How many pro-Israel supporters were intimidated from expressing their own views on campus? How many feared violent retribution if they spoke their mind?
Yes, there have been entirely legitimate and legal pro-Hamas demonstrations, and Trump is not shutting them down.
George says “There is not even a shadow of a justification for the government to punish, or even express disapproval of, speech that condemns Israeli actions or even that praises terrorist or otherwise illegal actions.” Well, the courts will adjudicate the legal question at issue which is not whether or not the above applies to a CITIZEN (in which case I agree with George - citizens have a right to be idiots) but whether or not we can punish the speech of those who are trying to become US citizens. I’m quite happy to send Khalil and all those like him back to their home countries.
Why do you believe there should be a double-standard between citizens and non-citizens when it comes to free speech rights? This would seemingly create a category of non-criminal but deportable offences.
My concern is that the language around „adverse foreign policy consequences“ is vague and gives government a broad remit to punish foreigners engaged in legal activity.
The Khalil case would set a dangerous precedent: would you be comfortable with e.g. foreigners advocating for Israel to be deported if a future Democrat Government radically switched it‘s policy vis-a-vis Israel/ Palestine?
Doing some great thinking here. Excellent piece. One question regards Columbia receiving $400 billion in federal money. I haven't checked, but it seems this may have been a typo. If it's not, how is this possible...? Seems like an astronomical amount of money for an institution which also charges exceedingly high tuition rates. I really hope it's a typo
Noted. But still seems unbelievably high, if I'm being honest. 400m, to one single institution? I'm a person who definitely wants taxes to pay for things, especially enrichment programs and education. But we can't look at that number and pretend there was no waste. This is why academia is full of aimless departments with few material accomplishments. They've been receiving blank checks of funny money for so long that they stopped caring about actually delivering a meaningful experience to their students.
Discussions like this ought to make it clear that there is no symmetry between left-wing and government threats to free speech. Cancellation by woke zealots was and is very unpleasant, and sometimes even career-threatening (though right-wing billionaires have gotten into that act as well). But the government's coercive tools are far worse, including deportation and imprisonment. And even more important, the government is a public entity, employing public resources, with very strict legal limits on what kind of speech it can interfere with. There is not even a shadow of a justification for the government to punish, or even express disapproval of, speech that condemns Israeli actions or even that praises terrorist or otherwise illegal actions. Speech is not (except under extremely narrowly defined conditions) material assistance -- that is a fundamental principle of First Amendment law. Of course the Trump Administration is ignorant of the fundamental principles of First Amendment law. So it's the job of everyone who writes about these matters to repeat it at the top of their lungs until an effective majority of the population hears it.
Also: “The Harper’s Letter was a critique of the often stifling literary and intellectual culture that sometimes led to editors and writers losing their jobs. The Khalil case is part of a coordinated state effort to suppress a political movement. “
Respectfully, that's completely bonkers. The left has near total chokeholds on the social science and humanities faculties of most prestigious (and most non-prestigious, for that matter) colleges, and routinely both quietly and overtly imposes political litmus tests for hiring, publication, grant-issuance, and tenure. Up to half of American academics, when polled, freely admit that they'd mark down a research prospectus with a conservative-leaning hypothesis, or discriminate against a Trump voter in hiring.
And when it comes to protest movements that the Left disapproves of - anti-COVID mandates, or TEA-parties, or conservative campus groups inviting right-leaning pundits to speak - the left's most common reaction is to dox, disrupt, "deplatform," threaten, riot, and close ranks around black-bloc agitators. Well sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and a non-citizen who organizes violent campus disruptions which result in several janitors being held hostage and college buildings being covered in innumerable swastikas is a much more apposite target than many the left have chosen.
Schmendrick: I made two claims: 1) that government coercion is potentially far graver than the informal, private kind; though the latter can threaten careers, the former can threaten liberty; and 2) government may not sanction even hateful speech, unless it imminently incites serious violence. I don't see that you've addressed,much less rebutted, either of these claims.
Yes, many or most humanities and social science departments are not very ideologically diverse. I've long wondered whether there are any intellectually serious studies explaining that phenomenon -- more serious than Wall Street Journal editorials. Do you know of any? And as for the small-scale (but of course unpardonable) de-platforming phenomenon, it seems to me utterly dwarfed by the right-wing assault on free speech documented in "Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy" by Kathleen Stewart and "The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market" by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. Not to mention the assault currently underway by the Trump Administration, which illustrates just how much more dangerous government coercion is than even coercion by random billionaires, much less by squads of overzealous students.
