Richard Hanania wrote similarly here: https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1786080226344345765, noting that in practice, speech policies on campuses are more about their particular preferences than their nominal approach towards speech, in the abstract, with the corollary being that taking a harsher stance on anti-Israel speech would likely correlate with an environment more accommodating, rather than less accommodating of various types of speech more preferred by conservatives.
Unrelatedly, this article somewhat conflates the content of speech with the method of presentation.
The problem with lefties disrupting lectures or study in a library by yelling commie gobbledygook isn't just the content of their speech, but their actions that accompany that speech. And that distinction is even clearer when it comes to things like occupying campuses and attacking people.
Sure, if the goal is to ideologically purge universities of their most left-leaning elements, because they produce bad scholarship, then the distinction isn't as important. But if the goal is to allow normal conservative-minded people to be able to get through university unmolested, without having to deal with professors haranguing them about their internalized necrophobia, then that could partially be accomplished by cracking down on actions, not just speech. Who's more likely to harass normal students in or out of the classroom, some quiet leftist academic with radical views, or those who engage in or facilitate disruption? Clearly the latter. It's possible, even for lefties, to accommodate those with divergent views and to not impede them from earning their credentials and getting on with their lives.
Cracking down on disruption, rather than the content of speech doesn't even nominally run into the slippery slope problem.
“Unrelatedly, this article somewhat conflates the content of speech with the method of presentation.”
Agreed wholeheartedly with the conflation of speech and actions like shouting down others, blocking their movements (unless they speak a loyalty oath).
Bu then this just demonstrates that this author is a lot like Richard Hanania: writes interesting stuff, but combines it with certainty about other idiotic stuff that any reasonable intelligent person knows is idiotic (or, at barest minimum, that to be certain about it is unwarranted and borderline insane).
And that’s certainly true of this piece
Of course, he is both a lesser Hanania in terms of interesting, and (at least until the most recent 5 minutes with Richard), more whack and more leftist than Richard.
Reading some comments I have the impression that many have missed the point. I don't think the author wrote it just do defend "Zionist privilege", but to put a reflection about the broad concept of "Free speech".
Based on this, I would like to post an article I read on a site I follow (it's not on substack) which talk about this issue.
Here in English :
"The freedom of individual opinion is one of the theoretical cornerstones of liberal democracy.
Everyone notices its fundamental inconsistency with practice, but few understand why this statement has gained such propagandistic importance. To understand this, we must first ask ourselves: why does a person wish to express their opinion on a certain matter? To convince others that what they are asserting is correct, or to bring about a change in society. No one who truly believes in what they are saying speaks into the void.
What does this imply? That the famous phrase, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," falsely attributed to Voltaire, is a complete nonsense. A person who truly believes in what they affirm is not, logically speaking, willing to fight for someone else's opinion—because what matters to them is the affirmation of their own.
The proof of this lies in the fact that all liberal regimes have mechanisms to censor or neutralize ideas and opinions deemed uncomfortable or dangerous to the system itself. We should also remember in no chapter of European history, neither in those societies where “democratic” forms were in place, has such freedom ever truly existed.
To give a textbook example—since it is often taken as a model of modern democracy—let’s look at the essence of the classical Athenian polis. The heart of democratic Athens was the ekklesia, the assembly, whose participation was considered a duty, not a right or privilege. All adult male citizens with political rights and the capacity to bear arms took part. In other words, every citizen participating in political life received a full education, especially military, which made them fit to decide on the fate of their city.
Between the modern concept of democracy—individual “freedom,” electoral representation, political parties—and the ancient model, there is a chasm.
As for the issue of free speech, often linked to the Greek term parrhesia, the reality was quite different. No Athenian citizen was free to publicly profane the city’s gods, its ancestors, or its values. He did, however, have the right to speak freely in order to convince the members of the ekklesia to support his proposal on decisions to be made in the city’s interest. But the fact that everyone made such proposals within the framework of the laws and customs of the polis was taken for granted.
Parrhesia was not the freedom to speak nonsensically, but the faculty to criticize those in high office if one believed they were acting against the interests and values of the city.
If you read Aristophanes’ comedies—a vivid example of ancient satire—you find a kind of irony that has nothing to do with the modern one. Aristophanes mocked vices to exalt virtue. Today, instead, the regime clowns mock virtue and exalt vice.
So, if the concept of freedom of speech as it is promoted today never truly existed, and doesn’t even exist now in the way it’s presented, why is it so important for modern subversion?
