Progressives who once argued that free speech is violence now claim that violence is free speech.
Yesterday, the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT were caught in a trap in front of a House committee. Each was asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated rules at their university. Each president refused to answer directly, insisting that everything depends on context.
So here’s the context: On university campuses and in many other places, anti-Semitic speech regularly crosses the line into threats, intimidation, and outright violence against Jews. University rules and local laws are intentionally violated because everybody knows that the rules and laws are selectively enforced.
Liberals in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill like to compare speech and debate to a marketplace. Let all offer their ideas in peaceful competition; let all have equal opportunity to listen and judge. But there’s another tradition consolidating around us. In this tradition, speech is not like a market. It’s like a battle. The goal is not to enlighten, but to dominate. Adversaries must be overawed, intimidated, and silenced.
Since the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, we have heard many stories of threats to pro-Palestinian free speech in the United States. The Atlantic itself has published some accounts of them. Yet take a closer look, and something else is usually going on. Complaints that pro-Palestine speech has been curtailed again and again turn out to involve violations of norms, rules, and laws that have nothing to do with speech as liberal-minded people would define it. In New York City last week, pro-Palestine demonstrators attempted to disrupt the lighting of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. For fear of a repeat of such attacks, yesterday the state of California announced that its tree-lighting ceremony would no longer take place in person, and would be a virtual event.
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Rhetoric drawn from the Jefferson-Mill tradition is now being used to defend behavior that is meant to intimidate or harm. Important elements of our society have shifted from their former claim that speech can be violence to a bold assertion that violence should count as speech. A few days ago, Canada’s York University—the country’s second-largest college—suspended three academics who had been criminally charged for their anti-Israel activism. “You should consider defending speech as opposed to the Orwellian Toronto Police on this matter,” the Toronto-born writer Naomi Klein tweeted.
What was this “speech” that Klein referred to? The three arrested academics had splashed red paint over the entrance of a downtown bookstore, then pasted posters all over the store’s windows bearing an (invented) anti-Palestinian quote they (falsely) attributed to the store’s owner, a prominent Jewish businesswoman.
Rifle through the news accounts of the past few years and you find dozens, if not hundreds, of similar cases of vandalism, bodily interference, even outright assault as forms of anti-Israel expression. Only this week, the Biden White House and the governor of Pennsylvania issued statements condemning the mob action against a falafel restaurant in Philadelphia owned by an award-winning Israeli-born chef and entrepreneur.
But such menacing behavior has become the preferred style of anti-Israel expression in the United States and Canada.
Pro-Palestine advocates have built barriers to block people’s way as they tried to walk across a college campus or drive to work.
They have padlocked doors to a university building to prevent students from taking a midterm exam.
They have assembled slogan-chanting crowds outside businesses owned by Jews to frighten customers away.
They have confronted and harassed shoppers in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood.
They have defaced synagogues and damaged libraries named for Jewish donors.
They have set off smoke bombs and thrown paint at the home of the head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
In October, anti-Israel protesters at Harvard mobbed a student who tried to film them with his phone—something he was entitled to do at a public event. The protesters allegedly jostled and grabbed at him in an effort to prevent him from recording the encounter.
On November 10, Columbia University suspended the local chapters of two pro-Palestine groups after both violated university rules and went ahead, despite warnings, with an event that involved “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.”
In the worst cases, activists have escalated street demonstrations into physical fights that have left some Jews injured, in one case with a broken nose, and led to one violent death when a pro-Palestine protester struck a Jewish man in the face with a megaphone, knocking him to the ground so that his head hit the curb.
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As the sheer number and variety of these acts confirm, these are not occasional and unfortunate aberrations. In the words of a student activist at William & Mary in 2018: “By breaking down the notion of respectability, the Palestinians can and should demand that their oppression be taken seriously.” In 2021, the Palestinian American writer Steve Salaita mocked those who “speak of rights and democracy and civil liberties and then superimpose those categories onto Palestine. It doesn’t occur to them that Palestine has its own vocabularies of freedom worth forcing into the American conversation.”
