We cannot have one fixed rule for who counts as worth no-platforming; for now, it suffices to name obvious hate-mongers and their cohort. It’s not that complicated. Mukund mentions Charles Murray as the sort of public figure worthy of heckling, but not shutting down. I suggest that we provide no platform, especially in the academy, for his vile attempts to rehabilitate racist, classist theories about heredity and IQ, which have been long discredited. Decades of no-platforming actions against Holocaust denier David Irving have left the anti-Semite unable to schedule public talks around the United States. Murray deserves the same treatment.

Property damage and physical confrontation might court little favor with the liberal-Left. But the deployment of radical tactics is predicated on the belief that power does not yield until it is threatened, and a friendly protest will not do. Such polite protest is too easily dismissed and held at bay, especially with state and institutional infrastructure committed to protecting fascist speech. When protesters shut down attempts by white nationalist organizer Jason Kessler to give a press conference after his Unite the Right rally, police escorted him to safety.

No-platforming is not about taking full control of what speech gets to exist, as if without these speakers speechifying we’d reach some post-fascist utopia. No-platforming is only useful if it is contextualized in a broader abolitionist struggle, which recognizes that white supremacy will not do away with itself by virtue of being “wrong.” Surely by now liberals have realized the folly in assuming justice is delivered by “speaking truth to power”? Power knows the truth, and determines what gets to be the regime of truth. The “truth” of racial justice will not be discovered, proved or argued into lived actuality, but fought for and established.