The radical Right’s initiatives have not been confined to the realm of ideas. Armed with a specific understanding of the deep cultural and social foundations of the liberal hegemonic order, they have diligently embarked on a Gramscian war of position: a patient counter-hegemonic struggle to change the predominant ‘common sense’ and produce ‘organic intellectuals’ who can critique the existing order and provide alternatives to it. We focus on the Right’s often overlooked efforts to capture the traditional institutions of cultural and political domination via academic publishing, universities, and policy institutes. These initiatives seek to create a new legitimacy and acceptability for radical Right ideas, explicitly re-writing intellectual history from a radical conservative perspective and reclaiming it from the academic mainstream. Through new universities and think tanks, their aim is to replace the liberal, woke, managerial, globalist elite with a Right elite, schooled in the critique of managerialism and critical of the over-reach of international institutions and liberal powers and think tanks.

This essay was penned in response to the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, that took the lives of fifty people, and the subsequent response to not only ban assault rifles but to ban speech as well – hate speech that is. Banning hate speech will not work, especially in the age of Internet access to virtually all of human knowledge, and in which almost anyone anywhere can set up a web page and publish their ideas, no matter how hateful. You can combat evil, as when police forces catch criminals and military services counter terrorists and challenge insurgents and threats. But the idea – and it is an idea that can only be heard in an environment of free speech – that one can simply ban bad, dangerous, or hateful ideas has a historical track record of failure to do so, while snagging it its net good, useful, and productive ideas and their human generators. As I conclude, following the old saying that the answer to the problems of democracy is more democracy, the solution to hate speech is more speech.