Quite simply, because at first, it is used to push forward theses that a healthy and normal society would consider abhorrent. Once those ideas are accepted in the name of freedom of opinion, the underlying paradigm shifts, and it is the healthy, normal ideas that get censored—rather than the abominable ones.
The so-called Popper Paradox, which antifa obsessively repeat, is merely the final stage of this complete reversal of values, where the model becomes everything that is contrary to the norms of social life and natural law—as can be seen from the ideas being spread about abortion, drugs, LGBT issues, immigration, and everything else that could be considered rotten.
Fundamentally, liberals and Marxists are evil and perverse".
Mildly reactionary Zionist billionaires do not have infinite social capital. Starting witch hunts to fire professors costs some of that capital. For every professor you fire, there are more people out there who wonder, are jews really all that oppressed if they can pick out their enemies and publicly castigate them? Hamas gave them a shot in the arm of this capital, but it's very small compared to the big stock that came with the post WWII civil rights holocaust hysteria. Knowing that this supply of capital is limited means it should be used judiciously. Going after individuals is just a repeat of McCarthyism. Us 'smart right wingers' should not want a repeat of McCarthyism, because McCarthyism utterly failed in the long term.
Mass firings of professors would be good. Can it be done? Unlike with DOGE and federal employees, reactionaries do not have direct access to kick out all professors they do not like at once. Leftoids still are the ones at the levers of power in universities. So the only way of firing the worst leftoids is through indirect social pressure. This is a finite and fading resource. Don't waste it on this!
(i) Identify a list of misbehaving leftists at every university.
(ii) Get them fired.1"
As someone who has used my voice to speak out vociferously against the recent explosion of antisemitism on college campuses, there's a bothersome part of this argument, I'm going to rewrite it here:
Did they say something supporting Che? Cancel them, it offends the Cuban-Americans.
Did they say something supporting Putin? Cancel them, it offends the Ukrainians.
Did they say something supporting Mao? Cancel them, it offends the Tibetans.
How is that any different than the below?
Did they use normative pronouns towards you? Cancel them, it offends the gays and non-binaries.
Did they say "slaves" when the proper term is "enslaved person"? Cancel them, that offends Blacks.
Did they put Plato and Sophocles on the syllabus? Cancel them, that offends anyone who isn't a cisgender white man.
What you are really suggesting is no different than what the wokies are demanding, no?
No, he is not saying anything like what you’re saying.
He’s saying “find the professors teaching negative value stuff - example 1A) Grievance Studies - and fire them.”
Not because what they are teaching is “offensive”. But because it is objectively wrong and bad. Some of it is evil, but even the non-evil stuff that is bad merits firing.
Now separate from the fact that based on your handle you like a lot more of that stuff than he or I do, you also would likely object to my argument precisely because I am making an “objective” claim, and so am rejecting the moral relativism worldview most “liberals”/progressives hold.
If criticising Israel is the point at which free speech ends, then we will just end up with a leftist-dominated academia that engages in every kooky leftist pet cause except anti-Zionism. After all, during the BLM insanity, were any foreign students deported for making white students feel uncomfortable? In fact, ideologically speaking, leftist anti-Zionism is the most admirable and consistent part of their worldview especially given what we're seeing in Gaza and the West Bank. They're just applying anti-racism to everyone including Jews which actually goes against some real systemic power and privilege unlike the phantom of white supremacy. Crushing anti-Zionism from campus leftism via hard state power, Canary Mission style doxxing/harassment/career ruination and lawfare in service of Zionism is something that I as a gentile living in the West have no interest in supporting.
I do not see how the fact that there are legitimate criticisms of Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza justifies anti-Zionism which is the belief that Israel should be turned into some kind of miserable Zimbabwe like third world shithole, thus allowing Hamas to re-enact the Holocaust. Plenty of leftist Zionists are critical of Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza.
I think the scenario you describe is far fetched. Being woke and far left and thinking all disparities are due to discrimination is not consistent with a belief in the continuation of the existence of Israel. Israel is more than 10 times richer than countries like Egypt and Jordan, so if you’re woke your explanation can’t be IQ and it has to be that they are evil.
All that said I am a strong and principled believer in free speech and I’m not comfortable with many of these deportations and so on.
I'm understanding you a bit more. But do you realize what people with no context would think, if they read your article about not-genociding, and thought that you were referring to the operation in Gaza as "genocide"?
