Thomas Zimmer: Student Revolt and the Curtailing of Critical Speech

https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/student-revolt-and-the-curtailing

Across the country, authorities – sometimes university leadership, sometimes elected officials – have decided that the right answer to peaceful student protests and encampments on college campuses is to mobilize the coercive powers of the state and escalate the situation with brute force and violence. Mass arrests; police in riot gear beating unarmed students and faculty; heavily armed state troopers marching on the campus, turning the scene into the type of carnage that bloodhounds on the Right eagerly use as the justification for demanding the National Guard be deployed, as senator Tom Cotton and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have done – men who are just generally excited to use whatever level of violence is deemed necessary to force anyone who is coded as “left-wing” into submission.

You don’t have to like the pro-Palestinian protests or even agree one bit with the substance of what these young people are criticizing and demanding, with the way they are doing it, to see how this is a widely disproportionate response: An outrageous suppression of speech because the powers that be reject the content of what is being said and consider those who are speaking dangerous, subversive, and unworthy.

Large swaths of America’s mainstream elite and polite society want to pretend that this is all a necessary answer to rabid antisemitism and escalating hatred of Jewish people and life amongst indoctrinated radicals. We are supposed to be believe that what was happening at Columbia before the mass arrests was something like the leftwing extremist equivalent of the Unite the Right Nazi rally in Charlottesville in 2017. In Charlottesville, as you’ll recall, neo-Nazis marched with torches, heavily armed rightwing militants descended upon the city, counter-protesters were assaulted – one person was killed. Ask yourself: Have you seen anything like that? Armed vigilantes? Violent clashes?

In some corners of the Left, conversely, there is a reflexive impulse to deny that anything antisemitic is ever said or done at these pro-Palestinian protests. This type of denial is not only morally disingenuous, it is also politically disastrous. The Left – and anyone who cares about the plight of the people in Gaza – should come down hard on those who see these protests as an opportunity to display their vile hatred. Some might just be getting carried away, who knows. But the fact is that yes, sometimes criticism of the Israeli government at these protests crosses the line into antisemitism; and there can be no justification for blocking Jewish students from entering or leaving university grounds, for assaulting them, berating them…

*snip*