War brings new threat to free speech | Will Bunch Newsletter

It’s 2023, and shouldn’t COVID-19 — emphasis on the “19″ — be over? Not in my family, where both of my elderly parents, my sister, and I have contracted the coronavirus in the last 10 days. Now that I’m feeling well enough to write this, I’m here to remind you there’s still time for you to get a booster shot, and to be mindful that COVID-19 is still out there.

Because of my unplanned week off, I had a lot to say about Israel, Palestine, and free speech here in the United States. So I’m starting with a longer essay and skipping the Backstory feature this week.

📮 Defying stereotypes, your responses to last week’s question about Israel and Palestine were (mostly) civil and thoughtful, with a majority expressing hopes for peace and for an end to the Israeli occupation. “As long as Palestinians are treated as second-class citizens, deprived of their rights and property, pushed off their land by settlements, there will be uprisings, some horribly violent and rightly deserving condemnation,” wrote Charles Day. But Alvin Gilens argued the blame rests solely with the intransigence of Hamas, asking: “Do you know the date when anyone from Hamas last met with anyone from Israel?”

This week’s question: Some GOP lawmakers back a bill to yank all federal dollars from universities that sponsor events deemed to be antisemitic. Do you support this, or does it raise too many free-speech issues? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

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The bloody terror attacks by Hamas on Israeli families and young attendees at a pro-peace music festival were still fresh memories, and the retaliatory air strikes on densely populated Gaza were well underway when two members of Congress — New York Republican Mike Lawler and Democrat Jared Moskowitz of Florida — turned up on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. But much of the interview focused on an entirely different front line — waging war against college campuses where speakers had defended Palestine or lashed out at Israel after the Oct. 7 assault.

“I think this has been one of the most disturbing aspects, frankly, of society,” Lawler said. “We have seen a big uprising of antisemitism on college campuses...” He segued into a pitch for a bill he has already introduced, the Stop Anti-Semitism on College Campuses Act, “which would strip any institution of all federal aid, including federal aid for students, that promote antisemitism.”

Sounds simple enough, but Lawler never explained which government official would be tasked with determining which speech would be deemed antisemitic enough to strip students of their federal loans ― in a time when real antisemitism is clearly on the rise, but supporters of Israel’s far-right government are quick to unfairly tar their critics with the same broad brush. Or how those government decisions would jibe with the First Amendment.

“This is not a free speech issue — you have the right to say what you want,” Lawlor insisted. “But we don’t have to pay for it and we don’t have promote it and I think these institutions have an obligation to crack down on it.”

“I agree,” chimed in Mika Brzezinski, Morning Joe co-anchor and a public face of MSNBC, the news organization which Donald Trump — tied or even leading in the latest 2024 presidential polls — has threatened to investigate if he takes the oath on Jan. 20, 2025.

The surprise Hamas attack just 10 days ago has been called Israel’s 9/11 by some, and that feels painfully true. Both al-Qaeda and Hamas played on people’s grievances to gain political power and their own twisted sense of glory through violence against innocent, defenseless people — one from the skies, the other looking them in the eye.

But we’ve seen how terrorism can eat at democratic societies, not as much from the initial bloodshed as from the anti-democratic overreaction. In a brilliant essay titled simply, “Have We Learned Nothing?” David Klion writes: “I can’t remember a time since 9/11 when emotion and bloodlust overwhelmed reason as thoroughly as they do now, including among liberal elites in media and politics.”

It all feels very familiar — the overly simplistic and bloodthirsty statements from demagogues like Sen. Lindsey Graham to “level the place” (with two million civilians), the questions about whether MSNBC has lowered the visibility of Muslim anchors who happen to be its best journalists, and the so-called “diplomats” of the State Department who were warned in an internal email not to use phrases like “de-escalation,” “ceasefire,” or “restoring calm.” The beatings of Muslims or people who just looked like Muslims in 2001 echoed tragically in Chicago when a landlord obsessed with talk radio recently stabbed a 6-year-old Palestinian boy to death and wounded his mother.

But the many 2001 callbacks feel most ominous when it comes to free speech. Twenty-two years ago, the presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer responded to a 9/11 burst of “cancel culture” that got Bill Maher ousted from his ABC gig by warning “all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do.”

Censorship and war are not new — just Google “Eugene V. Debs” — and is not just an American problem, as evidenced by France’s ban on pro-Palestinian demonstrations or the Frankfurt Book Fair’s ridiculous cancelation of a Palestinian author. But in the United States in 2023, the Middle East conflagration is tossing gasoline over a simmering war over free speech, especially on college campuses.