Actually (and this doesn’t reflect much better on my reading comprehension skills), you claimed that “left wing” cancellation wasn’t comparable to “government coercion” - a false symmetry from the beginning. Of course, when the government is in left-wing hands that same machinery cranks up to suppress right wing causes. and instead throws grannies in jail for quietly praying outside of abortion clinics, colludes with social media companies to censor Americans with disfavored views, and intervenes in politics by suppressing and lying about true news stories inconvenient to their preferred candidate, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story. So again, even if I grant your framing of the Khalil matter (which for the record I do not), the Trumpist use of government to target its own ideological enemies here is hardly unprecedented.
But as serious as that is, I would think someone as focused on dollars-and-cents issues as you would recognize the societally-disastrous consequences of "threatening careers." Making the ability to feed yourself and provide shelter for your family conditional on holding the right political opinions is deeply, deeply insidious; made worse when friends, coworkers, and even random strangers both on the internet and in real life are all potential "informants" against you. Worse, the ideological-hijacking of the knowledge- and credibility-generating institutions of education in America by ideological progressives (there are numerous easily-findable studies documenting rampant ideological bias against conservatives, as well as the more common sort of prejudice against allegedly-"privileged" identities) fundamentally poisons our basic perception of reality; the same as how you'd feel about the less-common blacklists against socialists or progressives in the mid-20th century.
Schmendrick: The post was not about comparing left-wing and right-wing coercion throughout world history but in 21st century America. Yes, some left-wing governments in the 20th century were just as bad as some right-wing governments. But in our time and place, the wave of ideologically-motivated coercion inaugurated by the Trump administration far outweighs that attributable to campus leftists, student or faculty. The original post acknowledged this; my original comment merely called for greater emphasis.
"when the government is in left-wing hands that same machinery cranks up to suppress right wing causes." -- I'm not sure what you're referring to here. America's government has never, alas, been in left-wing hands. Centrist liberal governments have been know to throw abortion protestors in jail, not of course for protesting but for harassing vulnerable women, killing doctors, or bombing clinics. As for "intervenes in politics by suppressing and lying about true news stories inconvenient to their preferred candidate," yes, all sides have done some of that. But if you think the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN, are remotely as dishonest as Fox News, Clear Channel, and the other outlets where Trump voters get most of their news ... well, I disagree.
You're certrainly right that denying qualified candidates jobs because they're conservative is deplorable. But I asked for some studies because there are obviously other possible reasons for the ideological imbalance: perhaps conservatives are not generally as interested in or well-qualified for positions in academic humanities or social sciences; or perhaps they'd rather make more money. I'd also point out that young conservative intellectuals have vastly more financial support available to them from right-wing foundations and institutes, which are much more focused on financing the careers of independent right-wing intellectuals than are large liberal foundations like Ford or Rockefeller.
Finally, this: "rampant ideological bias against conservatives, as well as the more common sort of prejudice against allegedly-"privileged" identities" If you mean bias against students on campus, I'm sure there's more anti-conservative bias than anti-left bias. Again, I agree bwith you that's bad, though I don't think it's as consequential today as government coercion. When you refer to prejudice agains "allededly 'privileged' identities," are you referring to affirmative action? That's over now, as you know, and in any case it was never about "prejudice"; it was about repairing the effects of not just prejudice but centuries of lethal oppression.
The litany of cancellation and suppression Schmendrick listed was within the last 10 years by the Biden Administration and other non-right governments in the world (the arrested granny was in Scotland, I believe). “Real 21st Century Leftist suppression has never been tried”? I suppose, still doesn’t make what’s actually happened by governments OK.
I think an acknowledgment that universities have, whether intentionally or not, molded themselves into the worst Rush Limbaugh-esque caricature imaginable would be a good first step at showing a seriousness of purpose in trying to fight Trump, allaying an obvious but unstated question for those on the fence: If you hate me and other benighted fellow Americans, why would I believe you when you say you want to save America? Many people *do* want to save America, but unless you drop the part that says “‘America is a melting pot is racist’” you are only serious in reclaiming power, not removing a grave threat to our country as we believe it to be.
I could go on about the litany of groupthink, along with newfound enforcement methods, that have run through the university system over the last 15 years, and the damage to knowledge that has resulted, but I also want to hone in on the social cost, which you keep trying to shy away from. The Civil Rights, Anti-War, and Free Speech movements that came out of the University system changed the country through persuasion. Wokeness through the universities has also tried to change the country, but far more with cancellations, either financial or social. This too has been felt, particularly right around the isolation of Covid, and the vast majority of Americans think that method of coercion is unamerican. Merely shrugging one’s shoulder’s to say “hey, at least it’s not the government” misunderstands what is at stake even if Trump were removed by a Woke counter (counter) revolution.
