Has Free Speech Gone Too Far?

With Trump ahead 10 points in the swing state of Michigan (and ahead generally in polls across the country), and with armies in two wars spilling rivers of civilian blood, and with a full-fledged eviction crisis unhousing millions, and with migrants from South America fleeing the mess caused in part by climate change and decades of bad US foreign policy to congregate by the hundreds of thousands in miserable conditions at our Southern border, which has created a situation that is difficult to deal with humanely, the American media is laser-locked onto the real threat to the American way of life: free speech on college campuses, specifically the big-name expensive ones. Some pre-COVID nostalgia, just in time for the holidays.

Oh, but it’s different this time: almost everyone in the establishment thinks free speech has gone too far, apparently. The New York Times has 24/7 coverage of this issue, as does WaPo, as does WSJ, as does every legacy media outlet patronized and peopled by alumni of Harvard, MIT, and other golden-ticket schools, plus — and this is more important, I think — the aspirational middle still bitter about that rejection letter.

Our political leaders in the House of Representatives are also concerned about dangerous speech on college campuses, to the point where they have even carved out time from their busy schedule of obsessing over Hunter Biden’s penis (and business dealings) to hold hearings about it. You have probably heard about Elise Stefanik’s viral moment badgering the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania into saying they would allow their students to call for genocide against Jewish people by making false equivalencies and then talking over the university presidents when they attempted to explain why the equivalencies were false. You can read the remarks here: just search “genocide” and cut directly to the two Stefanik interrogations that cost the UPenn president her job and has the other two under a barrage of criticism that may yet end their careers.

Stefanik knew exactly what she was doing in that hearing, and the bumbling presidents handled it about as well as people employed in academia usually handle the direct and unnuanced viciousness of the real world, which is to say poorly. Don’t take my word for it: read this article from Johnathan Chait, a Dreadful Centrist that I rarely, if ever, agree with. I don’t agree with everything in this article either, but I think its existence is significant: it’s not just us far-left woke CRT DEI gender-affirming antifa communists who think the anti-woke mob has manufactured a controversy to strike a blow against their ancient enemies in higher education while way too many libs clap and bark like idiot seals.

I’ve made my own position on the war in Gaza extremely clear, and I would like to take this opportunity to double down on every single thing I said two months ago. Hamas’ attack on children and adult noncombatants on October 7th was an unforgivable, disgusting act: a horrific response to very real oppression. 786 noncombatants who should be alive are dead, and some of them died horribly.* I hope the hostages are OK and that they make it home soon. Israel’s reaction is monstrous. What is happening in the Gaza Strip right now is a war crime, and everyone who has executed, aided, or abetted that crime should be tried in the Hague, including our very own president. Netanyahu has explicitly announced his intention to “thin out” the population of the Gaza strip by driving them into surrounding countries, a strategy we have a term for. An Israeli study published in an Israeli newspaper found that 61 percent of Palestinian casualties are noncombatants, which is by far the highest percentage of civilian casualties of any war in the last 123 years, which as you may recall was a pretty rough stretch when it came to total warfare. A few days ago, three Israeli hostages waving a white flag were gunned down by Israeli forces who “felt threatened,” an incident that is utterly compatible with the way Israel has waged this war so far. None of these facts are surprising. Netanyahu’s government is full of slavering genocidal lunatics who have been very clear for decades about what they’d like to do to the disenfranchised Palestinians belligerently living on land that they consider theirs.

It has become increasingly difficult to justify the things happening in Gaza. After shameful weeks of credulous cheerleading, the mainstream press is beginning to grow squeamish as the bodies stack higher. It feels like too much blood. But this is an ugly story, and one that could futher undercut our stunningly unpopular incumbent for the 2024 election, and so it is easier and better to engage in that time-honored American tradition of avoiding ugly stories by arguing about whether people should be allowed to tell them.

