In February 1986, the Ottawa Citizen, published in Canada’s federal capital, ran an opinion piece by its publisher Paddy Sherman titled “The ban-happy folks at Mindless U.” Sherman was furious that Canadian student protestors were trying to shut down the ambassador of South Africa’s Apartheid government from speaking on their campuses, rather than welcoming an opportunity for a “clash of ideas” that would certainly “demolish” the ambassador. In disbelief “that critics would want to prevent a debate on freedom of expression in South Africa,” he lamented that the topic of apartheid had “a tendency to turn campuses into assembly-line branches of Mindless U.”

Throughout the fall of 1985 into the spring of 1986 a full-blown moral panic over “free speech on campus” gripped the attention of Canadian media. At the center of this controversy was the South African ambassador Glenn Babb, who arrived in August and immediately undertook a full schedule of speaking engagements at universities and community clubs across the country, as well as media appearances, in which he argued that recently adopted sanctions against South Africa would only destroy the country and lead to violent revolution. The increased public activity of the Embassy took the anti-apartheid movement by surprise — Babb quickly achieved a notoriety bordering on celebrity status, and proved adept at using the platforms given to him to spread his pro-apartheid arguments.

Responding to what anti-apartheid activists deemed the “Babb offensive,” the movement sought to counter his message by protesting his appearances, withdrawing his invitations to speak, and disrupting his speeches — a strategy that is sometimes referred to as “no-platforming” or “deplatforming.” At the University of Toronto, Babb was shouted down by students, and faculty filed an injunction in an attempt to bar Babb from returning campus. At Carleton University in Ottawa, a student group was stripped of its club status for inviting Babb to speak. These incidents caused an uproar among newspaper columnists and others who insisted that Babb was being censored, and that these infringements on his freedom of speech made them no better than apartheid South Africa.

If this seems familiar, it is because the clamor over “free speech on campus” has once again achieved the status of a moral panic. Since Donald Trump’s election in the US, there have been renewed attempts by students to “no-platform” far-right speakers and prevent them from organizing on campus and in their communities, leading many liberal and conservative commentators to refer to the present moment as a “crisis” of free speech. In Canada, the Conservative Party has picked up on this sentiment by promising to block federal funding to universities if they do not adequately protect free speech.

Most recently, Faith Goldy, an alt-right media personality, was going to lecture on “Ethnocide: Multiculturalism and European Canadian Identity” at Wilfrid Laurier University. Goldy was met with demonstrations, and her lecture was ultimately disrupted when someone pulled a fire alarm. If Goldy’s name rings a bell,  it’s because she was recently fired from The Rebel — Canada’s Breitbart — for appearing on a neo-Nazi podcast, and has been peddling a narrative of “white genocide” in South Africa, which has gained traction not just among right-wingers on the Internet, but even Australian government ministers. The disruption of Goldy’s lecture led to a frenzy of pundits handwringing over supposed threats to free speech, declaring that even awful people should be welcomed on campus to participate in a marketplace of ideas.

The experience of the anti-apartheid movement shows, however, that far from encountering a crisis of free speech, we are simply repeating the exact same debates from 30 years ago. (The resurgence of the right electorally in Western Europe and North America makes it feel like we’re going back another 40 years.)  In the fight against apartheid in the 1980s, no-platforming was the right move — and it didn’t bring down civilization, either. It also demonstrates that then, as now, so-called free speech advocates were far more willing to tolerate and even enable racist, far-right voices than they were to oppose them.