Gavin Wax Explains Why Censoring and Deplatforming Nick Fuentes Sets a Bad Precedent for Free Speech
Right-wing political activist and columnist Gavin Wax recently appeared on Big League Politics Live where he defended his position regarding banished video blogger Nick Fuentes, who was recently axed from Twitter after enduring hit pieces against the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
Wax has received heat for standing for Fuentes’ right to free speech and stated that he is not the enemy who conservatives should focus their ire upon. He noted that far-left groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) used to commonly hold that offensive speech should be permitted throughout society before the Orwellian culture of supreme repression really started to take hold.
“Everyone has a right to a platform, they have a right to free speech, they have a right to bank accounts, they have a right to not be added to a no-fly list,” said Wax, who also serves as President of the New York Young Republicans.
“I think if we really believe in these things, you should be willing to defend controversial people like Nick Fuentes, and I think he would even agree that he is in fact controversial, and those are the fights you have to have,” he added.
One day after this interview was recorded, Fuentes was banned from Twitter entirely. This is the next phase of censorship ramping up, and Wax’s concerns have proven to be valid.
“I just think the whole thing is ridiculous, and I think a lot of it comes down to pure hysterics,” Wax said, referring to the many conservatives who agitated for the deplatforming of Fuentes.
Many of those anti-free speech conservatives also used Fuentes to attack Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), who has arguably the best America First voting record in Congress, because of a meme claiming that Fuentes and Gosar were holding a fundraiser.
“I’m not going to throw him to the wolves like all these other gatekeepers and these basically right-wing cancel nuts. It just goes to show that the biggest problems that we have are sometimes not from the Left, it’s from people on the Right or from people supposedly on our side or supposedly in the big tent,” Wax said.
Even though Wax considers himself a big tent Republican, he is deeply concerned with the tendency for conservatives to attack individuals who they perceive as being further on the right than they are. This turf war is based off of elitism and plays into the hands of the Left, Wax believes.
“They’re more susceptible to the social pressures because they still want to be accepted. They still want to be getting their little gigs, their thinktank gigs. They want to be on the networks, on the shows, etc. So they like to be a little more palpable for the orthodoxy and the orthodoxy is basically leftism so they can never be too far away from that if they want to be somewhat accepted on the margins,” he explained.
“It’s like a societal classism thing is what it comes down to,” Wax added.
Despite the rhetoric from the official conservative movement, Wax thinks that there are far more people who are “authentic” and “grassroots oriented” out there, and this is who populists should be focused upon forming alliances, rather than conservatives who have been seduced by the Washington D.C. swamp.
The full BLP Live interview with Wax can be seen here:
Share: