There is a rhetorical fallacy informally known as “the Lillian Hellman argument,” named after the notoriously self-dramatising US playwright who refused to testify before the United States House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952. “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to suit this year’s fashions,” Hellman wrote in an open letter. She might be admired for defying the Red-baiters or denounced as an apologist for the USSR, but the point here is that she justified her position simply by declaring its unconventionality. Whatever its original merits, the Lillian Hellman argument of 1952 has become, in 2025, a routine tool of political commentary across the spectrum—even though it’s not really an argument at all.

A byword of public discourse these days is “heterodoxy,” derived from the Greek hetero, meaning other or different. In contrast to orthodoxy (from orthos, or straight, in the same language), heterodox opinion is upheld as unusual, dissenting, and original, rather than familiar, acquiescent, and derivative. Since 2015, the US-based Heterodox Academy (HxA) has had a mission “to advance open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement across higher education,” and the term is now often invoked by politicians and pundits who insist that a wider range of ideas be disseminated by teachers, writers, and other shapers of thought. But heterodoxy—or some vague synonym thereof—has also become a convenient cover for those seeking to shape thought for their own narrow and negative ends. Sometimes it’s a serious project to expand everyone’s mind; sometimes it’s a cynical ploy to keep them closed.

As a journalistic ideal, or a corporate trademark, heterodoxy actually goes back a while. The libertarian print and online journal Reason, which first hit newsstands in 1968, has long claimed its dedication to “Free Minds and Free Markets.” Fox News trumpeted the slogan “Fair and Balanced” between 1996 and 2017, while the US-based Disinformation Company somehow got away with releasing a line of “You’re Not Supposed to Know” titles on politics, conspiracies, and the media in the 2000s. In our own era, the Free Press website, whose publisher Bari Weiss has just been hired to run CBS News, modestly describes itself as “Honest. Independent. Fearless.” Canada’s Rebel News advertises that “We tell it like it is, and we examine the world from a different perspective—a side of the story you won’t get anywhere else.” UnHerd announces that it is aimed at “People Who Dare to Think for Themselves,” and Spiked, another British news and opinion site, tells prospective readers, “We are irreverent where others conform, questioning where others wallow in received wisdom, and radical where others cling to the status quo.” Lillian Hellman lives.