Does Free Speech on College Campus Mean Protecting Calls for Genocide?

In the last month, we have seen the secular university crumble. It has gone from a place where empty moralizing about social justice replaced a humanities education to one that defends violent protests calling for the end of Israel. Even liberals like Bill Maher have seen the emptiness and cowardice on display, and he has warned students to avoid the elite universities because, in his words, “they make you stupid.”

How can we make sense of this cognitive dissonance? In one way, we can’t. To try and make sense of it would be to assume it is coherent. However, the advocates of these radical viewpoints are not interested in consistency. You can point out their inconsistency all day long, and it won’t give them pause. Consistency is only a concern if you are trying to learn the truth of the matter. But if you are only trying to scream your opinions and assert your feelings, truth is not the goal.

Even so, I do think we can understand where the misunderstanding comes in. To do that, Seth Leibsohn and Josh Hammer have written the attached article. In it, they explain how universities have so badly misunderstood the First Amendment. While protecting professors who slander conservatives with the name “white nationalist hatemongers,” these same universities fail to stop actual hate speech. They say:

“Today, in a perverse twist, political speech that debates the best opinions about how we govern ourselves with regard to political contentions that have been with us since time immemorial has been censored on college campuses. When it comes to the war in Israel and Gaza, Americans living under our Constitution might disagree on the merits of a U.S.-prodded ceasefire, whether Hamas-supporting foreign students ought to have their visas revoked, or any number of other public policy issues. But bloodthirsty marches on behalf of genocide must not be confused with morally or legally legitimate “free speech” under our moralisticconstitutional order. Our regime recognizes these not as differences in the “degree” of would-be speech, but in the kind of speech.”

To learn about how the framers understood the Frist Amendent and what the Constitution protects, I highly recommend you read their whole article here:

https://americanmind.org/salvo/free-speech-sense-and-sensibility/