After Donald Trump’s threat to free speech on U.S. campuses, everyone who claims to stand for freedom has an obligation to stand against it, writes Caitlin Johnstone.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter
President Donald Trump has made a post on Truth Social saying federal funding will be cut to universities which allow “illegal protests” on their campuses, obliquely referring to pro-Palestine demonstrations against Israel’s genocidal atrocities.
“All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests,” Trump said. “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!”
Elise Stefanik, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the U.N., made it clear that this was the Trump administration taking a position on “anti-Israel hate.”
“Antisemitism and anti-Israel hate will not be tolerated on American campuses,” tweeted Stefanik with a screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social post.
Trump’s declaration follows a completely insane statement from health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr which makes the targeting of pro-Palestine protests much more explicit.
“Anti-Semitism?—?like racism?—?is a spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues,” said Kennedy. “In recent years, the censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture have transformed our great universities into greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence. Making America healthy means building communities of trust and mutual respect, based on speech freedom and open debate.”
Leaving aside Kennedy’s ridiculous claim that antisemitism “kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues” in modern times and all the weird mental contortions he’s performing to turn this into a Health and Human Services issue, conflating pro-Palestine protests with antisemitism and then claiming it needs to be eliminated as a “pestilence” squarely contradicts Kennedy’s asserted support for “speech freedom and open debate.”
Kennedy’s bat shit crazy remarks align with an accompanying statement from Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, who says,
“Americans have watched in horror for more than a year now, as Jewish students have been assaulted and harassed on elite university campuses. Unlawful encampments and demonstrations have completely paralyzed day-to-day campus operations, depriving Jewish students of learning opportunities to which they are entitled.”
They are using the completely fictional narrative of “antisemitism” on university campuses to stomp out protests against Israeli atrocities in the United States. They couldn’t be more transparent about it. Which is why civil rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) immediately released statements denouncing this move by the Trump administration.
“It is disturbing to see the White House threatening freedom of speech and academic freedom on U.S. college campuses so blatantly,” said Cecillia Wang, legal director of the ACLU.
“We stand in solidarity with university leaders in their commitment to free speech, open debate, and peaceful dissent on campus. Trump’s latest coercion campaign, attempting to turn university administrators against their own students and faculty, harkens back to the McCarthy era and is at odds with American constitutional values and the basic mission of universities.”
“Today’s message will cast an impermissible chill on student protests about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” says FIRE. “Paired with President Trump’s 2019 executive order adopting an unconstitutional definition of anti-Semitism, and his January order threatening to deport international students for engaging in protected expression, students will rationally fear punishment for wholly protected political speech.”
If you support freedom of speech you now have an ethical obligation to oppose Israel, even if you didn’t before.
Western governments’ support for Israel is the biggest threat to free speech in our society today. Civil rights are being stomped out throughout the western world to protect Israeli information interests, and speech is being suppressed in support of Israel more aggressively than with any other topic.
We’re not seeing this level of all-out warfare against free expression on any other frontline?—?not Russia, not vaccines, not “election security”, not on any kind of ideological front. The west’s support for Israel is the number one threat to free speech in the west today, and nothing else comes anywhere close.
Trump’s latest announcement about “illegal protests” against Israel on university campuses is just the latest escalation in what has been an ongoing assault on all criticism of the Zionist entity.
We’re seeing journalists and activists persecuted and fired for opposing Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza, protests violently shut down by police, new laws shoved through at alarming speed to help target pro-Palestine demonstrators, massive amounts of social media censorship across all major platforms?—?all while the mainstream press commit extremely egregious journalistic malpractice with obfuscations in their reporting and punditry designed to spin Israel’s abuses in a positive light.