Anyway, I have a bone to pick with this. Great charts and everything, congrats, but why the hell did you place the circle representing the acceptable speech of pro-Hamas protesters in the LOWER LEFT of the chart?
What, if anything, about agitating for an Islamic fascist terrorist organization is "anti-authoritarian"? Is there something inherently anti-authoritarian about Hamas that I'm not aware of? Or about any other strain of radical Islam? To me, the conceit that an organization which throws gay people off rooftops and cuts babies out of Jewish womens' wombs in the name of an absolute divine authority is somehow "anti-authoritarian" is the sickest joke perpetrated on campus protesters who want to consider themselves anti-authoritarian. It also may be "leftist" in the idiotic context of intersectionality, where "Queers for Palestine" is a thing, or where one can believe that Islamic terror will bring about economic equality and "climate justice". But it's certainly not libertarian. In this very same piece, you semi-jokingly mention that anyone advocating Maoism or wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt might also be put on a watchlist. Sorry, was Mao a left-libertarian? As far as I can tell, there's no definition of left-authoritarianism that doesn't include him in it.
What I'm saying is, I think you're making some sort of mistake by locating these campus protests, and the shit these kids were taught, in the lower-left quadrant of that chart. If you think about it, really, there can't even BE a left-lower quadrant (I used to call myself a left libertarian, until I realized THAT CANNOT EXIST... there's no way to reconcile leftist economics with anti-authoritarianism, be because left economics require governments to force individuals to go against their individual desires. Every other quadrant on the chart is imaginable, but the lower left is a pure fantasy). Anyway, certainly the occupiers on campus are no anti-authoritarians. To the extent that they're even leftists, or use left-wing jargon to explain away what is basically fascism, they are totalitarians and authoritarians. Rebelling against "The Man" in a campus setting that visually resembles the civil rights movement doesn't make them different [from any mob chanting "death to America" on a street in Karachi].
For context, if you've never read "Among the Believers" by VS Naipaul, give it a go. It's wall to wall entertainment. But he describes the students taking over the universities in Tehran to agitate for Khomeini, in '79, and beyond a shadow of a doubt you can see that these were not the spirit of '69, anti-authoritarians. They were hell bent on establishing authoritarianism.
So please move your circle north when you describe the idiots at Columbia, if not all the way right as well.
The idea that freedom of speech means screeching and screaming in acts of cosplay activism is just 1960s garbage. Just like the idea that free speech means access to porn or that women's rights mean abortion on demand.
The problem on campus isn't speech, it's actual violence, intimidation, bullying, B&E, assault, and general law-breaking. If masked mobs of students behaved this way towards black students the reaction would be completely different. If Jews ("Zionists") are singled out and physically blocked from entering class (UCLA), that actually is a civil rights issue.
If universities restrict admission to Jewish students and won't hire Jewish faculty, is that free association, or a civil rights violation?
For a non-Zionist, if you want to make the case that Zionism was a mistake and Israel doesn't provide safety for Jews, it might help to care about Jews' ability to be treated as equals in the diaspora.
Though I agree that the campus antisemitism is a small symptom of the real problem, the far left colonization of universities.
"It really is as simple as getting rid of as many leftists as you can, and keep getting rid of them until there aren’t any."
This sounds like mowing the lawn. If it didn't work to stop Hamas, why would it work on campus? At some point they're going to need to blow up the metaphorical woke tunnel network underneath the quad.
“The problem on campus isn't speech, it's actual violence, intimidation, bullying, B&E, assault, and general law-breaking.”
Well, it’s both, but you are correct that the non-simple speech aspects you mention are worse.
But as the fall 2023 congressional hearings brought out extremely well, the idea that, e.g. at Harvard, misgendering and fatphobia “constitute violence”, but that calling for the genocide of Jews does not necessarily constitute bullying and harassment “depending on the context” is a massive speech problem.
If Zionism needs the support of the government to punish and even deport its critics, then I guess it doesn’t need free speech to defend its ideology. Honestly, I admire the chutzpah.
And yet this is precisely what does not exist on most campuses today, where leftists get the heckler’s veto, but anti-semites get to bully and intimidate well beyond simple speech.
Richard Hanania wrote similarly here: https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1786080226344345765, noting that in practice, speech policies on campuses are more about their particular preferences than their nominal approach towards speech, in the abstract, with the corollary being that taking a harsher stance on anti-Israel speech would likely correlate with an environment more accommodating, rather than less accommodating of various types of speech more preferred by conservatives.