Classical liberal defenders of free speech imagine speech as an appeal to human reason. On October 17, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression posted a statement that urged:
Let every participant in the debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict show their cards, even those with the most extreme views. And let others marshal arguments and evidence to refute or discredit those views.
But marshaling evidence and arguments is precisely what some advocates reject on principle. For the past decade, the big idea of anti-Israel protesters has been BDS: “boycott, divest, and sanction.” What the BDS idea has meant in practice is attempts at systematic exclusion of Jews and Israelis from participation in public dialogue. U.S. academic associations including the Middle East Studies Association, the American Studies Association, and the American Anthropological Association have voted to sever their ties with Israeli universities. On American campuses such as the University of Chicago, pro-Palestine advocates have tried to mobilize students to boycott classes taught by Israeli nationals or people with connections to Israel. At a New York City high school last month, students rioted against a teacher who had posted on social media about her attendance at a pro-Israel rally. Two dozen New York police and the city’s counterterrorism unit had to be called to protect the teacher and restore order at the school.
In a marketplace of ideas, ripping down posters you disagree with is wrong. Post your own! But to those who see the world of ideas as a battlefield, ripping down an offending poster is amply justified. Opponents are enemies, not competitors, and enemies are allowed no rights at all. So go ahead, rip down posters of abducted children—and physically attack those who document your actions. In Canada, there have been multiple instances of guns being fired at Jewish schools during non-classroom hours: a wishful fantasy of mass murder.
The denial of speech rights to those who think incorrectly is not a marginal idea in American life. It commands wide support from some of the most celebrated American thinkers of our day.
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Ibram X. Kendi, for example, published an article in 2015 defending students at Wesleyan and Brown who had tried to shut down their campus newspapers for publishing opinions to which those students objected: in one case a defense of Columbus Day, in the other a criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement. He wrote:
When the press publishes false or unproven racist ideas in news stories or columns without informing readers there is no truth to those claims and tales, that is not an exercise in free speech. That is unfree speech … We should applaud the students at Wesleyan and Brown who are trying to silence unfree speech in their student newspapers.
Endorsing 2021 demands that Netflix sever its ties with the comedian Dave Chapelle, GLAAD urged “accountability when content causes harm.” Two academic specialists in digital free speech made a similar argument in a 2021 op-ed:
Cancel culture is not a threat to free speech—it is a manifestation of it. Cancel culture is an evolving form of democratic discourse where individuals use their free speech rights to form masses. These masses exert pressure on people and institutions. A better term for it would be “accountability culture” … That’s what cancel culture is doing. It is people leveraging emerging communication tools to apply pressure to individuals and organizations.
Arguably, this way of thinking reached its culmination in the summer of 2020, when The New York Times allowed angry staffers to force the resignation of the editorial-page editor, James Bennet (a former editor of The Atlantic), for the offense of publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton. The article called for deploying the military to suppress riots in American cities. Its critics and their allies condemned Cotton’s article for supposedly endangering Black journalists at the Times.
According to this new code, rights vary according to the status of the rights-bearer. One rule exists for the so-called marginalized; a different rule applies to the nonmarginalized. MIT provided a pair of telling examples of how the new dispensation of rights-by-status operates.
In the fall of 2021, MIT invited Dorian Abbot, a young academic at the University of Chicago, to deliver a lecture about new developments in climate science. For Abbot, this was an exciting opportunity, the kind of honor that speeds an associate professor toward a tenured professorship. Two months before the lecture, however, Abbot published an article criticizing affirmative action in higher education. MIT had never before made a scientific invitation conditional on the scientist’s views about a nonscientific matter. Yet, after protests by graduate students, the MIT earth-sciences department canceled the lecture.
Two years later, MIT faced a direct violation of its declared rules by pro-Palestine demonstrators. To avoid traffic disruption, MIT forbids demonstrations at the campus’s main entrance. A group called Students Against Apartheid announced a plan to break that rule on November 9—coincidentally or not, the 85th anniversary of the Nazis’ Kristallnacht attack on Jews and Jewish property in Germany. The protest soon turned rancorous.
MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, ordered the protesters to clear out and warned students who disobeyed that they would face suspension. Some students did disobey. But when it came time to apply the penalty, MIT retreated. Foreign students suspended for nonacademic reasons could forfeit their student visas. To protect them, MIT dropped its threat.
In other words, in 2021, MIT imposed a significant penalty on an academic who had broken no rule. In 2023, MIT waived the penalty for students who broke an important rule.
The new speech code redefines some words as causing “harm”; at the same time, it redefines actual “harm” caused as mere words. Some previously distinguished academics have deliriously celebrated Hamas’s atrocities as exhilarating or at least justified them as understandable responses to the provocation of an Israeli dance party. At Arizona State University, a student-government debate about a resolution on Israel and Gaza was interrupted when pro-Palestine students threw rocks at the windows of the meeting hall. Police were called—not to arrest the rock throwers, but to escort Jewish students home. Jewish students similarly had to be escorted out of the rear entrance of the Cooper Union library building in New York City on October 25.
What on earth can be done about this awful situation?
In the 2010s, those progressives who urged universities to suppress unwanted ideas hoped that they could leverage their power within institutions of learning, communications, and culture to remake the rest of society. They scored considerable successes. But there was always something artificial about their project. The norms they sought to enforce were usually not shared. The opinion that got Abbot bounced from his MIT lecture—against race-based preferences in university admissions—is shared by fully half of Americans. Other causes that got academics deplatformed in the 2010s offered even more startling examples of minorities commandeering public institutions to create a false appearance of consensus. In 2023, a Gallup poll asked, “Do you think transgender athletes should be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity or should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender?” Only about one quarter of Americans said yes to the “gender identity” option—the one favored by the deplatformers—while almost 70 percent chose the “birth gender” option.
But the polling also shows that the revulsion against Hamas’s atrocities represents a genuine majority feeling in American society. Americans do not like terrorism, and they do not like excuses for terrorism. They do not like the heartless behavior and symbolic violence that is typically joined to the excuse-making.
And so, anti-Israel activists who ripped down posters of abducted children found themselves named, shamed, and in some cases fired. Amazon, Apple, Intel, Meta, and other large companies withdrew from one of the world’s largest tech conference after the CEO accused Israel on social media of war crimes without mentioning Hamas terrorism. Dozens of leading asset managers signed a letter pledging to outlaw any expression of anti-Semitic hate at their organization. Twenty-four major U.S. law firms have issued a similar commitment. A non-Jewish managing partner at a major North American law firm shared with me a message he sent to all his partners and associates in October:
The State of Israel is connected to many of our people by family, friendships and shared history. It is connected to all of us as a democracy in a very troubled area. The terrorist attacks of this past week are an affront not just to Israelis and the Jewish diaspora, but to all civilized people.
These acts, too, involve freedom of expression and association.
Yascha Mounk: Cancel culture cuts both ways
Since October 7, hate-filled violence has killed one Palestinian American boy and savagely wounded his mother, victims of an alleged stabbing attack by their landlord in a town southwest of Chicago. Over Thanksgiving weekend, three Palestinian American students were shot, and one was severely wounded, in Burlington, Vermont—a crime that police are still investigating. All are entitled to live without fear. All acts of violence must be held to account. No act of violence should be condoned or minimized.
And the days of dressing up ritualized violence as “speech”—and demanding protections for stalking, harassing, bullying, impeding, intimidating, deplatforming, and even actual violence—must end.
Everybody should be free to express his or her opinion about the Middle East as an opinion. Everybody should be equally free to express opinions about other people’s opinions, including by exercising the freedom to peacefully boycott or to lawfully refuse to hire. But what the great majority of tolerant and law-abiding citizens are abruptly discovering is that some progressives define their rights as including the power to threaten, coerce, and harm others. This is not behavior that a free and democratic society can accept if it hopes to survive as a free and democratic society. If the public condemnation of their violent behavior comes as a shock to people incubated in progressive spaces, the shock will be a salutary one.
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