Even if you’ve never cared about Israel before, you should be opposing it if you care about the existence of free speech in your society. Hell, you should be aggressively resisting this war on speech even if you support Israel. When civil liberties are being snuffed out one by one with increasing brazenness in defense of a foreign state, then everyone who claims to stand for freedom has an obligation to stand against it.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Glad you said this. This society is very agitated. The king of the dumpster fire has been busy dividing and conquering, laying waste to anything he cast his gaze upon. Personally, I think he needs a light sword.
But, this guy is something nothing short of hilarious viewed as the twelve year old who got locked inside the toy store, him and his Keablur Elf. But, I digress. Folks are acquiring the ‘Fear’ as HST would say.
Look I have a satellite internet provider. News reports are quite often interrupted by a black screen and no sound for up to several minutes at times. It has to be either the provider or the program producer doing it, I figure. No locally owned newspapers, everything is on the net. It’s crap. New and sports seem the only two things affected this way.
So limiting free speech is a thriving ‘thing’! He is going to be a brutal dictator to everyone and even worse when he is pissed off about something. It is obvious.
Obvious because much like the right wing Israeli leadership when he wants something to be true he simply makes something up! This is who the man is, this is what the man is get used to it.
IMHO the Israelis long ago started perfecting mind control on the people who live in Israel. All of them. The Zionists seem to have had a knack for activism and perfecting techniques.
Fascists do not want people debating material outside the approved text. Here in the U.S. we depend on society doing just that and we stopped doing it. This is a major problem for our democracy. I just see too much of this.
Tanks CN
When Injustice becomes Law, Resistance becomes Duty.
The single most important thing to learn, understand and accept about the Mideast is this: 1948 Israel is not a contemporary version of Biblical Israel! When you know the difference, the Mideast makes sense.
The Israel Lobby owns the USA.
To understand the incredible power of the Israel Lobby please read Ilan Pappe, Lobbying for Zionism on both sides of the Atlantic. At least read chapters 8–10 (chap. 10 is “The War on American Civil Society”). You have to read the actual details to grasp the terrifying scope.
I have always known that the MAGA rubber would hit the road when it runs into Israel First.
I have just been waiting for it to happen.
This is a sad day (IMHO) especially for RFK Jr.
Because he has just totally blown his credibility to do his actual job.
And he has shown that he doesn’t give a s— about Palestine’s children.
And he must know that he is lying in his teeth, and where a lot of evidence points in the case of the assassinations of his uncle and his father.
Here’s a good slogan to characterize those imprisoned for opposing Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Gazans:
‘ARRESTED FOR DECENT EXPOSURE.”
I want to see our Democratic “leaders” get off their frightened and passive butts and organize nation-wide protests. This is a direct attack on free speech that needs a loud, long, universal and immediate answer.
I don’t know why anyone would count on the Democrats.
The ones who presided over and armed the Gaza genocide from DC.
Kathleen did not state that she counts on Democrats. That said, opinion polls showed that among self-identified Democrats, the support of Palestinians was not small at all, unlike officials they voted for. Lamentably, this demographic (self-identified Democrats who should oppose criminalization of opposition to genocide, repression, dispossession etc.) seems very timid.
For the same reason no one should count on Republicans, they are from the government, they work for AIPAC and Israel and not for you.
Don’t these people know that the Palestinians are Semites ,and always have been ?
Part of the problem is that we have never had freedom of speech is this country (I don’t know about ‘anywhere’ though I do wonder); and I’m not referring to the prohibition against yelling fire in a theater. Of course, one might say that we have had ‘freedom of speech with consequences’; that is certainly true for my growing up in the rural south and growing up in the McCarthy era. My point is that the limiting of speech isn’t beginning from a time when there was true freedom; we have long been conditioned to avoid words, phrases and topics. Fear of ideas has taken on increasing power over reason: the Realities of geopolitical confusion, the changes in lifestyle demanded by ecological sustainability, economic dependencies exposed by just how much we have no power over vital costs … and all this making it easy for demagoguery to run its own narrative of reality and demand that it be accepted by criminalizing any expression of difference or rejection. The criminalizing of pro-Palestinian speech (and the genocide) is just a trial run.
