Trump’s stifling of free speech won’t end with Mahmoud Khalil. Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket/Getty Images
Last week, the Trump administration sent a letter to Columbia University demanding, among other things, that its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department be placed under federal receivership for five years. It’s unclear what exactly this means, but it could well involve an appointee of the federal government monitoring the department’s curricula, syllabi, and faculty appointments.
The letter arrived a few days after Department of Homeland Security agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, and revoked his green card. Now, they are trying to deport him over his political speech. The same week, DHS searched two student dorm rooms and arrested another international student who was involved in the campus protests against the Gaza war for overstaying her visa. Going forward, the State Department will be deploying artificial intelligence to scan the social media posts of tens of thousands of international students to search for pro-Palestinian sympathies.
The dragnet isn’t limited to the foreign-born. Under pressure from the White House, Columbia University is looking into an American student for writing an op-ed calling for divestment from Israel. On Friday, the Department of Justice announced an investigation into the Columbia protests to determine whether they violated federal terrorism laws; 59 other universities are also under investigation.
These are the actions of a President who claims to be restoring free speech to America after four years of online censorship orchestrated by the Biden administration. “This is the most significant threat to free speech in modern United States history,” civil rights attorney Jenin Younes, who sued the Biden administration for censorship in the Supreme Court case of Missouri v. Biden, tells me. “There is almost no precedent for deporting people in the United States merely for voicing dissent from the government’s foreign policy.”
For years, conservative politicians and “heterodox” writers (myself included) have complained incessantly about the threats to free speech posed by the social justice-oriented Left. About a decade ago, an authoritarian, schoolmarmish ideology took hold within Left-wing academic and activist circles. It then percolated into elite American institutions, including the media, the government, the nonprofit sector, and the human resources departments of major American corporations.
This ideology equated speech with violence. The thinking was that because spoken and written expressions of disfavour toward “marginalised communities” can lead to real-world discrimination and even physical attacks, such speech should be suppressed. Mobs of activists “de-platformed” speakers at public venues; universities enacted speech codes, created safe spaces and instituted trigger warnings; employers forced workers into training sessions on what to say and how to think.
Over time, this ideology began to shape government policy too. During the Covid pandemic, the federal government pressured social media platforms to suppress posts that questioned vaccine efficacy and criticised lockdowns. Joe Biden accused Facebook of “killing people” by not censoring the expression of views that the government disagreed with.
The Right baulked at this culture of censorship, as did some on the Left. The annihilation of “woke” ideology became the animating cause of the Republican Party, and may have won Trump the 2024 election. But all the while, a conservative strain of the exact same ideology was gestating on the Right, until October 7 unleashed it.
When the Gaza war erupted and militant student protests mushroomed on campuses all over the country, Republicans suddenly began to talk exactly like the social justice activists they so despised. In precisely the same way that Left-wing ideologues condemned every opinion that failed to conform to social justice dogma as “racism”, “misogyny”, or “transphobia”, the Right vilified not only the excesses of the pro-Palestinian movement, which were considerable, but declared just about any expression of opposition to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza as “antisemitism”. The very expression of those views, they insisted, put Jewish students in physical danger. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis banned Students for Justice in Palestine from the state’s public university campuses. Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill that promised to make campuses into “safe spaces” for Jewish students. House Speaker Mike Johnson stood alongside students from elite private universities who claimed to be victimised by the political beliefs of their classmates.
For 18 months, the pro-Palestinian narrative has been systematically demonised. And now, to Republicans and many Democrats, pro-Palestinian activism has become synonymous with antisemitism, promoting terrorism, and endorsing Hamas. This narrative is taking on the force of law. In an NPR interview last week, deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Troy Edgar described Mahmoud Khalil’s participation in pro-Palestinian protests as ipso facto support for Hamas. He called Khalil’s advocacy “antisemitism activity” and compared it to terrorism.
This isn’t mere political rhetoric; it’s the legal basis for the administration’s case against Khalil. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has openly declared that he was arrested for being “a supporter of Hamas” and for “ril[ing] up all kinds of anti-Jewish student, antisemitic activities”.
Even if he had explicitly declared an allegiance to Hamas and a hatred of Jews, his views would still be protected by the Constitution. But no evidence has emerged that he holds either of these beliefs. Khalil has explicitly disavowed antisemitism in his movement, telling CNN that “the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other”.
Yet in the Right’s imagination, there is no distinction between supporting Palestinians and supporting Hamas. Just as, on the Left, concern for preserving women-only spaces can only indicate deep-seated transphobia, on the Right, criticising Israel can only suggest a genocidal hatred of Jews. As such, to the movement’s critics, pro-Palestinian speech must be criminalised and suppressed, even at the cost of America’s commitment to free speech.
Trump’s stifling of free speech won’t end with Khalil. “The administration has indicated that its next strategy will be to go after US citizens for ostensibly engaging in terrorist activities,” Younes says. “Given that pro-Palestine activism is defined as terrorism, this is an absolutely horrifying prospect.”
Nor are Trump’s brazen attacks on free expression limited to pro-Palestinian speech. In its mission to expunge “woke ideology” from the federal government and those entities funded by it, Trump and Elon Musk have directed the National Science Foundation to do keyword searches of disfavoured terms (such as “women” or “diverse”) in its grant database to determine where to make cuts. Other agencies have scrubbed references to such terms from their websites, as have their contractors in the private nonprofit world. Trump’s de-wokification campaign has begun tracing the outlines of China’s censorship apparatus.
