Libertarians against freedom
By 
With techno music thumping faintly in the background, two infamously “canceled” American intellectuals drooled over Hungarian women, celebrated the way the country’s favorable exchange rates have kept the cheap booze flowing—one of the two men announced that he was on his ninth drink—and lampooned the mayor of Portland (“[He’s] a lunatic, he’s got pronouns in his bio”). They discussed the visiting man’s plans for his stay in Budapest, which naturally included a face-to-face with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s political director (“Dude, he’s great, you’re gonna love him”). And, serious students of vigorous debate and meticulous empiricism that they are, they capped off the evening with a probing discussion of some of society’s thorniest questions—including whether, as one of the men put it, “It’s the woke movement’s goal to, like, transition all gay people.”
The two canceled men in question were Ilya Shapiro, who abandoned his new job at Georgetown Law School last spring after an investigation spurred by a racist tweet ended with his sinecure not being taken from him by force, and Peter Boghossian, who left his position as a philosophy professor at Portland State in September 2021. Two months after Boghossian released a widely shared resignation letter arguing that “illiberalism” had “fully swallowed the academy,” he became a founding faculty fellow of the University of Austin, an educational venture dedicated to restoring the “classically liberal university” and “reclaiming a place in higher education for freedom of inquiry and civil discourse.”
Joining a time-honored tradition, both Shapiro and Boghossian have parlayed their sympathetictreatment in some quarters of the media into what can best be described as a “cancel culture speaking tour.” They made a joint appearance in March at a Princeton panel titled “Mob Rule: The Illiberal Left’s Threat to Campus Discourse.” Last week, they ran into each other in Budapest, and after Boghossian suggested Shapiro record their conversation as a podcast, the two settled down—Boghossian with a gin and tonic, Shapiro with a Hungarian dessert wine—for a “full, unvarnished discussion.” “I’d never [recorded a podcast] before, partly out of hesitation at the ‘process’ that might be involved, but then I threw caution to the wind, pressed the big red button on Voice Memo on my iphone, and here we are,” Shapiro tweeted on Wednesday.
Both Shapiro and Boghossian were in Hungary as guests of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, or MCC, a small, private educational institution run by Orbán allies with a semi-explicit mission of training a cadre of future right-wing elites. The school, which Orbán recently granted more than $1.7 billion, now controls assets worth more than the country’s entire higher education budget, according to reporting from The New York Times. It has wielded this windfall to attract high-profile figures in media and academia from across the Atlantic: Senior visiting fellows like Boghossian earn up to 10,000 euros (around $9,700) a month, or 11 times the average Hungarian assistant professor’s salary. Never let it be said that taking a blowtorch to democracy isn’t lucrative.
If only American academia had Viktor Orbán’s staunch commitment to liberalism. Or strengthening my financial holdings! Whichever comes first.
Trying to to decide whether Boghossian or Shapiro had the most pathetic “cancel culture has forced me to quit in order to make much more money to do much less work while claiming that right-wing authoritarians are the real supporters of free speech” media tour, and I’d have to say that they’re both winners.