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.

There is, admittedly, an actual orthodoxy that’s driven such conceits. During the last century, the gatekeepers of legacy media confined the public conversation to what now seems like a hopelessly narrow political scope. Not only were the most noxious exponents of bigotry or crankery kept off the airwaves and the front pages (you might find their work via mail-order distribution, if you were willing to risk seeking it out), but even tamer messages in favour of everything from socialist revolution, gay liberation, and recreational drugs to school prayer and tax revolt were limited to small imprints or self-published pamphlets. Comedians were arrested for uttering dirty words, and conspiracy theories were passed on via mimeographed samizdat. “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” ran an oft-quoted line attributed to A.J. Liebling in a 1960 New Yorker essay.

The advent of the internet at first promised a liberation from such restraints, as an infinite range of content could now be freely accessed—and created—by anyone with a computer. Yet even then, it seemed that the most trafficked platforms of reporting, learning, or officialdom still maintained rigid standards of what it was acceptable to say and think. In the 2010s, the pronouncements of the BBC, the New York Times, and CNN—not to mention the posting guidelines of social media and the speech codes at universities around the world—laid down the law on key issues, and woe betide anyone who didn’t obey their diktats: black lives matter, believe women, you live on stolen land, racism is systemic, silence is violence, climate change is an emergency, truth is relative, and sex is a construct. By the early 2020s, the orthodoxy had become suffocating. Fortunately, an alliance of heterodox rebels arose to fight back.

One problem: that little history isn’t very accurate. Over decades, countless writers, editors, readers, and publishing entrepreneurs have definitely said they were standing up to a censorious establishment. And there have definitely been banned books, films, and artists, and some outspoken employees definitely are fired for voicing the wrong beliefs, and individual Facebook and Twitter users definitely did get cancelled for posting unpopular statements. But anyone who thinks the censoring, banning, firing, and cancelling is all directed by one monolithic establishment is kidding themselves. More importantly, anyone who thinks that going against a perceived establishment automatically validates whatever position they’ve taken is, consciously or not, relying on the Lillian Hellman argument.

anyone who thinks that going against a perceived establishment automatically validates whatever position they’ve taken is, consciously or not, relying on the Lillian Hellman argument.

What constitutes heterodox and orthodox ideas has always been relative. Everyone complains about media bias, but bias is in the eye of the beholder. The definition of rebellion is subject to change, too: in 1965, for example, rock music that celebrated long hair, casual sex, and mind-altering drugs was pretty heterodox, at least for older generations, but by 1985 the genre had spawned an “alternative” subculture, for whom the rock of twenty years before had become safe and predictable. Or think of all the anti-war protests during the presidency of George W. Bush, with participants flocking to Michael Moore’s incendiary documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 and Truther websites, and disparaging the mass of sheeple who believed the martial propaganda of the Republican Party. Two decades later, MAGA diehards flock to the sex-trafficking allegations of The Sound of Freedom and QAnon, while disparaging the mass of normies who believe the DEI propaganda of the Democrats. Two very different movements, working from very different sets of ideas, but each equally convinced that they alone hold the secret of What You’re Not Supposed to Know.

Pick a controversy: many public divisions these days come down to supposed freethinkers versus supposed conformists, irrespective of the subject under discussion. Transgender people, for instance, say they are vulnerable minorities whose human rights are threatened by a mob of religious fundamentalists. On the other hand, mothers and fathers of school-age children say they are the vulnerable citizens whose parental freedoms are threatened by a mob of woke activists. Supporters of Israel say they are vulnerable secularists whose security is threatened by a mob of Jew-hating theocrats. But supporters of Palestine will say they are vulnerable martyrs whose nation is threatened by a mob of genocidal Zionists. People concerned about infectious disease will say they are vulnerable rationalists whose health is threatened by a mob of paranoid anti-vaxxers. But people concerned about government power say they are vulnerable resisters whose private choices are threatened by a mob of medical busybodies. Don’t bother protesting that these disputes are “really very simple,” because if that were true, we would not still be fighting over them.

Broken Incentives

The media’s incentives may be broken, but we as individuals do not have to be.

QuilletteClaire Lehmann

What’s partisan cheerleading to me is fair and balanced to you. Yesterday’s libertine is tomorrow’s prude. Innumerable dinner parties have been afflicted by guests who begin, “I don’t know if it’s ‘politically correct’ [using air quotes] to say this, but…” before expressing something completely inane. At its most affected, heterodoxy is what social scientists call a positional value, which means it can only exist in contrast to the orthodox view, just as you can only be cool next to a lot of squares. A case built around the purported unfashionability of your views may disguise all the ways in which your views are, in reality, blandly conventional, or even dominant (especially when they’re shared by tech moguls and presidents). It’s a form of faulty reasoning that amounts to something like, “All those dupes are saying X; I’m the only one with the audacity to say Y; therefore Y is correct.”