The will to silence the political opposition is neither a specifically Republican nor Democratic predilection. Rather, it’s the irresistible impulse of whoever happens to be in charge. Those with the power to censor their ideological opponents will tend to do so; this was true of Biden’s administration and it’s just as true of Trump’s. But as with everything Trump does, it’s dialled up to 11.
If the courts don’t stop him, Republicans should prepare for a future in which they reap what they sow, just as the Democrats are doing now. The Right won’t be in power forever. When their ideological adversaries next return to the White House, the full force of the state could be turned against anyone who dissents from liberal orthodoxies, eclipsing what transpired even at the height of The Great Awokening. The scale of that suppression will make Biden’s Covid censorship subtle by comparison.
In their race to restrict each other’s right to free expression, both parties have contributed to this catastrophe. We’ll be fortunate if American democracy survives it.
Leighton Woodhouse is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Oakland, California.
lwoodhouse 
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SubscribeTo deny a person the right to speak is to deny them their humanity. To prevent a person from smashing windows, setting fire to college libraries, pepper spraying police, ripping down posters, blocking Jewish and other students from speaking or assembling, threatening the life and safety of Jewish students and their supporters, etc., is no such thing. All of that behavior by Hamas and its supporters is a clue and not one remotely hard to read. Their purpose is to put an end not only to the right of Jews to speak.
Didn’t Trump recently pardon a load of people who broke into and vandalised the Capitol building as part of a protest? Why the double standards?
(Although I don’t believe this man has actually engaged in any vandalism)
Was this the minor fracas where a black policeman shot and killed a near hysterical white women, and to lapse into the vernacular, “ got away with it”?
No, the riotous attempt to overturn an election where the lawmakers escaped a vengeance-drunk mob by the skin of their teeth. Oh yeah, same one I guess—just a different sense of what’s real. “Day of Love” you say?
Oh no, AJ. The “Summer of Love” was a different, albeit similarly-recent, event during which Radical Leftists overthrew the federal and local government across multiple barricaded blocks of Seattle and set up (in its place) a self-governing country named “Capital Hill Autonomous Zone.” These Radicals were ‘successful’, by dubious measures, in looting and committing murder. I believe they gave up after a few weeks or maybe month, once they ran out of other people’s stuff to steal and couldn’t support themselves otherwise.
I’m well aware and I wasn’t in favor of that either, Cantab. I’m not gonna pick my “favourite rioters”, whether they seem to be on my team or not. 1/6/21 is far more relevant to Trump’s, ahem—highly selective love of free speech. But incidentally: Who was president during everything you listed?
The term “Day of Love” (that you used) was originally a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Democratic Mayor of Seattle’s light dismissal of the Radical Leftists’ overthrow of the US and local government in Seattle, when she labelled it the “Summer of Love”.
This reference points to the ironic truism that the Left is far more tolerant of similar events on the Left, that they otherwise label “insurrection” when the folks are on the Right.
Since you used the term, I thought it appropriate and relevant to contextualize the same.
Regardless of this, at least both you and I understand that CHAZ and the Capitol Hill Riot were both riots. CHAZ wasn’t really going to be successful in overthrowing the US and local government for very long, and the approximately two-thousand Capitol Hill Rioters weren’t really going to be successful in overthrowing a country of approximately 326,000,000 people.
Suggesting otherwise is hyperbole.
As to your question of who allowed CHAZ to go on for a month: It was Jenny Durkan, the Democrat Mayor of Seattle. The very same person who called the Seattle riot, “The Summer of Love.”
Seattle voters subsequently decided whether her treatment of the riot and rioters was reasonable. And voters decided Trump’s fate for his actions on 1/6 when they reelected him last November.
Even though I didn’t vote for Trump and even though I don’t live in Seattle, I support the election outcomes and the will of the people in both cases. Democracy – with politicians beholden to the people – is the answer.
I understand that too, and agree to a degree. Yet the president bears a measure of responsibility too, and that would surely have been emphasized by the Right if a Democrat was in the White House. I don’t think you can say Trump handled his office well after COVID hit. Not that his successor did great, but he calmed things down down—in that early period before his always mediocre mind deserted him.
Even the original Summer of Love—San Francisco in 1967–had a downside which quickly grew as more and more drug-addled youth wandered the Haight Asbury district mumbling or begging. That doesn’t means things were fine or that the “adults were alright” in mid-60s America.
I had edited my post above to add a paragraph. I’ll post it as a reply to your suggestion of holding Trump responsible.
“Seattle voters subsequently decided whether [Durkan’s| treatment of the riot and rioters was reasonable. And voters decided Trump’s fate for his actions on 1/6 when they reelected him last November.
Even though I didn’t vote for Trump and even though I don’t live in Seattle, I support the election outcomes and the will of the people in both cases. Democracy – with politicians beholden to the people – is the answer.”
Trump was forthright during campaigning that he was considering pardoning the rioters. The transparency was there, and the voters decided.
From a very generous point of view, maybe. He said he would consider pardons on a case by case basis. But on a grander scale you’re correct that Trump didn’t hide his intentions, including his intention of using the presidency for his own “ultimate and absolute revenge”. Just under 50% percent of those who voted were in favor of that, resigned to that, or convinced he couldn’t achieve that. I’m sure quite a few never heard or read the statement either. (CPAC: February, 2024).
*Addendum: I accept that Trump is a fairly elected president. That does not mean he has a sweeping mandate for radical disruption according to his whims. Or that I’m duty bound to extend him more grace than he deserves, let alone grants to others. (Hard to think of a more graceless man).
