By now, we’ve all read of the disturbing case of Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University who was detained by federal immigration authorities a few weeks ago for daring to criticize Israel. Khalil, who had been an avid activist on Columbia’s campus and organizer of the pro-Palestinian protests that shook the campus over the last year, was to President Donald Trump's administration an ideological threat which, in their national purge of dissent, could not be tolerated.
The video of Khalil’s arrest, which I recommend watching here, is nothing short of chilling. Immigration officials arrive at Khalil’s dorm, handcuff him without stating the charges for arrest, refuse to answer the questions of his wife and their lawyer and drive away in an unmarked SUV. The scene was something straight out of the Gestapo. Khalil’s detention is the first case of the kidnapping and disappearance of a political dissident by the Trump administration, but it won’t be the last. The very essence of free speech in America is now imperiled by Trump’s deliberate silencing and threatening of political adversaries of every kind who speak out against him.
The South African Ambassador to the U.S. has been expelled by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who accused him of being “a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates [Trump].” A French scientist was recently denied entry into the U.S. after his phone was searched and found to contain messages critical of Trump. An executive order was issued last week to shut down Voice of America, an international radio news service originally founded during WWII to counter Nazi propaganda, for being “anti-Trump.” People of the United States: Everywhere the alarm bells of fascism are sounding.
The current jeopardy posed to the First Amendment by Trump has been enabled by a widespread misconception which in recent years has found currency in the mainstream American political arena: that free speech is a value of the political right. Conservatives in America have maintained a calculated campaign to present themselves as the great defenders of free speech, a bastion of liberty against the oppressive forces of liberal wokeism (what does this term even mean?).
This concerted effort has been especially effective when it comes to college campuses. Demagogues like Charlie Kirk have made a hucksterish political killing off of touring universities proclaiming to stand up for the rights of those who think differently on issues particularly regarding the opportunistically-fabricated phenomenon of a “culture war.”
At Duke, the designated campus group that “advances freedom of speech” and “promotes civil discourse” is the Ciceronian Society, a right-of-center student organization which has likewise assumed the great crusade of defending free speech under the guise that this value is empowered by the right. The group invokes the name of free speech and claims to promote its presence on campus while simultaneously hosting speakers like Allen West, who suggested Trump should go as far as to arrest and jail Democratic governors who refuse to comply with his national plans.
Within the context of Trump’s actions, the right’s claim to be the guardians of free speech in America is nonsense, and no one should be fooled into believing the First Amendment is stronger because of their efforts. Threatening freedom of the press, banning books and erasing entire sections of history for asserting the existence of minorities is not free speech. Conceding such a premise, as has been done in America in recent years, has directly led to the constitutional crisis with which we are now faced.
But the conservative hijacking of free speech is as much a political failure of the left as a con job of the right. Over the last few years, liberals in America have turned away from their rich historical tradition of defending free speech, which up until recently had been a cornerstone of classical liberal thought and progressive movements for centuries. Free speech was not too long ago ardently championed by the left as a means of fighting against reactionary political power, and was crucial in cases like the protests against the war in Vietnam and in promoting civil rights. The left has now decided to repudiate this honorable legacy, and it’s worth understanding why.
The rise of the pathetic, xenophobic, hate-filled movement of Trump created a desire on the left to defend and maintain the plurality of America and ensure that hate speech exists only in the extreme fringes of society where it belongs. But the execution of these goals, however noble their intentions may or may not have been, was done in so botched a way as to actually degrade freedom further. Vapid political ideas originating from identity politics in which race, gender or sexual orientation became a means for disqualifying certain people from their right to speak to such issues began to take precedence among progressives especially. Individuals began to be subdivided into the categories of the oppressor and the oppressed. Those belonging to the former, once deemed as such, were shut down from contributing to the debate.
Unsurprisingly, the mainstream promotion of such practices has had a chilling effect, causing many people to think twice about expressing an opinion out of fear of retaliation. The majority of Americans came to recognize the intellectual laziness and obnoxiousness of this policing of political discourse, with 62% of adults saying that “people being too easily offended by things others say” is a major problem in the country today. Demagogues like Tucker Carlson and Dennis Prager eagerly rushed to fill the resulting vacuum of honest discourse.
There once existed a vibrant class of liberal intellectuals who championed free speech as the means of rightly exposing the sordid corruption of the status quo, people like Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Christopher Hitchens and others. But that generation of freethinkers is dead or dying. Author Salman Rushdie, who knows a thing or two about the dangers of sacrificing free speech, remarked on the current state of these affairs, “Freedom, and in particular freedom of expression, is everywhere under attack — from reactionary authoritarian populist demagogic half-educated narcissistic careless voices. Places of education and libraries are subject to hostility and censorship. And there are also progressive voices being raised in favor of a new kind of censorship, one which appears virtuous, and which many people, especially young people, have begun to see as a virtue. So freedom is under pressure from both the left and the right, the young as well as the old.”
It’s time for the left to take back the values of free speech and dissent, and provide a haven for its existence. This reclamation, to which Rushdie alluded, should start on college campuses. Universities in America have stopped being looked upon as places of rigorous discourse, instead becoming one-sided, intellectually-devoid “safe spaces.” Of course, there should be individual places at all universities for students to go and find community. These resources can be essential forms of belonging and much-needed relief for students on campus. But colleges as a whole are not, and shouldn’t be, safe spaces. They should be battlegrounds for ideas and contrasting ideologies, fueled by lively debate and exchanges of ideas. Anything less would be betraying the concept of higher education.
Famous liberal free-thinker Thomas Paine once remarked, “He who dares not offend cannot ever be honest.” University students on the left must heed Paine’s words. Rather than shunning the voices of those on the political right, or asserting that certain political positions can be grounds for dismissal of discourse, open debate should be pursued and encouraged thoughtfully in classes, extracurriculars and day-to-day conservations. The student on campus who voices an unpopular opinion is the one who should have their viewpoint protected most. When encountering dissent of this kind, we should recognize that the presence of that dissenting opinion makes us stronger and think more critically. Diversity entails more than just race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Much more importantly, it entails the diversity of thought, and a wide spectrum of different political and social ideas.
The forces of censorship are threatening our country not just from the right, but from the left too. Now more than ever, as Trump and the acquiescent right employ the destructive combination of destroying free speech while claiming to be its protector, it is the moral obligation of liberals, especially young liberal college students, to re-embrace the principles on which left-wing movements bravely fought past injustice. Freedom of speech and expression unequivocally cannot be trusted in the guardianship of the right, that much is clear. It is now up to us college students to decide if it can be trusted in the guardianship of the left.
Leo Goldberg is a Trinity first-year. His pieces typically run on alternate Mondays.
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