Triggered

Free speech and the brazen hypocrisy of the right

In the months following the declaration of stay-at-home orders throughout the U.S. in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, protesters gathered in small numbers in the capitols of Michigan, Texas, and other states to express their opposition to the lockdowns. The reaction from the media was borderline hysterical. The protesters were called “white supremacists” and compared to Nazis. They were accused of “anti-black racism.” Later, they were equated with the January 6 rioters and with the Charlottesville alt-right white nationalists.

Two years later, in Canada, we were shown what that kind of rhetoric meant when it was instituted as government policy. After Canadian truckers brought Ottawa to a standstill in a demonstration of their opposition to vaccine mandates, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau maligned them as violent extremists and “people who wave swastikas,” and his government froze the bank accounts of protesters and their donors.

At the time, conservatives stood behind the protesters and rejected their vilification by politicians and the mass media. “The truckers in Canada have done more for freedom than the entire Democrat Party the past two years,” North Carolina Congressman Dan Bishop proclaimed. “They are not some ‘fringe minority’ with ‘unacceptable views.’”

But now that there’s a protest movement they disagree with, the right has adopted wholesale the authoritarian tactics they once claimed to deplore. After demonstrations broke out in multiple American cities against Israel’s war on Gaza, Bishop pantomimed Trudeau’s demagoguery, asking whether “pro-Hamas protests” constitute a “foreign malign influence operation.” Elon Musk, who once tweeted that “Canadian truckers rule” and has denounced restrictions on free speech in Canada, Brazil, and the U.S., now claims that the pro-Palestinian student movement is “openly antisemitic” and boosts accounts that have called for its censorship. Donald Trump, who complained for years about online censorship of conservatives including himself, called for the banning of pro-Palestinian groups from college campuses.

Following Trudeau’s example, the right went from demonizing protesters to outright criminalizing the exercise of their constitutional right to free speech. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who five years ago signed a bill protecting free speech on Texas college campuses, is now sending state troopers onto those very same campuses to suppress it. Abbott also issued an executive order directing Texas universities to “update free speech policies” to punish students for “antisemitic speech,” specifically singling out two pro-Palestinian student groups for suppression. In the language of the progressive Social Justice Warriors he so despises, Abbott bragged about creating “safe spaces” for Jewish students. In Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis attempted to ban a pro-Palestinian student group from the state’s campuses, falsely accusing them of being part of Hamas. He has since called for the expulsion of pro-Palestinian protesters and for canceling the visas of those among them who are international students.

However objectionable, antisemitic speech is protected by the Constitution. But it’s not even clear that the speech in question is antisemitic. One of the most cited examples of antisemitic harassment at Columbia University was when a random man on the street yelled “Go back to Poland! Go back to Belarus!” at Jewish students participating in a counterprotest. Another infamous case was when a student protester held a sign that read, “AL-QASAM’S NEXT TARGETS” with an arrow pointing at a group of Israeli flag-waving students.

Both invectives are obnoxious, but neither is self-evidently an attack on Jews for being Jews. One could easily interpret “Go back to Poland” as a demand that Israelis of European ancestry abandon what Palestinians regard as stolen land. An Israeli might find it deeply offensive to be called a colonist, but the insult isn’t about their Jewish identity. “AL-QASAM’S NEXT TARGETS” might betray a level of hostility bordering on fantasies of mass murder, but it expresses a straightforwardly political form of hatred.

You might be not be prepared to give those protesters the benefit of the doubt. We all know what they mean, you might say. But would you apply the same standards to the pro-Israel side? Israel’s supporters incessantly call the protesters “pro-Hamas.” Counter-protesters have wished rape upon pro-Palestinian student activists. A Republican Congressman has boasted about turning Gaza into a “parking lot.”’

These comments are every bit as vile and hateful as what we’ve heard coming from the Palestinian side. But if you apply the same standard, they’re no more and no less Islamophobic than the anti-Israel rhetoric is antisemitic; either it’s all hate speech, or none of it is. The rancor is unmistakable, but it’s political, not ethnic or racial hatred. Nor should it come as a surprise that the supporters of each side of a war hate one another. That’s what war is. And yet we’re allowed to debate war, even histrionically, in a functioning democracy.

The case that the protests are “violent” is even weaker. “I Was Stabbed In The Eye At Yale,” screams the headline of an article by a pro-Israel activist. Watch this video and judge for yourself if that’s a fair claim. On the other side of the ledger, meanwhile, there has been actual violence. A week after October 7, a 6-year-old Palestinian boy was murdered for being Palestinian, a straightforward hate crime that has since been memory-holed, even as raucous pro-Palestinian protests have been the subject of multiple Congressional hearings.

Hatred is hatred, and dehumanization is dehumanization. I don’t believe it’s any worse if it’s based on one’s ethnic or religious identity than if it’s based on their political views. But in this case, it’s important to distinguish between the two because only one of them is being deployed to restrict the First Amendment rights of Americans. Nobody is arguing that student protesters should be prohibited from peaceably assembling if they express their views in a rude or hurtful manner, a standard that would be so blatantly unconstitutional it would beclown oneself to invoke it. Instead, the right has claimed that this speech isn’t political at all — it’s hate speech, and thus undeserving of protection.

Many Americans would be surprised to learn that, unlike in many Western European countries, in the United States, so-called “hate speech” is also protected speech. Because of this failure to appreciate the First Amendment’s scope, it sounds more reasonable to suppress it. This is why the left portrays the articulation of every conservative view as an expression of bigotry while pleading for it to be censored.

In the world before October 7, 2023, the right ridiculed the left for this transparent ploy. Now, they’re doing the exact same thing. The most astonishing part is that they seem to expect us not to notice.