I don’t claim that Trump is devoid of any good or good ideas and I hope his presidency proves less disastrous that it looks to me so far.
“just a different sense of what’s real.”
Getting shot in the shoulder at point blank range with a Glock 22, particularly when you are unarmed, is about as “real” as it gets in my book.
What about you sir?
So is being crushed against a barrier or smashed in the head with a flagpole. I don’t disagree that she was wrongly shot. But your deliberate myopia, attempting to turn the whole affair into that alone, is a cheap trick.
She was the ONLY person killed, how on earth is that a “cheap trick” as you so charmingly put it?
Then to exonerate her killer “really takes the biscuit”, don’t you agree?
It is a cheap trick to dismiss the menace and violence of the rioters, as well as their attempt to invalidate an election. Trump allowed every part of it to happen. Including the assaults on Capital Police which contributed to one early death and several suicides soon afterward.
Was that the one organised by Pelosi and the FBI?
Go ask the voices in your head. But consider that they might be misleading you.
You have zero evidence or even sensible basis for such a claim. Zero.
I think you just touche’d your self.
So you tell me, why was there a double standard?
You mean the folks that were ushered into the Capitol building by Capitol police, or the ones who were coaxed into entering by FBI plants?
You believe that tripe do you?
How so?
“The city is prior by nature to each of us, for through it – including the speech that takes place in it – we are fully human.” Aristotle
Thank you for your thought provoking response.
I must object, however that the Stagirite finds himself in decidedly strange company when he is conscripted to the service of what is called ‘Free Speech’.
I fear that when Aristotle writes of ‘Speech’ his meaning is highly circumscribed. He was neither a democrat nor an advocate of individual liberty and majoritarian consensus-forming. For Aristotle speech was what was uttered by free, educated, leisured, affluent adult men. It is an aristocratic ethic. The speech of others – the young, the unpropertied, resident foreigners, the enslaved, women – was to be highly restricted. By way of contrast, when Aristotle writes of speech his meaning couldn’t be further from, for instance, what John Stuart Mill or Mr Vance mean by that word.
More than that, the sort of recreational and performative ’cause’ farming that passes for politics in our age would have belonged more rightly to the Theatre than the Pnyx – up to and including the current occupant of the Oval Office. Its unacknowledged intellectual parents are Shelley and Rousseau, not Aristotle.
Thanks for the erudite context. But aren’t we well within our “readerly rights” when we take the source material’s context into account without letting in invalidate the larger application, as when we downplay the paternalistic attitudes that most white abolitionists and suffragettes had toward blacks? I think we can respect the Western Canon, in a good version of cultural conservatism, without cleaving to a narrow originalism.
The larger application of Aristotle to this particular situation would be the reassertion of the principal that the political speech of Metics (resident foreigners without the rights to participation in the Polis) is legitimately curtailed.
As far as I can see it, Aristotle would have had no truck with the Millsian, Universalist, Romantically inflected idea that
“To deny a person the right to speak is to deny them their humanity”.
Fine. But to adhere to such an originalist rigidity would also mean that slavery was acceptable. I don’t think anyone born over 2,000 years before the Romantics would have shared their politics and aesthetics as such. You are engaging in a form of anachronistic thinking yourself. Are the works of Aristotle (the notes taken by students, it’s thought) reducible to—or correctly judged by one-to-one comparison with—Modern-era terminology and much later thinkers?
In other words: What’s your point, that Aristotle was an arch conservative by post-1750 standards?
Wasn’t Aristotle a Metic anyway?
Of course we should never forget that Aristotle was the tutor to the homicidal Macedonian pygmy, sometimes referred to Alexander the Great, who together with father was one of the most repellent figures of the Ancient World.
Good work for a philosopher if you can get it though, in terms of pay that is.
Well Epicurus described Aristotle as “a wastrel, who after squandering his father’s fortune took to soldiering and selling drugs”!
Always preferred Plato myself. More questions and not so many clear answers, a true philosopher.
Agreed, but I would still put Socrates at No1.
Indeed
You are right that speaking, without which there is no “political,” requires leisure, which means freedom from the mere necessities of life. You are also right that there is a difference between speaking and speaking well. And you are right again when you say that speaking poorly is common while speaking well is not common at all. None of this means for a moment, however, that Aristotle would oppose the speech of anyone, least of all the poor. Socrates never had two nickels to rub together and spoke as well as any human could. He himself, however, never claimed to be a good speaker, but instead repeatedly said that the only thing he knows is that he doesn’t know anything. The last thing the world’s philosophers are inclined to do is speak, that is, to spill up what they have ill digested.
The United States’ Declaration of Independence declares “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
These unalienable rights were considered to be Natural Rights, i.e.: rights each of us has because we are human beings, no more no less.
This concept of Natural Rights was considered so important that it was codified in the U.S. Constitution as the first of the original ten amendments. The First Amendment to the Constitution is not a permission, it is a prohibition to Government from making any law that interferes with the exercise of the Natural Right of Free Speech.
It’s worth repeating: It is not Government permitting citizens to speak freely, it is government forbidden from restraining free speech.
We have the right to speak freely because we are Human Beings. It is as simple as that. No law, or proclamation, gives us the right to free speech. Instead, like other natural rights such as Liberty, one may use force to prevent someone from speaking freely, but that does not abrogate one’s right to free speech, only–temporarily–interfere with it.
No one is asking whether or not non-citizens should be granted the same protections that the constitution guarantees for its citizens. All this talk about the removal of free speech is nothing more than ‘feels’. If I go to any other country and fire up a mob or start a riot, chances are pretty good that I’m going to get kicked out. Is the US better than that? Maybe. Should (wealthy?) foreigners be able to go to the US and create whatever trouble they want? Probably not.