Antisemitic things are happening on college campuses right now; it would be dishonest to ignore that. Some people are cheering for what Hamas did to noncombants, to women, to children, which is disgusting. Vigorous protests for a cease-fire, and for Palestinian rights generally, are also happening on college campuses right now, and these things are not antisemitic at all. And yet these two genres of things have become hopelessly conflated, to the point where it was very difficult to find an article to link to that talks about antisemitism without lumping it in with antizionism. Then again, according to the House of Representatives, there's no difference between the two. House Resolution 894, which declared antisemitism and antizionism synonymous, is one of the only bipartisan things that august institution has done in at least a decade; it passed 311 to 14, with 125 almost-brave Democrats voting “present” instead of “nay.”

The position makes sense for Republicans, who would like nothing more than to make disagreement with their policy platform into a hate crime. It also makes sense for some Democrats — the ones who have been railing against campus free speech for years.

That’s right. We’re going there.

This whole debate feels very 2017: the peak of Has Free Speech Gone Too Far, back when Milo Yiannannannannanopopoulos was going around siccing MAGA freaks on trans students and undocumented students and generally being an obnoxious menace. Richard Spencer, with his punchable face and fashionable fascism, was getting a microphone too. It was a grim and wretched era of campus provocateurs, many of whom were met with violent protest, which generated headlines, which generated more speaking engagements and endless exhausting thinkpieces not dissimilar to what we are seeing in newspapers today. Dangerous far-right idiots still occasionally speak on college campuses today, but the phenomenon is greatly reduced since the fascists showed their true colors in Charlottesville and America recoiled in horror. Ultimately, it wasn’t silencing the alt-right proper that destroyed them. It was letting them speak.

Sometimes I feel like all I do is write about the free speech question, but in my defense it is the question of our age. How do we, as a society, deal with dangerous ideas? The question grows more urgent every day. The dapper fascists are gone, but the fascist threat remains: Trump is going around quoting Hitler now and according to the polls, it’s working.

How do you solve a problem like a Nazi? It depends in part on how many Nazis there are. Back in 1980, when the Blues Brothers came out, you could deal with Nazis by collectively laughing when the Bluesmobile drives through their very small demonstration and watching them jump into the river: a ridiculous fringe punching bag that no one would ever take seriously. We’re way past that, unfortunately.

Another way you can deal with Nazis is to ask the authorities to shut them down, and when it comes to actual Nazis I’m not against this. Nazis have no right to reasoned debate: something they do not support and have not earned. Allow me to be insufferable for a moment and quote myself from way back in April:

It is very easy to tell the difference between edible food and excrement, but when it comes to ideas the distinction is less clear. Campus groups, and leftist groups generally, have spent years telling us that olives are human shit, that discomfort is a form of harm, that harm makes students feel unsafe, that the discourse must be made safe from difficult and controversial topics that, in actuality, deserve to be debated. It’s not just a conservative trope. I went to college from 2016 to 2019 and I saw it firsthand. There were excesses, bad ones, and those excesses are returning to haunt us now.

Listen to the way Zionists talk about the problem of students who vocally support Palestinian rights. Sometimes they point to specific incidents of antisemitic incitements to violence (which, as I said before, are happening and are the equivalent of feces in our potluck metaphor), but often they point to whether or not Jewish students feel unsafe, which is to say uncomfortable, which is to say harmed (olives). Same playbook. Same results.

In the congressional hearing, Stefanik started by asking the president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, whether she is aware that calls for intifada are calls for genocide. The correct answer to that question is that, whatever you think of it, “intifada” does not mean genocide, but Gay, conditioned by a decade of appeasing anti-olive leftists, chose instead to say that she finds the word personally abhorrent, rheotrically conceding the point. Stefanik then asked if such calls for genocide go against Harvard’s code of conduct and the Harvard president, without correcting Stefanik’s definition of genocide, refused to say that the word “intifada,” violates the Harvard code of conduct, since it doesn’t. Game, set, match. Get your Palestinian olives off the table.

How did you think this would go, exactly? Left-wing activists will tell you, correctly, that our current system perpetuates injustice and that the only way to fix it is to rebuild it from scratch, and then, in the same breath, ask that very same system to police freedom of expression. At bottom, Harvard is not progressive. Harvard, like the corporations that currently sell pride merch every June, like the FBI that currently goes after January 6th insurrectionists/protesters/whatever, like every single institution in America, stands for the status quo.

Every weapon the left hands the system to attack their ideological enemies will eventually be used against the left.

