Over the past few cycles, we have focused our editors’ corner pieces on the topics of free speech and college journalism, expressing our commitment to students’ freedom of expression and the value of college media publications. 

The Harvard Salient is Harvard’s active undergraduate student “journal of conservative thought.” On Sunday, Oct. 26, the journal’s board, made up of conservative alumni, suspended the publication, citing the magazine’s harmful content and “deeply disturbing” complaints about the organization’s culture. The alumni board did not directly point to any specific objectionable articles in their condemnation; however, the magazine published an article in its September issue echoing statements from a speech Hitler delivered in 1939. 

The Salient’s editor, Richard Y. Rodgers, asserted in an article entitled “The Crimson’s Campaign Against Dissent” that The Harvard Crimson had written a piece which “fixated on a line in The Salient’s print edition that happened to resemble a phrase from a 1939 speech by Adolf Hitler.” Rodgers defended the line in question  —  “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans” — saying “that the article’s author and editors did not intentionally quote Hitler.”

Rodgers claimed on behalf of the Salient that “our clarification … that the phrase long predates the Third Reich — was mentioned but immediately minimized.” However, as The New York Times reported, the Salient article “also argued for values rooted in ‘blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own’” — “‘blood and soil’ being a nationalist phrase used extensively by the Nazis.”

Rodger’s defense accused the Crimson of “campaigning against its peers,” and said that his response was “not a plea for sympathy” but instead “a record of the narrowing of Harvard’s intellectual life — of a campus that proclaims free expression while quietly cultivating fear of it.” 

Rodgers concluded his editorial by stating that “The Harvard Salient will go on printing what we believe to be true.” 

The Salient’s website underscores this message with the words “defending veritas at Harvard” written in 100 pt. font on the landing page. But for a publication that purports to be so centrally focused on the truth, they seem to be intentionally ignoring one crucial truth: one of their reporters wrote an article with several Nazi dogwhistles in it, and the Salient published it. That is the truth. So when the Crimson reports on the Salient’s publication of Nazi language, that is journalism — not a campaign against the Salient. 

The Crimson also published an opinion piece responding to Harvard College Dean J. Deming’s response to the Salient’s piece — that he would not comment on the controversial article because the College had not received complaints. Harvard’s institutional voice policy recommends that Harvard leaders do not comment officially on matters beyond the scope of “core functions” of the university. Despite the incongruity with the university’s continual condemnation of antisemitism in activist circles over the past two years, Dean Deming’s response seems to uphold this policy. 

The Crimson opinion writers asserted directly, “To be clear: Harvard should not censor the Salient … But it is also obvious that any use of Nazi rhetoric is absolutely reprehensible.”

Notably, even accidentally quoting Hitler demonstrates agreement with his values — something that should give anyone pause. Instead, Rodgers and the Salient breeze right past that worry and cry cancel culture. 

Still, it seems that for any argument Rodgers makes that the Crimson is running a campaign against conservative voices, there is certainly evidence to the contrary. When a Crimson opinion piece says that Nazi speech is reprehensible, and in the same piece argues against any possibility of Harvard’s censoring that publication, that is the very definition of the free speech conservatives hold so dear. 

An ideal very close to truth, for every journalistic organization, is responsibility. The words you publish are your responsibility. And when the truth is that your writer published an article with several Nazi dogwhistles in it, it is your responsibility not to hide behind the accusation of silencing conservative thought, but to own the truth of that piece.

To be clear, Nazi language has no place in our discourse. It is a problem to print Nazi language and Nazi dogwhistles. The Salient’s own board of directors — conservative alumni — suspended the publication because its language was “reprehensible, abusive and demeaning.”

The Salient is not a victim of cancel culture. What they are is an organization facing the consequences of publishing hateful language.