Sure, also to deny a visitor on a guest visa the right to complete free speech, a right that is meant to be held by citizens, is not a denial of human rights.
What should be off limits then? Also, he has a full green card now. Or perhaps these new, curated standards should be retroactive as well.
Where is the evidence that Khalil engaged in any one of the behaviors you enumerated? I’m not saying there is none, but “where is it?”. Guilt by broadbrush group association should not be enough.
I have some sympathy for some of these claims (never thought Jim Jordan was as concerned with free speech as much as taking advantage of a politic opportunity).
Yet, Mahmoud Khalil has not be arrested for a crime of speech. He has been detained for deportation, not for “merely for voicing dissent from the government’s foreign policy”, but for leading an “anti-capitalist” organization that is actively pursuing the “total eradication of Western civilization”.
It is completely reasonable to deport a foreign national who is calling for the eradication of the country and civilization in which he is a guest.
(Sources: https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2023/11/14/columbia-university-apartheid-divest-who-we-are/; https://nypost.com/2024/08/17/us-news/columbia-universitys-anti-israel-group-seeking-total-eradication-of-western-civilization/)
Thanks for that clarification. No one should be targeted for expressing a view on the Gaza conflict that differs from the government of the day’s views but equally foreigners seeking to ferment anti-western agitation should accept that their continued presence may be abrogated. We must accept non-violent expressions of dissent from our own citizens but why should the government do so from foreigners – particularly if they constitute an attack on the whole basis of civil society?
The rampant antisemitism in Columbia and other universities has been well documented, and is horrifying. In that respect, the universities are reaping what they sowed.
As for Khalil, if he encouraged others to take their frustrations on Jewish students, he deserves to be kicked out. A university education is a privilege, not a right.
But Mr. Woodhouse is right. The correct corrective to left wing extremism is not right wing extremism, but tolerance.
What? It’s a free speech issue. That’s it.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the Zionist wife of the Casino toad who gives Trump mucho $$$?
We have a new cancel culture.
Israel are the snow flakes.
Snow flakes who have killed over 100k people, continue to push people off the land in the West Bank, burn mosques and churches, shoot children.
Yet say you don’t like them and what they stand for, and it’s all waaaah waaaah wahhh.
Israel is everyone’s crazy ex girlfriend.
Look. Once hatred-filled religious nutters stop trying to eradicate Jews, all this will stop.
Be told.
So the hate filled settlers in the West Bank that are ACTUALLY eradicating Palestinians now are acting in self defence?
Eradicate Jews with what? Backyard rockets? Kites?
Upside down world in these Unherd comments.
Bigot!
Nice swerve .
How?
The wars that were launched against the post WW2 Israeli state, brought into being after the Holocaust, have precipitated the situation you describe.
As well as being told, learn your history before posting, then YOU wouldn’t get things “upside down”.
Lad please. Yes, but I guess you were I favour of the Zionist terrorist activities before 48? Israeli is a state now, yes. That won’t change. Even though it was the Europeans who were slaughtering the Jews and European countries who refused to take them in once the pogroms were common knowledge.
The whole world had called for the two state solution. Or have one state with equal voting rights. You know, a modern democracy. The Arabs have all agreed to it. If you think that the Israelis are honest actors you are deluded lad. This is their chance to finally get rid of the people they have been killing and moving and stealing land from for the last 70 odd years.
Because of European guilt there is this narrative that the Israelis are perennial victims and everyone wants them dead. Do you think it’s ethnic cleansing what is happening? Do you believe there are such things as war crimes? Not letting food and water get in is what? They are on record. You need to listen to the Israeli govt more than you apparently are.
And they continue to kill children, break ceasefires and gaslight the whole world, Unherd readers included.
Who is Barbaric here? Who? Bibi is a psychopath, a narcissist and just wants to stay out of jail.
Monsters.
Well, fair enough. But exactly how does one fight extremism without a certain element of extremism in reply?
“But exactly how does one fight extremism without a certain element of extremism in reply?”
With unflagging support for free expression, especially for those with whom one disagrees. Just as it’s easy to defend speech one agrees with, it’s all too tempting to deny that speech one disagrees with is under attack when it is. The woke censors and thought police are responsible for bringing Trump to power. Their arrogant, ideologically motivated, incoherent authoritarianism alienated all but the effete urban elites. But anyone who thinks he gives a fig for the speech rights of his opponents is dreaming.
The rampant ANTIZIONISM is well documented including calls for war crimes arrests of BIbi. There are Jewish humanists active in these protests. The Israelis have lost all justification to hide behind the concept of Antisemitism
“The correct corrective to left wing extremism is not right wing extremism, but tolerance.”
Doesn’t work. All that will happen is they will use their “free speech” privileges to continue undermining Trump’s government and malign the “far right”. And as soon as they are back in power at government, or even now at a local level (government agencies, universities etc) they will ruthlessly suppress conservative voices, as they have done for decades.
A better strategy – “you started it, we will finish it”. Only way to deal with Fascists and Marxists, and that’s exactly the mixture we are dealing with here.
My point is that these students were not only using speech to get their message across. They felt the need to smash up their universities, assault university staff, Jewish students, etc. Their protests went far, far beyond “free speech”.
Can’t happen quickly enough in England too
No, it’s too late here, particularly with the introduction of Non-Crime Hate Incidents (NCHI).
