The Bi-Partisan Hypocrisy on Campus Censorship
The Response to Recent College Protests Reveals Conservatives and Liberals are Hypocrites when it comes to Civil Rights
By Nolan Higdon and Mickey Huff
Outraged by the horrendous events in Israel and Gaza last month, thousands of college students protested across the country, including at the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Cruz; Harvard University; and George Washington University, just to name a few. The protests once again left colleges across the country struggling to strike a balance between campus safety and protecting free speech and expression. The demonstrations exposed how a waning commitment from conservatives and liberals to constitutionally protected rights, particularly the First Amendment, has come back to haunt younger, progressive protesters. While both major parties in the US seem to agree on very little, they do seem to see more eye-to-eye on supporting the military industrial surveillance complex, censorship of various kinds (but not always on who is targeted), and unwavering support of Israel.
Team Blue
Since Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote in 2016, the liberal class and many Democrats have increasingly adopted illiberal tactics to wield against those with whom they disagree, weaponizing censorship in the name of fighting so-called fake news. These censorious efforts by the government, and their Big Tech proxies in Silicon Valley, have been further corroborated by the Twitter Files and other sources, and have revealed themselves in the form of maintaining a single-narrative treatment of Russiagate and US elections; so-called “fact-checking” of news outlets by dubious or conflicted parties (like NewsGuard and the Atlantic Council), legacy media failures to report accurately during the Covid pandemic; blocking and memory holing factual information and related perspectives alleged to be “Russian propaganda” around the war in Ukraine; the US court system weighing in on the Biden Administration’s coercion of social media companies to throttle content of those with whom it disagrees; and now the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, with the latter’s disproportionate response against Palestinians. All of these examples illustrate illiberal efforts in government as well as mass and social media outlets to constrain expression based on ideology, promote establishment-approved propaganda, and silence dissent.
High profile Congressional liberals, such as Alexandria Occasio Cortez (D-NY) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), among others, have been very vocal in supporting what amounts to government censorship by proxy. Indeed, the revelations of the Twitter Files and statements from Big-Tech reveal that the US government skirted the First Amendment by urging Big-Tech to censor both far right and far left content online. Similarly, colleges and universities, which tend to attract more student leftists overall, increasingly rely on censoring or cancelling campus speakers and guests with whom administrators, or other organized campus constituencies, disagree.
Now some of the same liberals who championed these acts of censorship by Big-Tech and the government find themselves in the crosshairs of the censorious regime they created. Indeed, the student demonstrations spurred counter-protests and other censorious reactions, including: several law students who participated in protests had employment offers revoked and Columbia University students who signed a letter criticizing Israel around the October 7 events had their pictures displayed on giant trucks outside of campus. These sentiments were echoed by the US Senate, which unanimously passed a resolution condemning any groups decrying the state of Israel’s violence against Palestinian civilians. This pressure trickled down to other campuses and businesses, where blacklists of student and employee protesters have been generated and shared, and again, where people have lost jobs and experienced other types of punishment for expressing their constitutionally protected views.
Team Red
These demonstrations are occurring in a political context where conservatives have branded themselves as the protectors of free speech in the past several years. Citing content moderation from Big-Tech and college student protests in response to conservative speakers, conservatives argue that they are the victims of liberal censorship efforts. However, their response to the recent college activism regarding Israel and Gaza demonstrates that their commitment to free speech is little more than empty rhetoric.