And the epicenter is here in the cradle of American democracy, Philadelphia.

The breeze that locals felt this weekend may have been University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill furiously backpedaling in an effort to save her job, with billionaire and multi-millionaire donors and trustees calling for her resignation (and also that of trustee board chair Scott Bok). Their issues? That Penn’s hosting this fall of a pro-Palestinian literary festival harbored antisemitism, and that Magill’s initial statement about the Oct. 7 assault didn’t brand Hamas as “terrorists.”

Magill said in an email Sunday that Penn “should have moved faster” to condemn some of the speakers at the Palestine Writes festival, and she also made sure to denounce “a terrorist assault” by Hamas. Those statements weren’t wrong. Other than for publicity, I’m not sure why the festival invited Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, who is neither Palestinian nor a deep thinker, just a provocateur skilled at offending — but what was deeply troubling is not what Magill said, but what she didn’t say.

There was no reference at all to the Palestinians currently bearing the brunt of civilian casualties. “Shame on Liz Magill for putting out another statement that absolutely erases the Palestinian people from the entire equation,” said Ahmad Almallah, a poet from Palestine and artist-in-residence in Penn’s English department’s creative writing program. But just as glaring was the lack of commitment to academic freedom on campus.

Just over a month ago, Magill praised the “free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission. This includes the expression of views that are controversial and even those that are incompatible with our institutional values.” As my Inquirer colleague Susan Snyder noted, that bold sentiment has vanished this weekend, an apparent casualty of war.

“Right now is not the time for universities to back away from their core commitment” — an open exchange of controversial and often differing views on topics like current events or world history, Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education programs at PEN America, told me Monday night. (Full disclosure: I’m a member.) “It’s one of the worst things that could happen to universities.” Friedman shared my concern that momentum for bills sanctioning government-defined antisemitism could merge with the growing crackdown on campus expression from the authoritarian right.

In the three years since the massive protests over the police murder of George Floyd, free expression in the classroom — not just on college campus, but all the way down to grade schools — has been under assault, with restrictive measures mostly around teaching race and gender adopted in 28 states. Florida, where the efforts to ban classroom discussions around anti-racism — contested on First Amendment grounds ― have been the most aggressive, now has a whopping 47% of faculty members looking for jobs in other states because of the political climate.

A new, aggressive clampdown on campus speech triggered by war in Israel and Gaza — whether from new laws or political pressure on administrators like Penn’s Magill — could have a broader, chilling effect on all protest movements. And the timing couldn’t be worse. America is also at the start of a 2024 presidential election cycle that will likely determine the future of democratic government and stir up intense passions, both before and after the votes are counted.

There’s a not-insignificant overlap between those who’ve demonstrated for the Palestinian cause this week and those who would likely take to the streets to protest a more dictatorial U.S. government in 15 months. Once new anti-protest laws are on the books, it will become tempting and perhaps inevitable for people in power to expand them. President Joe Biden has argued that supporting Ukraine, as well as a more complicated stance on Israel and Palestine, are part of a global fight for democracy, but those words will ring hollow if war is an excuse to quash freedom on the home front.

Question: In a light week for questions, I’ll have to paraphrase @MelissaHBuckner from X/Twitter who asked if I was “worried” whether a House Speaker Jim Jordan (the vote on his nomination is a few hours after I’m writing this) would certify a Donald Trump loss in the next presidential election.

Answer: Melissa, I definitely have some concerns over the Trump-aligned Ohio congressman playing any role in the election certification, given the fact there are so many unanswered questions about his role leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection and his phone calls with Trump on that day. But don’t forget that Congress did approve legislation in late 2022 to strengthen the Electoral Count Act and remove some of the options for chaos that existed in 2021. I’m more worried about what a Speaker Jordan could do in the short term, with the federal government about to run out of money and Ukraine in need of additional aid. Plus, there’s a not insignificant chance the House Speaker on Jan. 6, 2025 will be Hakeem Jeffries.

Pro tip: You guys have gotten so good at emailing me answers to my weekly question, please also email me with your questions for me to answer!

Eleven years ago this morning, the world was processing a major presidential campaign debate between Barack Obama and his GOP challenger Mitt Romney, while the moderator — CNN’s Candy Crowley (remember her?) — was apologizing for running out of time before getting to her planned question on global warming. I responded: “So I wonder if textbooks 50 years from now will express amazement that in the critical U.S. presidential election of 2012, there was no debate question about climate change. This after the world matched its hottest September ever.” Read the rest of what I’d say was a prescient take from Oct. 17, 2012: “Candy Crowley ran out of time...will Planet Earth?”