Unrelatedly, this article somewhat conflates the content of speech with the method of presentation.
The problem with lefties disrupting lectures or study in a library by yelling commie gobbledygook isn't just the content of their speech, but their actions that accompany that speech. And that distinction is even clearer when it comes to things like occupying campuses and attacking people.
Sure, if the goal is to ideologically purge universities of their most left-leaning elements, because they produce bad scholarship, then the distinction isn't as important. But if the goal is to allow normal conservative-minded people to be able to get through university unmolested, without having to deal with professors haranguing them about their internalized necrophobia, then that could partially be accomplished by cracking down on actions, not just speech. Who's more likely to harass normal students in or out of the classroom, some quiet leftist academic with radical views, or those who engage in or facilitate disruption? Clearly the latter. It's possible, even for lefties, to accommodate those with divergent views and to not impede them from earning their credentials and getting on with their lives.
Cracking down on disruption, rather than the content of speech doesn't even nominally run into the slippery slope problem.
“Unrelatedly, this article somewhat conflates the content of speech with the method of presentation.”
Agreed wholeheartedly with the conflation of speech and actions like shouting down others, blocking their movements (unless they speak a loyalty oath).
Bu then this just demonstrates that this author is a lot like Richard Hanania: writes interesting stuff, but combines it with certainty about other idiotic stuff that any reasonable intelligent person knows is idiotic (or, at barest minimum, that to be certain about it is unwarranted and borderline insane).
And that’s certainly true of this piece
Of course, he is both a lesser Hanania in terms of interesting, and (at least until the most recent 5 minutes with Richard), more whack and more leftist than Richard.
Reading some comments I have the impression that many have missed the point. I don't think the author wrote it just do defend "Zionist privilege", but to put a reflection about the broad concept of "Free speech".
Based on this, I would like to post an article I read on a site I follow (it's not on substack) which talk about this issue.
Here in English :
"The freedom of individual opinion is one of the theoretical cornerstones of liberal democracy.
Everyone notices its fundamental inconsistency with practice, but few understand why this statement has gained such propagandistic importance. To understand this, we must first ask ourselves: why does a person wish to express their opinion on a certain matter? To convince others that what they are asserting is correct, or to bring about a change in society. No one who truly believes in what they are saying speaks into the void.
What does this imply? That the famous phrase, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," falsely attributed to Voltaire, is a complete nonsense. A person who truly believes in what they affirm is not, logically speaking, willing to fight for someone else's opinion—because what matters to them is the affirmation of their own.
The proof of this lies in the fact that all liberal regimes have mechanisms to censor or neutralize ideas and opinions deemed uncomfortable or dangerous to the system itself. We should also remember in no chapter of European history, neither in those societies where “democratic” forms were in place, has such freedom ever truly existed.
To give a textbook example—since it is often taken as a model of modern democracy—let’s look at the essence of the classical Athenian polis. The heart of democratic Athens was the ekklesia, the assembly, whose participation was considered a duty, not a right or privilege. All adult male citizens with political rights and the capacity to bear arms took part. In other words, every citizen participating in political life received a full education, especially military, which made them fit to decide on the fate of their city.
Between the modern concept of democracy—individual “freedom,” electoral representation, political parties—and the ancient model, there is a chasm.
As for the issue of free speech, often linked to the Greek term parrhesia, the reality was quite different. No Athenian citizen was free to publicly profane the city’s gods, its ancestors, or its values. He did, however, have the right to speak freely in order to convince the members of the ekklesia to support his proposal on decisions to be made in the city’s interest. But the fact that everyone made such proposals within the framework of the laws and customs of the polis was taken for granted.
Parrhesia was not the freedom to speak nonsensically, but the faculty to criticize those in high office if one believed they were acting against the interests and values of the city.
If you read Aristophanes’ comedies—a vivid example of ancient satire—you find a kind of irony that has nothing to do with the modern one. Aristophanes mocked vices to exalt virtue. Today, instead, the regime clowns mock virtue and exalt vice.
So, if the concept of freedom of speech as it is promoted today never truly existed, and doesn’t even exist now in the way it’s presented, why is it so important for modern subversion?
Quite simply, because at first, it is used to push forward theses that a healthy and normal society would consider abhorrent. Once those ideas are accepted in the name of freedom of opinion, the underlying paradigm shifts, and it is the healthy, normal ideas that get censored—rather than the abominable ones.