Even Lady Thatcher’s 1986 Public Order Act, (section 5) is been used to persecute dissent.
Much of the blame for this catastrophe can be laid at the feet of the so called Tory Party and its creatures such as Gove, May and Cameron, a veritable “parcel of rogues in a nation”*, but Labour will be no better, sadly.
*Thank you RB.
Disagree. I, and, if I read the mood correctly, the vast majority don’t want our country to become a terrorist sympathising satellite of Hamas. It’s necessary to accept that Islam is a savage threat to our way of life and cannot coexist in a civil society. Their attack and beheading of 70 Christians in Congo is further warning if 7/10 wasn’t enough. All the nonsense DEI, NCHI can and must be reversed and the Reform (and it may not be them) performance at the ballot box, will give rise to stronger gods. No capitulation, no surrender…..
I couldn’t agree more with your sentiments and admire your confidence, but from my experience we have gone beyond the point of no return.
The bacillus of marxist/socialism has infected every organ of the State. For example Mr Gove’s recent and decidedly pernicious Levelling-up and Regeneration Act of 2023.
Who would thought it possible that a so called Tory administration could have enacted such a blatantly marxist agenda? That allows our wretched English* County Councils to impose a 100% Council Tax surcharge on the new enemy, ‘second home owners’?
Of course as the wretched Gove was only born in 1967, and rather obviously has NO idea what a Tory is, rather like most his former party.
However when discussing this situation in that ‘font of all reason and knowledge’ my local pub, I was appalled to find that the consensus was very much in favour of ‘hammering second home owners’. In fact it reminded me of the days of super tax at 99%, and the ‘evils’ of so called “unearned income”.**
Somehow that gentle England described by Orwell in his ‘Lion and Unicorn’ essay has been irrevocably changed, and is now a land riddled with spite and envy, and probably well beyond redemption.
*Predictably Wales is even worse with a 300% surcharge.
**.Investing in the Stock Market for example.
Might you just happen to be a second (or more) home owner?
Perhaps the fact that all your mates down the pub think it’s a good idea to address the issue, suggests you’re perhaps simply behind the times and incapable of gauging the public will, rather than everyone else being beyond wrong.
Being beyond the point of no return is no bad thing, if what we’ve come from is… well, just not that good.
I am indeed, and through no fault of my own, possess quite a few of them, most of which are rather irritatingly, ‘listed’.
They also need a small army of part-time locals to maintain them, plus most have been very expensively renovated, by local craftsmen thus turning medieval hovels into modern homes.
You also seem to have misunderstood me. My “mates down the pub” also feel it is somehow ‘unfair’ that anyone should own more than one property!
That is precisely the attitude I am ranting about! Twenty five years ago such spite and envy was fairly rare, but now it is omnipresent.
I presume you have no memory of “what we’ve come from” as you so charmingly put it, but I can assure it was a far better and gentler world then than the one we have now made for ourselves.
The problem with second homes is when the level of empty most of the time properties reaches the point where the all year round population is insufficient to run a shop, a school, bus service, doctor, dentist, restaurant, etc. Upping the second home owners’ tax can provide for a reduction on the residents’ bill.
I use my primary ‘Villa Rustica’ for about 120 days pa. All the others are tenanted.
If they were lying empty I would agree with you, but there is no difference between being empty and occupied or part occupied.
I gather most Councils are being crucified by their pension liabilities, and as much as 25% of their revenue is devoted to meeting this behemoth .
However paying in excess of £6000 pa to have the dustbins emptied once a fortnight is a tad too much in my opinion.
I’m not trying to pry but if your properties are tenanted then they are not second homes; council tax is either the responsibility of the tenants if domestic lets or if let on short-term holiday lets as businesses subject to business rates, quite often zero if in a rural area.
a pro-Palestinian student activist — This undersells Mr. Khalil a little bit, sort of like saying Jeffrey Epstein had a fondness for young women. One can be pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel all they want, but there are lines even with basic freedoms. I can say Leighton Woodhouse is a clueless tool, but I cannot say he is a clueless tool and we should march on his house and cause him harm.
It is correct to say that Khalil can hate the Jews with a burning passion and to have that belief protected, but as Rubio says, the “riling up” part is not protected. Why this must be explained to anyone is a mystery in itself.
It’s also fascinating to observe the Left’s sudden concern for free speech and social activists’ welfare, when their registered concern related to this cause is merely two months old.
Recall when the father of a schoolgirl was arrested at a Loudoun County school board meeting because he was upset and speaking his mind after his daughter was raped in the high school girl’s bathroom by a gender-fluid boy, after which the School District was desperately trying to cover it up?
The father was sentenced to 10 days in jail on the charge of disorderly conduct …
… he was pilloried on MSNBC, CNN, etc, that he was a MAGA terrorist when he was no such thing …
…while the National School Board Association sent a letter to the President of the United States, Joe Biden, demanding that this father be labelled a “domestic extremist” for his outburst and demanding that the President label such parental outbursts as “domestic terrorism”, which would sanction the use of Police State force to silence the parents?
Then, in court, a judge found that the gender-fluid boy was actually guilty of sexual assaulting that girl in the Loudoun County High School girl’s bathroom.
A girl who thought she was in a safe space for girls … until she wasn’t.
It’s hard to take the Left seriously when they shed crocodile tears.
Anyone who thinks Trump is a champion of free speech is delusional. Having said that, Khalil is not a U.S. citizen. He resides in the U.S. at the discretion of the govt and should act accordingly. Other than that, I agree with everything the author has said here.