How much longer is the Zionist subservient West going to go on kissing their rear ends??? Yes, I’ve turned ANTI ZIONIST and pro PALESTINIANS…who have just as much right to exist as others.
She’s right, as always. And she has been for fifteen months while professional journalists disgrace themselves daily.
Also, the freeness of speech is a delusion when, for the majority, its moulded by perpetual MSM propaganda.
Here’s another excellent piece of writing which illustrates how the genocide of Palestinians was politically accepted by those who should have immediately leapt to their defence.
hxxps://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/cairo-summit-gaza-plan-us-israeli-rejection-moment-truth
It illustrates that every human’s fate will eventually be so decided by craven and greedy politicians cowering before their more psychopathic counterparts.
This is what passes for representative democracy: Managed decline to extinction.
But let’s do some more peaceful protest yeah?
Thank you Caitlin. You are 100% correct….Bullseye! The “agitators” on University Campuses speak for all of us that abhor the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. In the name of “Antisemitism” and “Free Speech” Trump is blatantly shredding our Constitution. This is happening at the bidding and under the direct supervision of his Zionist masters.
We’d better stand up and resist this now…. or we’re all going to be stripped down naked and marched to the “showers”… in the building with the peculiar odor.
The most powerful form of suppressing of Free Speech is to convince people to self-censor on the thought of “well, I can’t say THAT.” This modern world of knowing that what you write will be read by government and corporate surveillance and website mods only trends more in that direction. You only realize how restricted you are when you happen to get to a place where suddenly you realize you can actually speak freely.
For me, that moment was skinny dipping with friends in a pond far outside cell phone range in a national forest when the conversation turned to politics, and I realized that in that place and moment I was actually free to say what I wanted to say. I could say what I wanted to say without fear. BTW, I highly recommend it, if you have such friends that you know are not informers, and while the world still has a few places out of cell phone range.
The Counter-Culture of the 60’s rebelled against this with its own choices of language. For an example, go to youtube and watch half a million people joining Country Joe McDonald in “the Woodstock Cheer”. Its the one that starts with “Gimme an F ….” I know you can find it at the start of a song called “Vietnam Rag” as I enjoy those lyrics still. It is in the older style of music where the lyrics accompany a tune one can whistle, so I hope modern ears are not too shocked.
What that illustrates is an act of freeing oneself from mental slavery by deliberately saying that thing that you can not say. A movement that made the things you can’t say a part of their regular speech …. to both shock “the Squares” and to separate themselves mentally from what was viewed as the toxic, pro-war, pro-corporation, divisive culture of “the Squares.”
How does one look at the world from completely outside the limitations that “the Squares” want to impose? If you say the things you can not say, as often as you can in this age of AI enforcement, that can be a first step. You might find that you can learn to enjoy the shocked looks on the faces of “the Squares.”
This truly is the fight of the century right now on the domestic front: free speech rights in America vs Zio power. Period. We absolutely must fight back against the billionaire Zios’ push to squelch criticism of Israel in every venue in the U.S. We cannot afford to lose this one.
Finkelstein envisions a spring resurgence of campus activism, with students wearing t-shirts emblazoned with “Free Gaza, Free Speech.”
I usually agree with Ms Caitlin, but this time I disagree with the title. The Ruling Elites of ‘the West” currently have zero use for free speech. Israel is only the tip of the spear. At this time in history, across the west, the Elites consistently turn towards repression of free speech as a way of solving problems. If you go out into the streets and mount any serious protest against this society of the elites, by the elites and for the elites, you will find yourself being repressed by the massive police forces that the Elites keep around for just such a purpose.
Both major pro-Elite political movements in America are strongly in favor of suppressing free speech. They only disagree, and only in a small way, about who’s speech is the highest priority for repression.
The Elites support for Israel’s Genocide is only just the most visible tip of this policy.