?’”

But for this article, to keep it relevant to Techdirt, I wanted highlight how Ackman’s “absolutist” support for free speech seems (how shall we put it?) highly selective.

When asked about antisemitic content on ExTwitter, he seems to brush it off as unimportant, and a tradeoff of enabling more speech:

This past September, Ackman, who invested $10 million in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, defended Musk against accusations that X had become fertile ground for antisemitism. “Elon has basically opened up Twitter,” he said. “The downside to a very open format is there’s gonna be some hate speech.”

And, like, that’s a perfectly reasonable and defendable stance to take. If you’re consistent about it. Platforming more speech does mean more hate speech will get platformed. It’s a tradeoff, and there are reasons why some will say that tradeoff is worth it. But, again, if you’re going to support that in the name of free speech, at least be consistent about it.

But Ackman is not. Because, the article highlights how his shitfit that helped lead to the resignation of Harvard’s President Claudine Gay was… because he could not stand the fact that there were protests on campus against Israel.

What launched Ackman’s crusade was an open letter signed by more than 30 student groups at Harvard that began with the sentence “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

And, again, I can understand how this letter could upset people (I find it pretty naïve, given the details of what happened on October 7th, but also, the fact that some college students are naïve and prone to over-simplifying complex world situations is… not new or surprising?). But there seems to be a disconnect in claiming that it’s somehow okay for there to be “some hate speech” on ExTwitter, but that it’s unacceptable for some students to (misguidedly) wish to blame the entirety of October 7th on Israel.

Are you okay with some hate speech in the process of “opening up” speech? Or are you going to go nuclear when there’s some hate speech that you, personally, dislike? Ackman seems to think it’s totally okay for there to be hate speech on ExTwitter, but simply cannot forgive naïve youthful protests on campus.

Of course, some of this seems even more personal, in that his main complaint is that while he went to Harvard and came out a stereotypical “greed is good” capitalist, his daughter (having grown up with him as her father) at least dabbled in learning about Marxist theory in college:

His nephew enrolled at Harvard, as did his eldest daughter — which, Ackman told me recently, is where the trouble started.

“She became, like, an anti-capitalist. Like practically a Marxist,” Ackman said in January, leaning across a large conference-room table at the offices of his hedge fund, Pershing Square. “We’d talk about capitalism, and she would freak out at the table.” His daughter was in the social-studies department just like her father, and rowed crew, too, but she had chosen to write her thesis on “The Concept of Reification in Western Marxist Thought,” having come to very different conclusions than her father had about how the world should work. Ackman said it felt as though she “had been indoctrinated” into a cult.

So… when he went to Harvard and came out as someone who would do anything to make money, that was all good and natural and the way the world works. When his daughter came out of Harvard exploring Marxist theory and pushing back on his views of capitalism, he freaked out and insisted it must be “indoctrination” and such free speech on campus must be stopped.

Even more telling, he then read a book by grifter-extraordinaire, Chris Rufo, who believes in indoctrinating kids in extremist right wing ideology, and, suddenly, Ackman was totally on board… and getting his info… from ExTwitter:

Someone else sent him the book America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, by Christopher F. Rufo, the conservative activist who led the effort to stigmatize critical race theory before turning his sights on DEI. Then came the deluge. “I started following various people on Twitter,” Ackman told me. “I started getting the download.”

Again, he’s allowed to have these opinions, but it really says something when you claim that hate speech is fine on ExTwitter because “free speech” but you go nuclear and try to burn down an institution like Harvard because your daughter is at least marginally interested in Marxist thoughts and some other students have slightly naïve theories about middle-east policy.

Some might call it hypocrisy.

And, it’s the kind of hypocrisy we’ve been seeing a lot of over the past few months. The infamous congressional hearing that has already resulted in two university presidents getting fired (for which Ackman likes to take credit) clearly involved those presidents awkwardly trying to get across the nuances of how they try to support free speech on campus, by looking at the specifics of any specific example of hate speech to see if it actually violates their policies.

But, almost immediately, the “free speech brigade” who all seem to support Elon Musk platforming neoNazis in the name of free speech, took huge offense to the idea that universities might allow people on campus who protest loudly against Israel. Such people do not support free speech. They support some speech that doesn’t much bother them, but will embrace a form of “cancel culture” of their own to oust those they dislike.

Filed Under: bill ackman, free speech, hypocrisy, marxism, neri oxman, selective free speech
Companies: harvard, pershing square, twitter, x