The political right has also participated in many recent censorship campaigns around classroom content epitomized by the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida and record number book challenges and bans. However, the recent protests around Israel/Palestine, many of which were in favor of peace and a ceasefire, revealed that many conservatives are hypocrites when it comes to protecting Constitutional rights and freedoms. For example, some are erroneously conflating support for peace and a ceasefire with support for the Hamas terrorist attacks– like when U.S. Senator and Republican Presidential candidate Tim Scott called for all international students “supporting” Hamas to be deported. “When we have students on campuses that are actually encouraging Jewish genocide, who are advocating for murder and supporting terrorism, those students should be expelled from the campus and those folks who are on visa should be taken – deported from our country,” explained Scott. Similarly Senator Josh Hawley expressed frustration that Democrats blocked his resolution to utilize the power of the U.S. Senate to condemn students who were using their Constitutional rights to criticize Israel. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) called for rescinding student loan for pro-Palestinian student protesters. Presidential candidate Donald Trump called protesting students “antisemitic” and said they should be removed from college campuses (and have student visas revoked where he deemed relevant). So much for the GOP’s mythical support of free speech on college campuses.
Outside of elected officials, billionaire hedge funder CEO Bill Ackman was among a handful of voices who called for Harvard University students that labeled the “Israeli regime entirely responsible” to have their names and details about them made public in order to create a blacklist that future employers could use. Similarly, funders for both Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania are withholding donations to these campuses because they allowed students to exercise their constitutionally protected rights to protest the events in Israel and Palestine. At George Washington University, some watched students using their Constitutionally protected rights and decided to call the police to stop them. Similarly, in Florida, the State University System of Florida Chancellor, in consultation with Governor Ron DeSantis, ordered chapters of pro-Palestinian groups to be deactivated on campus. All of these are examples of right-wing censors cracking down on student protests.
Sometimes Both Sides Are Wrong
The late, great social critic and comedian George Carlin once quipped about American politics and political language specifically, “let’s not have a double standard here, one standard will do just fine.” This should clearly pertain to our First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. Those interested in protecting Constitutional rights and resisting this intolerance on college campuses today should not necessarily count on liberals to help them. Indeed, it is difficult to take liberal commitments to Constitutional rights seriously when they have been gleefully supporting censorship.
Similarly, it is abundantly clear that many conservatives have very limited, ideologically circumstantial commitments to civil rights and free expression. Whether in the form of pushing legislation that restricts teaching historically accurate materials in schools, or attacking academic freedom, the right is not so righteous when it comes to championing free expression and civil rights, either. This leaves many rank and file Americans somewhere in the lurch when it comes to exercising their First Amendment rights on or off campus.
For the future of democracy to thrive, one hopes that the efforts to abridge rights and freedoms experienced by recent college protesters will inspire their commitment to protect and expand these rights for the citizenry, regardless of ideological positions. Given that the youth are the future, let us also hope that they turn the stifling forces of contemporary censorship into a clarion call for free speech and expression, and use this contentious time in our history to re-establish a national pledge in support of our constitutionally guaranteed rights.
Nolan Higdon is a founding member of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas, Project Censored National Judge, author, and lecturer at Merrill College and the Education Department at University of California, Santa Cruz. Higdon’s areas of concentration include podcasting, digital culture, news media history, propaganda, and critical media literacy. All of Higdon’s work is available at Substack. He is the author of The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education (2020); Let’s Agree to Disagree: A Critical Thinking Guide to Communication, Conflict Management, and Critical Media Literacy (2022); The Media And Me: A Guide To Critical Media Literacy For Young People (2022); and the forthcoming Surveillance Education: Navigating the conspicuous absence of privacy in schools (Routledge). Higdon is a regular source of expertise for CBS, NBC, The New York Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle.
Mickey Huff is the director of Project Censored and president of the nonprofit Media Freedom Foundation. To date, he has co-edited 13 editions of the Project’s yearbook, including most recently Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2022, with Andy Lee Roth. He is also co-author, with Nolan Higdon, of United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America (and what we can do about it) (2019). Huff received the Beverly Kees Educator Award as part of the 2019 James Madison Freedom of Information Awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California. He is professor of social science, history, and journalism at Diablo Valley College, where he co-chairs the history program and is chair of the Journalism Department. Huff is executive producer and host of The Project Censored Show, a weekly syndicated public affairs program that airs across the U.S. on Pacifica Radio. Learn more at projectcensored.org.