NY Expat: Rush-Limbaugh is exactly what the Woke brigade -- bad as they are -- are not like. Never mind the personal differences -- Limbaugh was a near-total ignoramus and uninhibited liar and smear merchant, while the cancellation crowd at least sometimes aimed -- by the wrong means, I agree -- to cancel the right people; and while they often exaggerated or distorted, did not, like Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Breitbart, etc outright lie, constantly.
But never mind that. The wokesters made academic humanities and social sciences inaccessible or uncomfortable for conservatives, which they had no right to do. Butn Limbaugh and his fellow right-wing talk radio and podcast blowhards, plus the evangelical Right, which did its share of cancellation, bamboozled tens of millions of people into hating their liberal fellow citizens enough to shoot themselves in the foot: that is, to vote for a party that has fleeced them (did you know that since Reagan, the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution would have received an additional $50 trillion if not for Republican tax policies, destruction of labor unions, votes against increasing minimum wage and unemployment benefits, etc.), poisoned their environment, deprived them of health insurance, tried to privatize their Social Security, and screw them in myriad other ways. And they've only just begun. In my book, there's no comparison between the harm done by the woke and by the right-wing propaganda machine.
I certainly agree that the woke left should be isolated and ignored, and that they are in part to blame for the social democratic left's unpopularity. They were a minor menace, vastly amplified by the right-wing noise machine. But they made it possible for the right to change the subject, away from their horrific agenda, and for that I don't forgive them. On the other hand, if every woke word disappeared from America tomorrow, the Republicans would devise another dishonest gambit to disguise their unflagging support for plutocracy. Best, I think, to confront them on the main issue and ignore the woke.
I would quibble with your opening about a possibility that seems less and less likely the more that comes out, though I appreciate the conceit, but more importantly with the idea that Trump has anything resembling a “plan” for Gaza.
How many pro-Israel supporters were intimidated from expressing their own views on campus? How many feared violent retribution if they spoke their mind?
Yes, there have been entirely legitimate and legal pro-Hamas demonstrations, and Trump is not shutting them down.
George says “There is not even a shadow of a justification for the government to punish, or even express disapproval of, speech that condemns Israeli actions or even that praises terrorist or otherwise illegal actions.” Well, the courts will adjudicate the legal question at issue which is not whether or not the above applies to a CITIZEN (in which case I agree with George - citizens have a right to be idiots) but whether or not we can punish the speech of those who are trying to become US citizens. I’m quite happy to send Khalil and all those like him back to their home countries.
Why do you believe there should be a double-standard between citizens and non-citizens when it comes to free speech rights? This would seemingly create a category of non-criminal but deportable offences.
Correct it would. https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-deport-hamas-supporters-visa-law
Thanks for sharing the article!
My concern is that the language around „adverse foreign policy consequences“ is vague and gives government a broad remit to punish foreigners engaged in legal activity.
The Khalil case would set a dangerous precedent: would you be comfortable with e.g. foreigners advocating for Israel to be deported if a future Democrat Government radically switched it‘s policy vis-a-vis Israel/ Palestine?
The short answer is yes - because I think it’s legal. The longer answer is that I think such a policy is foolish and would oppose it politically.
Doing some great thinking here. Excellent piece. One question regards Columbia receiving $400 billion in federal money. I haven't checked, but it seems this may have been a typo. If it's not, how is this possible...? Seems like an astronomical amount of money for an institution which also charges exceedingly high tuition rates. I really hope it's a typo
400 million -- typo!
Noted. But still seems unbelievably high, if I'm being honest. 400m, to one single institution? I'm a person who definitely wants taxes to pay for things, especially enrichment programs and education. But we can't look at that number and pretend there was no waste. This is why academia is full of aimless departments with few material accomplishments. They've been receiving blank checks of funny money for so long that they stopped caring about actually delivering a meaningful experience to their students.
Discussions like this ought to make it clear that there is no symmetry between left-wing and government threats to free speech. Cancellation by woke zealots was and is very unpleasant, and sometimes even career-threatening (though right-wing billionaires have gotten into that act as well). But the government's coercive tools are far worse, including deportation and imprisonment. And even more important, the government is a public entity, employing public resources, with very strict legal limits on what kind of speech it can interfere with. There is not even a shadow of a justification for the government to punish, or even express disapproval of, speech that condemns Israeli actions or even that praises terrorist or otherwise illegal actions. Speech is not (except under extremely narrowly defined conditions) material assistance -- that is a fundamental principle of First Amendment law. Of course the Trump Administration is ignorant of the fundamental principles of First Amendment law. So it's the job of everyone who writes about these matters to repeat it at the top of their lungs until an effective majority of the population hears it.