I think we have to hope that JD Vance is a champion of free speech. You’d hope given the harassment Trump suffered he’d be sensitive to the abuse of state power, and censorship, but perhaps he’s more vengeful than principled.
The author is absolutely correct that unless this administration holds the line on the principle of free speech, American politics is just going to oscillate more violently and elections become even higher-stakes, with all the attendant consequences. If the Right, which notionally prioritizes individual liberty, won’t stand up for freedom of speech, then it’s unlikely to be the Left, with its tendency to prioritize the collective, that brings an end to this vicious circle.
I do think Vance is more committed to free speech.
Trump may not be perfect on free speech. Compared to what woke puppet Biden inflicted on us, Trump is just fine.
What politician is a supporter of free speech. It’s pretty much a given that people in power will use that power to secure their goals in any way possible. The American system makes that difficult and limits the damage. Neither Trump nor most of his enemies have any respect for free speech or the Constitution. The globalists would love to replace it with some international human rights treaty such as currently prevents the EU from fixing their immigration problem. To them, it’s just an obstacle to them accomplishing their goals. They’re all basically horrible in that respect. Thank God the founding fathers had a good grasp of man’s political nature and wrote the Constitution with this sort of bad behavior in mind. Lord knows today’s politicians haven’t got a clue. If they had one, they probably wouldn’t have been blindsided and defeated by a television celebrity.
Free Speech is worth protecting – but it does not insulate you against the consequences. Has Khalil said enough to be no longer welcome as a guest? It could be that he is being used as ‘an example’.
Pro-Palestine *is* anti-semitism.
Yes. The entire “Palestinian” identity (which was created in the 1960s) can be summed up as “not Israel” and “No Jews from the river to the sea”. It is entirely negative with no constructive vision or tradition of any kind.
At the root of the Arab-Israel conflict is Islamic supremacism. How dare there be a place that was in dar-al-Islam where dhimmis (i.e Jews and Christians) do not accept dhimmi status? This was al-Husseini’s stance when he stoked pogroms from 1920 onwards. It is the stance of his heirs today.
Nope. The Trump Administration is deporting people who are in the US under visas who support terror organizations, and call for and commit violence against America and its people.
Does the Constitution really protect non-citizens?
He is not merelyba racist bigot. He explicitly organized violentbscts and leads an organization that seeks to violently destroy America.
If you are a guest in the US, don’t advocate for designated terrorist groups while intimidating true US citizens. Anti-Semites are not welcomed here.
If the pro-Israel crowd engaged in the same trespassing, calls for and performance of violent activity, and property destruction, the equivocation attempted here might be more persuasive. Violence is not speech, and carrying water for those advocating as much should be declined.
The question that no one seems to be answering: Is Kahlil protected by our Bill of Rights? Is he a citizen? Or some kind of provisional citizen? Does that matter? What does the legislative history and the case law have to say about it?
If he’s not protected he should be tossed out on his ass.
Here in NYC the protests began weeks before the Israeli assault. That certainly suggests that they were part of a plan, not spontaneous. Likely a Hamas plan. Certainly in aid of Hamas, a terrorist organization. The State Department should rule as they see fit. And then let the Court decide.
“These are the actions of a President who claims to be restoring free speech to America after four years of online censorship orchestrated by the Biden administration.”
Note: The Biden administration undertook its censorship on the sneak and intentionally out of sight. Huge difference.
The Left has done the same tirelessly for years. Sad that the Right is joining them.
The vile grip silencing truth is happening everywhere:
The US defense department webpage celebrating an army general who served in the Vietnam war and was awarded the country’s highest military decoration has been removed and the letters “DEI” added to the site’s address.
On Saturday, US army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers’s Medal of Honor webpage led to a “404” error message. The URL was also changed, with the word “medal” changed to “deimedal”.
Rogers, who was awarded the Medal of Honor by then president Richard Nixon in 1970, served in the Vietnam war, where he was wounded three times while leading the defense of a base. From the Inquirer
While this writer tries to shift the blame for opposition to freedom of speech from the left to the right, his drift seems to favour the former over the latter. The self-proclaimed ‘progressives’ have pushed restrictions on free speech to the point of abuse. Unpleasant as it may seem, they are reaping the result of their fanaticism. Most people don’t agree with the extreme opinions that have been, and are still being imposed on them by ‘progressive’ activists and will be happy to see them derailed.
Sigh… I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain this over and over, but the Constitution does not guarantee anything to non-citizens. It is the founding document of one country, the United States, not an international human rights treaty. It is explicitly restricted to the borders and citizens of the United States. There is no such thing as the Constitutional rights of visa or green card holders as this author asserts. The Constitution applies to Americans only, just as the Brazilian Constitution applies to Brazilians, and so on.
These visa and green card holders do have legal rights, rights defined by immigration law as passed by Congress. Such law is quite old and probably in need of review, but that’s a Congressional responsibility. The President’s job is to enforce the law, regardless of how old or outdated it is. If people have a dispute with something the government does, they can take the matter to court, which will decide whether the President was within his Constitutional rights and duties or whether he had extended the law beyond its language and it’s intent. That is exactly what is happening now. The courts will decide and the matter may even go up to the Supreme Court.
This is how the system works. There is nothing abnormal going on here. The US deported all sorts of people during the Cold War for being suspected supporters of Communist organizations or Soviet spies or Chinese spies or whatever. Nobody complained because we all pretty much agreed that these were our enemies and the courts have made many exceptions to free speech absolutism where national defense is concerned. When the government’s duty to protect people from foreign threats and its duty to protect Constitutional rights come into conflict, courts have often cited the former as taking precedence over the latter.