Here’s a part of Stefanik’s exchange that didn’t make most papers:

I’m working on an article about Project Veritas right now, and a lot of Project Veritas’ core principles were explicitly based on Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. Their all-time favorite: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." Conservatives love this one, as well they should. The liberal agenda is riddled with contradictions and self-loathing. Fish, barrels, etc.

If Claudine Gay had a backbone — if her politics were left-wing instead of liberal centrist — she could have answered this question by saying that explicitly racist memes, if that is what they were, are materially different from calls to intifada. But she is of the system, and so she cannot do this, because, to her, there is no material difference between Stefanik’s bullying and the bullying of the left-wing elements on her own campus. One might be more odious to her than the other, but she will respond to them in the same way. She will bend if she can, break if she must, always in the direction of the most powerful current force.

This current push to ban pushback against America's current criminal foreign policy, and against an apartheid state committing unforgivable acts in the name of a historically (and currently) oppressed people, vividly shows the flaws in the left’s recent attitude towards debate and free expression. For one thing, it clearly did not work: despite a decade of attempts to shut down discussion of dangerous ideas, Trump stands a solid chance of winning in 2024 with the most dangerous platform in the history of this country. For another, it eroded America's strong norm of protecting free speech and helped open the door for America's darker historic impulse towards McCarthyism.

Every possible solution to dangerous ideas carries great risk, including discourse. Human beings are not rational actors. The marketplace of ideas elevates the most emotionally appealing ideas, not the best ones, for the same reason that candy sells better than kale in the marketplace of food.

But the impulse to use the system to shut down debate of dangerous ideas is more hazardous still. That strategy only works for as long as the forces of culture and capital are largely, or at least in theory, on your side. No company wants to be seen as anti-LGBT because it's bad for business. 30 years ago, when I was a child, it was the opposite. No university wants to be seen as supporting racism. 100 years ago, that was the opposite too. Today, no university wants to be seen as antisemitic, and that word is currently being hijacked, and you see the result. The norm of free speech is one of the things that facilitates ideological change: a terribly sharp sword that cuts both ways. MAGA and the left both wish to change America, but a cursory look at the history of fascism reveals that their vision looks more like the status quo than the leftist one and always has. Free speech will always benefit the left more than it does the right, and we have spent the last decade running down the very concept, and now we are reaping our reward.

Human beings have free will, and force is a remarkably inefficient way to get them to do what you want. It takes a lot of energy to keep people constantly in terror, and the terrified will hate you for it, and if you lose focus for even an instant, relax your hold, or lose ground, they will rise up and destroy you.

I am not advocating civil debate with garbage ideologues who pedal oppression and violence, who do not argue in good faith and whose ideas do not deserve equal footing with the ones that uphold rights for all. We use rhetoric and pathos to expose and exploit the ridiculousness of the enemy’s ideas, we explain why those ideas are bad for everyone and laugh them out of the room. We air fry that kale and put a bunch of salt on it and try to persuade those who can still be reached to see things our way. We make it as safe as possible for them to migrate to our side, we welcome them with open arms, we stop the circular firing squad horseshit currently rendering most of the American left worse than useless. Look to the unions. Do as they do. They’re the only even remotely left-wing force doing anything significant for anyone right now.

And, if you are so inclined, raise your voice to join the voices of the many Jewish people, inside and outside of Israel, who are saying, loudly and with great passion, that this violence in Gaza is a war crime, that we must negotiate a cease fire, and that the oppression of Palestinians must end. Antizionism is not antisemitism. And even if you do not agree with me, it is my First Amendment right — my human right — to say so. I will not cede that ground to the right. Neither should you.

*Edit: I rather pointedly left out the soldiers who died on October 7th in my statement condeming that attack above, but a friend just pointed out to me in a private message that Israel has a draft and that many of those soldiers were regular people who did not want to be there. As a former soldier, I do think that military personnel are always a valid target in war no matter why they put on the uniform, but that does not make their deaths any less sad. This whole thing is hell. I hate it all.

Thumbnail by Ruth Archer from Pixabay, digitally altered by Yours Truly

(I actually really like non-metaphorical olives, if you were wondering)