I wrote: “The Khalil case poses a greater material threat to freedom than do the problems outlined in the Harper’s Letter.”
Yes, well done.
Also: “The Harper’s Letter was a critique of the often stifling literary and intellectual culture that sometimes led to editors and writers losing their jobs. The Khalil case is part of a coordinated state effort to suppress a political movement. “
Respectfully, that's completely bonkers. The left has near total chokeholds on the social science and humanities faculties of most prestigious (and most non-prestigious, for that matter) colleges, and routinely both quietly and overtly imposes political litmus tests for hiring, publication, grant-issuance, and tenure. Up to half of American academics, when polled, freely admit that they'd mark down a research prospectus with a conservative-leaning hypothesis, or discriminate against a Trump voter in hiring.
And when it comes to protest movements that the Left disapproves of - anti-COVID mandates, or TEA-parties, or conservative campus groups inviting right-leaning pundits to speak - the left's most common reaction is to dox, disrupt, "deplatform," threaten, riot, and close ranks around black-bloc agitators. Well sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and a non-citizen who organizes violent campus disruptions which result in several janitors being held hostage and college buildings being covered in innumerable swastikas is a much more apposite target than many the left have chosen.
Schmendrick: I made two claims: 1) that government coercion is potentially far graver than the informal, private kind; though the latter can threaten careers, the former can threaten liberty; and 2) government may not sanction even hateful speech, unless it imminently incites serious violence. I don't see that you've addressed,much less rebutted, either of these claims.
Yes, many or most humanities and social science departments are not very ideologically diverse. I've long wondered whether there are any intellectually serious studies explaining that phenomenon -- more serious than Wall Street Journal editorials. Do you know of any? And as for the small-scale (but of course unpardonable) de-platforming phenomenon, it seems to me utterly dwarfed by the right-wing assault on free speech documented in "Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy" by Kathleen Stewart and "The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market" by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. Not to mention the assault currently underway by the Trump Administration, which illustrates just how much more dangerous government coercion is than even coercion by random billionaires, much less by squads of overzealous students.
Actually (and this doesn’t reflect much better on my reading comprehension skills), you claimed that “left wing” cancellation wasn’t comparable to “government coercion” - a false symmetry from the beginning. Of course, when the government is in left-wing hands that same machinery cranks up to suppress right wing causes. and instead throws grannies in jail for quietly praying outside of abortion clinics, colludes with social media companies to censor Americans with disfavored views, and intervenes in politics by suppressing and lying about true news stories inconvenient to their preferred candidate, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story. So again, even if I grant your framing of the Khalil matter (which for the record I do not), the Trumpist use of government to target its own ideological enemies here is hardly unprecedented.
But as serious as that is, I would think someone as focused on dollars-and-cents issues as you would recognize the societally-disastrous consequences of "threatening careers." Making the ability to feed yourself and provide shelter for your family conditional on holding the right political opinions is deeply, deeply insidious; made worse when friends, coworkers, and even random strangers both on the internet and in real life are all potential "informants" against you. Worse, the ideological-hijacking of the knowledge- and credibility-generating institutions of education in America by ideological progressives (there are numerous easily-findable studies documenting rampant ideological bias against conservatives, as well as the more common sort of prejudice against allegedly-"privileged" identities) fundamentally poisons our basic perception of reality; the same as how you'd feel about the less-common blacklists against socialists or progressives in the mid-20th century.
Schmendrick: The post was not about comparing left-wing and right-wing coercion throughout world history but in 21st century America. Yes, some left-wing governments in the 20th century were just as bad as some right-wing governments. But in our time and place, the wave of ideologically-motivated coercion inaugurated by the Trump administration far outweighs that attributable to campus leftists, student or faculty. The original post acknowledged this; my original comment merely called for greater emphasis.
"when the government is in left-wing hands that same machinery cranks up to suppress right wing causes." -- I'm not sure what you're referring to here. America's government has never, alas, been in left-wing hands. Centrist liberal governments have been know to throw abortion protestors in jail, not of course for protesting but for harassing vulnerable women, killing doctors, or bombing clinics. As for "intervenes in politics by suppressing and lying about true news stories inconvenient to their preferred candidate," yes, all sides have done some of that. But if you think the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN, are remotely as dishonest as Fox News, Clear Channel, and the other outlets where Trump voters get most of their news ... well, I disagree.