I sympathize with the author’s position. I tend to be a free speech absolutist myself. I don’t think deporting people, citizens or not, for making political statements is good policy, regardless of the legality, but what Trump is doing is not beyond the pale. This is not a threat to democracy. The USA has done far more undemocratic things than this in its history. This author is just rehashing the same old ‘threat to democracy’ arguments that we’ve been hearing for a decade now. One might hope they eventually change their tactics and make their criticisms more practical and sensible rather than resort to hyperbole and fearmongering. One hopes for many things.
Exactly!
Most people don’t realize that free speech is a political or economic tool, not a universal principle. In certain political environments, even a citizen can be jailed or deported for what they say. Did people forget Tiktok was canceled (still canceled until April 2025) because of under “free speech” breach!
I am so surprised many people are arguing about this!
I’m of two minds on this point:
Are Trump, Vance, Musk and Project 2025 true saviours, determined to tear down the establishment and restore freedom and prosperity to ordinary Americans?
Or are they just playing their part in a grand charade, ultimately working for the same techno-totalitarians as the Democratic Party?
I’d love to believe that their intentions are good. I’d like to see wokeism utterly destroyed. That requires tackling it at source, so it is right to go after universities that receive “public money” (US taxpayers should not be compelled to subsidise the destruction of society). They should also be ruthless with enemies of freedom, finding and exposing illegal activities by the likes of Soros and Gates.
Having used the awesome power of the US federal government to crush the enemies of freedom, they ought to dismantle it, so that it takes decades to rebuild.
But I don’t really believe that they’re fighting the good fight. More likely, we’re witnessing one mafia clan make gains at the expense of another. Despite a lot of sound and fury, they’ll leave all the dangerous machinery of state in place – indeed, they’ll add to it.
When the pendulum reverses course, it does not stop in the middle. It goes to nearly the same spot on the other side of the mid-point. Perhaps this means an overcorrection, perhaps it means that the previous mark was so extreme that it can only be corrected by going to the opposite extreme.
The alibi of sold-out partisans from time immemorial. I’m not saying you’re all the way there, just in agreement with them on this one. Perhaps it’s better to think of it as an old-fashioned gas tank needle or radio dial. You may need to overcorrect slightly, but not in some drastic, equal-and-opposite measure.
If you want to live in a country without a functional government, why try to destroy the US? Why not just move to South Sudan?
When did I suggest I want to live in a country without a functional government?
And on a scale of 1 to 10, how “functional” was the US under Biden?
There are certain basic functions that (until recently) everyone agreed the federal government should handle, such as border control.
Most other functions are better handled at state or local level, or by private companies.
Power corrupts. Keep it to a minimum, and keep it close.
If he wants to have free speech in the us he should become American.
I wonder what would happen to a Jewish person using their free speech in gaza to bring down Hamas?
Victor Davis Hanson had an interesting take on this story aside from stating the obvious that Khalil is A) not a citizen and B) being deported for what he did, not what he said.
Hanson asks (and I paraphrase) what if immigration had asked Khalil when he applied for his visa/Green card what he’d be doing in the US? And what if he told them he was going to CU to do exactly what he ended up doing (organize pro-Hamas rallies and harass Jewish students etc, etc) ? Do you think he ever would have been allowed in?
You would never know from this account that students painted swastikas on dorms, called for “the Final Solution,” physically assaulted, threatened, and prevented Jewish students from free movement on campus. . Far from “systematically demonizing the pro-Palestine” views, anti Israel views are the norm in MSM. This is not a free speech issue; it is stopping assaults and harassment of Jews. Deport them all now.
“Department of Homeland Security agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University, and revoked his green card. Now, they are trying to deport him over his political speech.“
100% spot on!
Presumably these interventions are designed to prevent the promotion of terrorism in higher education.
Because what these little geniuses are doing is promoting pogroms against the Jewish community.
I would never agree with the statement that President Biden’s efforts to restrict free speech were ever “subtle” as the author declares. Starting with the post election frenzy of anti-Trump’s protests in 2016, there’s been an absolutely terrifying war on free speech conducted by the progressive wing of the Democratic party. It reached its zenith during the start of the COVID-19 epidemic, and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
When a system tends to one extreme, it’s not surprising that the correction might overcorrect in the other direction. Whatever is happening now is a genuine reaction. Neither extreme amplitude represents the genuine position of the overwhelming majority of Americans. It is they who will decide where the new normal as to free speech will come to rest. And, I honestly believe, that will be at a point that recognizes everyone’s right to say something someone else might find objectionable. It’s the only way for everyone to hear points of view, and find the truth.
Many people assume free speech and the right to protest are universal rights for even citizens. They are not. Free speech is not an inherent human necessity like food but a political construct shaped by legal and economic systems. In the U.S., it is protected by the Constitution—a political framework, not a universal moral, religious, or cultural principle.
Different governments define and enforce speech boundaries based on their interests. Free speech is not absolute nor fundamental; like other legally defined rights like gun rights, it can be granted, restricted, or revoked based on political conditions.
Before assuming free speech is a natural or god-given right, one must consider the institutions and political structures that define its limits, along with the economic interests that shape its enforcement. Recognizing this helps explain why movements like MeToo, BLM, or Palestinian protests face different responses depending on the political environment.
On free speech, I think the issue is clear.