This fallacy is not just employed by individuals and communities, but by the media they consume. Of course, people can certainly hold political outlooks out of genuine conviction rather than just a desire to be different. But such outlooks are often reinforced by outlets that flatter their audiences as more honest, independent, and fearless than audiences for something else. A symbiotic relationship has developed between self-styled outsider channels and the older institutions they reflexively oppose: where would Canada’s conservative C2C Journal be, for instance, without the multicultural pieties of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation? Where would Breitbart be without CNN? Where would the Free Press be without the New York Times? Where would UnHerd be without the Beeb? The mainstream media (if such a thing even exists anymore) has become every polemicist’s best friend by being pilloried as his worst enemy.

See for yourself. Try posting a pro-choice point on a pro-life Reddit forum. Try weighing in about the dangers of Islamophobia on a Reform UK Facebook page. Try making a crack about Charlie Kirk in a Rebel News comment thread. Try looking for a sympathetic piece on pro-Palestine student demonstrators at the Free Press. Try finding a friendly article about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at Fox News. It’s not that one side is right and the other wrong—or both, or neither—but that even the most smugly “independent” voices are usually siloed into ideological echo chambers that reward groupthink and punish heresy.

As far back as 1948, in an article for Commentary titled “The Herd of Independent Minds” and published a few years before Lillian Hellman refused to cooperate with HUAC, Harold Rosenberg noted the contradiction of decrying popular media through mediums that were scarcely less popular:

From “significant” novels, through “highbrow” radio programs, to “little” magazine articles and stories, a variety of mass-culture forms pits the mass culture of small groups against the mass culture of the masses. … Intellectuals who set themselves against mass culture become contributors to it by shifting small-mass perspectives to previously neglected fields.

And in their 2004 book The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter reflect:

[J]ust how many times can the masses be shocked out of their conformist stupor before we begin to wonder whether they were ever in a conformist stupor to begin with? ... After all, it’s never you who’s unconscious; it’s always the guy next to you or the guy who lives down the street. If everyone thinks that everyone else is unconscious, perhaps it’s time to consider the possibility that we are all wide awake. Perhaps people calling other people unconscious is just a way of dismissing the fact that not everyone thinks the same way you do.

Granted, accommodating divergent ideas makes for a healthy pluralism. The freedom of thought that underlies classical liberalism has taken some rough knocks lately, and ought to be defended. Insofar as educational and cultural leaders advance open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement, who can object? But others who jump on the heterodoxy bandwagon—and a bandwagon is what it’s becoming—have too often hidden behind viewpoint diversity to buttress any contrarian proposition without bothering to invest the intellectual rigour that allows a proposition to stand on its own. Hey, I’m telling it like it is, you won’t hear this anywhere else! Maybe we’re not supposed to know that Winston Churchill was the real villain of World War II! Maybe radical elites have covered up Antifa’s ties to George Soros! Maybe the leftist fake news is lying about the Deep State! Maybe slavery’s had a bad rap in the mainstream media! Maybe due process and rule of law are just status quo received wisdom! Maybe Elvis is alive and the earth is flat! Maybe. But it’s not mindless conformity to reply: maybe not.

The opinion industry monetises conflict, not conversation (just think of all those YouTube videos where a debater gets “DESTROYED” by an antagonist), giving us the profit-driven pretensions of the Free Press, UnHerd, Spiked, Rebel News, and their ilk. Sure, it makes a certain amount of commercial sense for publications and online groups to adhere to some level of consistency in their advocacy. A magazine or a web page that praised traditional family values in one article and then ran a warm profile about swingers the next day is not likely to gain a viable readership. But consistent advocacy shouldn’t be sold, ipso facto, as a noble challenge to the ruling order just because it’s consistent. Either you have a persuasive claim or you haven’t, no matter how many stupefied straw men you complain are lined up against you.

Lillian Hellman died in 1984. Today, she is still hailed by some for her courageous stand against Joe McCarthy, but biographers have noted that she had long been a committed supporter of Joseph Stalin. She bucked one oppressive system, but she embraced another. She wouldn’t cut her conscience to fit the 1952 fashion for hysterical anti-communism, and spent years cultivating the legend, but she’d already cut her conscience to fit the fashion for purges and show trials. She dared to be different, but she also stuck with the party line. She was proud to proclaim her heterodoxy, but she couldn’t admit her blind loyalty. Some things never change. Perhaps being heterodox, for which so many critics and commentary sites are now loudly congratulating themselves, is a bit like being powerful: if you have to say you are, you aren’t.