You're certrainly right that denying qualified candidates jobs because they're conservative is deplorable. But I asked for some studies because there are obviously other possible reasons for the ideological imbalance: perhaps conservatives are not generally as interested in or well-qualified for positions in academic humanities or social sciences; or perhaps they'd rather make more money. I'd also point out that young conservative intellectuals have vastly more financial support available to them from right-wing foundations and institutes, which are much more focused on financing the careers of independent right-wing intellectuals than are large liberal foundations like Ford or Rockefeller.
Finally, this: "rampant ideological bias against conservatives, as well as the more common sort of prejudice against allegedly-"privileged" identities" If you mean bias against students on campus, I'm sure there's more anti-conservative bias than anti-left bias. Again, I agree bwith you that's bad, though I don't think it's as consequential today as government coercion. When you refer to prejudice agains "allededly 'privileged' identities," are you referring to affirmative action? That's over now, as you know, and in any case it was never about "prejudice"; it was about repairing the effects of not just prejudice but centuries of lethal oppression.
The litany of cancellation and suppression Schmendrick listed was within the last 10 years by the Biden Administration and other non-right governments in the world (the arrested granny was in Scotland, I believe). “Real 21st Century Leftist suppression has never been tried”? I suppose, still doesn’t make what’s actually happened by governments OK.
I think an acknowledgment that universities have, whether intentionally or not, molded themselves into the worst Rush Limbaugh-esque caricature imaginable would be a good first step at showing a seriousness of purpose in trying to fight Trump, allaying an obvious but unstated question for those on the fence: If you hate me and other benighted fellow Americans, why would I believe you when you say you want to save America? Many people *do* want to save America, but unless you drop the part that says “‘America is a melting pot is racist’” you are only serious in reclaiming power, not removing a grave threat to our country as we believe it to be.
I could go on about the litany of groupthink, along with newfound enforcement methods, that have run through the university system over the last 15 years, and the damage to knowledge that has resulted, but I also want to hone in on the social cost, which you keep trying to shy away from. The Civil Rights, Anti-War, and Free Speech movements that came out of the University system changed the country through persuasion. Wokeness through the universities has also tried to change the country, but far more with cancellations, either financial or social. This too has been felt, particularly right around the isolation of Covid, and the vast majority of Americans think that method of coercion is unamerican. Merely shrugging one’s shoulder’s to say “hey, at least it’s not the government” misunderstands what is at stake even if Trump were removed by a Woke counter (counter) revolution.
NY Expat: Rush-Limbaugh is exactly what the Woke brigade -- bad as they are -- are not like. Never mind the personal differences -- Limbaugh was a near-total ignoramus and uninhibited liar and smear merchant, while the cancellation crowd at least sometimes aimed -- by the wrong means, I agree -- to cancel the right people; and while they often exaggerated or distorted, did not, like Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Breitbart, etc outright lie, constantly.
But never mind that. The wokesters made academic humanities and social sciences inaccessible or uncomfortable for conservatives, which they had no right to do. Butn Limbaugh and his fellow right-wing talk radio and podcast blowhards, plus the evangelical Right, which did its share of cancellation, bamboozled tens of millions of people into hating their liberal fellow citizens enough to shoot themselves in the foot: that is, to vote for a party that has fleeced them (did you know that since Reagan, the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution would have received an additional $50 trillion if not for Republican tax policies, destruction of labor unions, votes against increasing minimum wage and unemployment benefits, etc.), poisoned their environment, deprived them of health insurance, tried to privatize their Social Security, and screw them in myriad other ways. And they've only just begun. In my book, there's no comparison between the harm done by the woke and by the right-wing propaganda machine.
I certainly agree that the woke left should be isolated and ignored, and that they are in part to blame for the social democratic left's unpopularity. They were a minor menace, vastly amplified by the right-wing noise machine. But they made it possible for the right to change the subject, away from their horrific agenda, and for that I don't forgive them. On the other hand, if every woke word disappeared from America tomorrow, the Republicans would devise another dishonest gambit to disguise their unflagging support for plutocracy. Best, I think, to confront them on the main issue and ignore the woke.
I would quibble with your opening about a possibility that seems less and less likely the more that comes out, though I appreciate the conceit, but more importantly with the idea that Trump has anything resembling a “plan” for Gaza.