But if government funded organisations have been subject to ideological capture, or funds are being diverted into ideological purposes for which they were not intended, what is a new government to do? Can we really view actions to set that to rights as an attack on free speech?
ijjf
The secret to avoiding tribalism is to endorse principle, not party. Free speech is free speech, and all the asshats justifying Trump here in the comments are just as much the problem as the hideously woke.
You are pro free speech or pro government control over the thoughts and actions of the people, and I thought conservatives knew that.
This article is solid, but the author argues that the problem goes back about ten years. He is incorrect. These ideological currents reach back to the post WW2 era, and by the 70s, woke elitists had already begun their campaign of institutional capture.
It is smart phones and social media amplifying the worst narcissists on either end of the political spectrum that makes this appear new.
The essential point has already been made in the comments below that free speech via the US Constitution is generally a citizen’s right and not necessarily a human right, Without invoking Aristotle or Mill I think there are two other dimensions that might be imputed to “free speech”. One such dimension might be loyalty, in the sense that a patriotic person deserves citizens’ rights more than someone who does not care for nor feel loyalty towards the nation for whom s/he wishes to speak. The other dimension is the veracity of the speech in question. I would say that free speech is best suited to expression of truth rather than of fakery. If lies are spread using the excuse and cover of free speech, then the liar might not be said to deserve that right (or privilege). Personally I would find it counter-intuitive for anyone to argue for the right of a person to lie in public for the sole and devious purpose of misleading and manipulating the polis. I realise that truth and intent are often hard to prove! What I suppose I am trying to say is that one should have some nobility of intent and purpose when stepping up to the much revered podium of free speech. This is probably rather controversial, but such an approach might just reduce the abuse of this privilege enough to make the world a more peaceful place.
So now one should have to pass a partisan loyalty test, administered by a single man, before earning the Constitutional right to speech.
That’s beyond “controversial”. It is totalitarian and deeply un-American
I am not suggesting this should be a legal framework so much as a cultural reframing, and even less that it should be administered by a single person. Would it help to think of it as woke 2.0 (or 3.0) in which a notional test of constructiveness, veracity and responsibility is applied before demanding populist disapproval? Hate speech is already a crime in some places and it might help if the widespread sense of entitlement to free speech was slightly (self-?)moderated (and not criminalised, btw) by further reasonable criteria. Let’s just call it responsible speech!
Again, who would make such a determination and why is it permissible under the Constitution?*
There is simply nothing recognizably American about a “national test of constructiveness, veracity, and responsibility”.
It’s possible I’m misreading the intent of your reply, which does not seem clearly worded. I hope I am. As I understand it, you are suggesting something that is fundamental repressive and pretty well guaranteed to be misused to effects far worse than those caused by unwelcome or irresponsible speech (short of actual incitement to violence).
You are talking about the kind of standard applied in dictatorships, or medieval Europe under the Church.
*After re-reading your comment I see more to agree with. And long as the respect in mutual across sociopolitical line and voluntary, not extracted the point of a rifle or pitchfork.
It’s all very depressing.
But what Trump is doing in the US, Starmer is doing exactly the same in the UK. So how about an article on that for some balance?
A distinction needs to be drawn between free speech on the one hand and participating in violence on the other. The right seemed to have overstepped the mark here.
Khalil was/is the head and spokesperson for a Hamas friendly organization, that explicitly calls for – and commits – violence against Jews, Israel, and the US. He is an activist of a terrorist group. Deport him after he sits in jail for a few months.
They have become what they denounced.
The Roberts court needs to step up right quick- while the Executive should have broad latitude in matters of national security, the national security justification for deportation used on unpopular people (who advocate a Palestinian state in place of Israel, or even alongside Israel) could one day be used on, for instance Peter Thiel (his leadership of Palantir as a gay man creates a national security risk) or Amy Comey Barrett (membership in a “cult”). If this is what the Trump administration is doing in 3/24 imagine what they have in mind for the electoral opposition in 2026 and 2028.
Can “one day” be used? Seriously? This is the Left forgetting their lessons from history. Everything that Trump does has been done to him first. What goes round comes round. So, if he is the man they said he was, what a silly thing to have done to him.
So it’s fair game when he leaves to chase him relentlessly? If he’s going to act like this against those he disagrees with then he can have no complaints when the other side ramp it up when they get back into power.
This is banana republic territory
They already did chase him relentlessly. Too late to whinge about it happening to them.
His sin of being the man who had the audacity to break up their nice little club and deprive the chosen ones (Hillary and Kamala) of their “rightful Inheritance” will never be forgiven.
After all, It’s not supposed to work like that. That would mean the people actually have a say…it could be called “democracy”.
The fact that the people having a say is obstructed by the “club” is what makes a banana republic, not the trivial payback now being played out.
Of course, Britain is precisely the same…a banana republic run by the incompetent club, blocking democratic results…but with added grandiose delusions.
So it’s going to go on forever more? Each side simply keeps ramping it up once they get back into power, and idiots on each side will cheer it on?
Banana republic territory!
Britain is not only blocking democratic results, our government is actually cancelling planned democratic elections. Any takers for how long this “delay” will be and when we’ll ever get a vote again? It is for this sort of nonsense that we voted to leave the EU.
Did you vote for Trump, Mr Woodhouse? If so, you got what you voted for. Lots of people predicted this, and tried to tell you. Why wring your hands now, when you brought this on yourself?
No one can accurately predict just how bad this will get. But Trump voters are only beginning to get a taste of what they thought they wanted. However, it’s fair to observe that many only pulled the lever for him with a sense of desperation, against a pretty unappetizing alternative. Most of the believers won’t let real-world failures interfere with their blind faith.