The so-called Popper Paradox, which antifa obsessively repeat, is merely the final stage of this complete reversal of values, where the model becomes everything that is contrary to the norms of social life and natural law—as can be seen from the ideas being spread about abortion, drugs, LGBT issues, immigration, and everything else that could be considered rotten.
Fundamentally, liberals and Marxists are evil and perverse".
Website name?
It’s in Italian. Doubt anyone’s here know it https://www.kulturaeuropa.eu/2025/02/05/liberta-e-malvagita/
Mildly reactionary Zionist billionaires do not have infinite social capital. Starting witch hunts to fire professors costs some of that capital. For every professor you fire, there are more people out there who wonder, are jews really all that oppressed if they can pick out their enemies and publicly castigate them? Hamas gave them a shot in the arm of this capital, but it's very small compared to the big stock that came with the post WWII civil rights holocaust hysteria. Knowing that this supply of capital is limited means it should be used judiciously. Going after individuals is just a repeat of McCarthyism. Us 'smart right wingers' should not want a repeat of McCarthyism, because McCarthyism utterly failed in the long term.
Mass firings of professors would be good. Can it be done? Unlike with DOGE and federal employees, reactionaries do not have direct access to kick out all professors they do not like at once. Leftoids still are the ones at the levers of power in universities. So the only way of firing the worst leftoids is through indirect social pressure. This is a finite and fading resource. Don't waste it on this!
" The model should be as follows:
(i) Identify a list of misbehaving leftists at every university.
(ii) Get them fired.1"
As someone who has used my voice to speak out vociferously against the recent explosion of antisemitism on college campuses, there's a bothersome part of this argument, I'm going to rewrite it here:
Did they say something supporting Che? Cancel them, it offends the Cuban-Americans.
Did they say something supporting Putin? Cancel them, it offends the Ukrainians.
Did they say something supporting Mao? Cancel them, it offends the Tibetans.
How is that any different than the below?
Did they use normative pronouns towards you? Cancel them, it offends the gays and non-binaries.
Did they say "slaves" when the proper term is "enslaved person"? Cancel them, that offends Blacks.
Did they put Plato and Sophocles on the syllabus? Cancel them, that offends anyone who isn't a cisgender white man.
What you are really suggesting is no different than what the wokies are demanding, no?
I rarely defend this guy, but here I will.
No, he is not saying anything like what you’re saying.
He’s saying “find the professors teaching negative value stuff - example 1A) Grievance Studies - and fire them.”
Not because what they are teaching is “offensive”. But because it is objectively wrong and bad. Some of it is evil, but even the non-evil stuff that is bad merits firing.
Now separate from the fact that based on your handle you like a lot more of that stuff than he or I do, you also would likely object to my argument precisely because I am making an “objective” claim, and so am rejecting the moral relativism worldview most “liberals”/progressives hold.
If criticising Israel is the point at which free speech ends, then we will just end up with a leftist-dominated academia that engages in every kooky leftist pet cause except anti-Zionism. After all, during the BLM insanity, were any foreign students deported for making white students feel uncomfortable? In fact, ideologically speaking, leftist anti-Zionism is the most admirable and consistent part of their worldview especially given what we're seeing in Gaza and the West Bank. They're just applying anti-racism to everyone including Jews which actually goes against some real systemic power and privilege unlike the phantom of white supremacy. Crushing anti-Zionism from campus leftism via hard state power, Canary Mission style doxxing/harassment/career ruination and lawfare in service of Zionism is something that I as a gentile living in the West have no interest in supporting.
I do not see how the fact that there are legitimate criticisms of Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza justifies anti-Zionism which is the belief that Israel should be turned into some kind of miserable Zimbabwe like third world shithole, thus allowing Hamas to re-enact the Holocaust. Plenty of leftist Zionists are critical of Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza.
I think the scenario you describe is far fetched. Being woke and far left and thinking all disparities are due to discrimination is not consistent with a belief in the continuation of the existence of Israel. Israel is more than 10 times richer than countries like Egypt and Jordan, so if you’re woke your explanation can’t be IQ and it has to be that they are evil.
All that said I am a strong and principled believer in free speech and I’m not comfortable with many of these deportations and so on.
I'm understanding you a bit more. But do you realize what people with no context would think, if they read your article about not-genociding, and thought that you were referring to the operation in Gaza as "genocide"?
Anyway, I have a bone to pick with this. Great charts and everything, congrats, but why the hell did you place the circle representing the acceptable speech of pro-Hamas protesters in the LOWER LEFT of the chart?
What, if anything, about agitating for an Islamic fascist terrorist organization is "anti-authoritarian"? Is there something inherently anti-authoritarian about Hamas that I'm not aware of? Or about any other strain of radical Islam? To me, the conceit that an organization which throws gay people off rooftops and cuts babies out of Jewish womens' wombs in the name of an absolute divine authority is somehow "anti-authoritarian" is the sickest joke perpetrated on campus protesters who want to consider themselves anti-authoritarian. It also may be "leftist" in the idiotic context of intersectionality, where "Queers for Palestine" is a thing, or where one can believe that Islamic terror will bring about economic equality and "climate justice". But it's certainly not libertarian. In this very same piece, you semi-jokingly mention that anyone advocating Maoism or wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt might also be put on a watchlist. Sorry, was Mao a left-libertarian? As far as I can tell, there's no definition of left-authoritarianism that doesn't include him in it.
What I'm saying is, I think you're making some sort of mistake by locating these campus protests, and the shit these kids were taught, in the lower-left quadrant of that chart. If you think about it, really, there can't even BE a left-lower quadrant (I used to call myself a left libertarian, until I realized THAT CANNOT EXIST... there's no way to reconcile leftist economics with anti-authoritarianism, be because left economics require governments to force individuals to go against their individual desires. Every other quadrant on the chart is imaginable, but the lower left is a pure fantasy). Anyway, certainly the occupiers on campus are no anti-authoritarians. To the extent that they're even leftists, or use left-wing jargon to explain away what is basically fascism, they are totalitarians and authoritarians. Rebelling against "The Man" in a campus setting that visually resembles the civil rights movement doesn't make them different [from any mob chanting "death to America" on a street in Karachi].
For context, if you've never read "Among the Believers" by VS Naipaul, give it a go. It's wall to wall entertainment. But he describes the students taking over the universities in Tehran to agitate for Khomeini, in '79, and beyond a shadow of a doubt you can see that these were not the spirit of '69, anti-authoritarians. They were hell bent on establishing authoritarianism.
So please move your circle north when you describe the idiots at Columbia, if not all the way right as well.
The idea that freedom of speech means screeching and screaming in acts of cosplay activism is just 1960s garbage. Just like the idea that free speech means access to porn or that women's rights mean abortion on demand.
The problem on campus isn't speech, it's actual violence, intimidation, bullying, B&E, assault, and general law-breaking. If masked mobs of students behaved this way towards black students the reaction would be completely different. If Jews ("Zionists") are singled out and physically blocked from entering class (UCLA), that actually is a civil rights issue.
If universities restrict admission to Jewish students and won't hire Jewish faculty, is that free association, or a civil rights violation?
For a non-Zionist, if you want to make the case that Zionism was a mistake and Israel doesn't provide safety for Jews, it might help to care about Jews' ability to be treated as equals in the diaspora.
Though I agree that the campus antisemitism is a small symptom of the real problem, the far left colonization of universities.
"It really is as simple as getting rid of as many leftists as you can, and keep getting rid of them until there aren’t any."
This sounds like mowing the lawn. If it didn't work to stop Hamas, why would it work on campus? At some point they're going to need to blow up the metaphorical woke tunnel network underneath the quad.
“The problem on campus isn't speech, it's actual violence, intimidation, bullying, B&E, assault, and general law-breaking.”
Well, it’s both, but you are correct that the non-simple speech aspects you mention are worse.
But as the fall 2023 congressional hearings brought out extremely well, the idea that, e.g. at Harvard, misgendering and fatphobia “constitute violence”, but that calling for the genocide of Jews does not necessarily constitute bullying and harassment “depending on the context” is a massive speech problem.
If Zionism needs the support of the government to punish and even deport its critics, then I guess it doesn’t need free speech to defend its ideology. Honestly, I admire the chutzpah.
If the objective is "positional free speech", why not just say "everyone gets a turn to speak, and you're not allowed to speak over someone else"?
Granted, not clear how you scale that at a national level, but you could certainly implement it in a classroom/gathering scenario.
Reasonable.
And yet this is precisely what does not exist on most campuses today, where leftists get the heckler’s veto, but anti-semites get to bully and intimidate well beyond simple speech.