On May 1, when this site published my OpEd, “The Marketplace of Ideas Only Works if We Leave the Doors Open,” I expected it to be the least controversial piece of my life. It was an old-fashioned, red-white-and-blue libertarian defense of free speech for everyone, regardless of citizenship or viewpoint. It got one supportive comment on the site and 15-20 polite “nice piece” messages from left-leaning friends.
Then I posted it on social media, and it ignited a Facebook meltdown, with hundreds of outraged comments from conservatives, screaming that I was defending terrorists and downplaying antisemitism, for daring to suggest that the First Amendment should apply to everyone, not just American citizens with popular opinions. In hindsight, the reaction was so over-the-top that it did my job for me. The marketplace of ideas only works when the doors stay open, and my critics want gates, locks, and armed guards.
And just as I was finishing writing this follow-up, Columbia University, where I am a professor, exploded again as 78 more pro-Palestine protesters were arrested for taking over a reading room in Butler Library. A few weeks ago, in an earlier piece for the Mises Institute titled “Oops: Trump Just Bankrolled the Protesters He Intended to Silence,” I warned this would happen.
Fox News gave the protesters round-the-clock attention, and Trump gave them real-world power by cutting half a billion dollars in funding to Columbia in response. Such clumsy attempts to shut people up through heavy-handed state action don’t suppress protest; they radicalize it. What protesters want most is attention and influence, and now that they are getting both in droves, they are getting louder and bolder. And with the protests intensifying again, my Facebook feed is once again flooded with conservative friends saying, essentially, “See? I told you Columbia’s an antisemitic cesspool.” As if that somehow invalidates the principle that speech should remain legal even when it’s awful.
I defended the right of international students like Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University and a Columbia alumna. Her op-ed in The Tufts Daily was calm, logical, and polite. She defended pro-divestment views on Israel while explicitly acknowledging that the university might still be right not to divest, based on the Chicago Principles. No threats, no vandalism, just words. Yet she was thrown in an ICE detention center in Louisiana, labeled a “national security threat,” all because Marco Rubio didn’t like her article. If that OpEd makes her a national security threat, then Antiwar.com readers might want to renew their passports and dust off their go-bags.
Nothing says “land of the free” like jailing a student over an essay in a college newspaper.
But here is where it gets surreal. The same conservatives who erupted in fury when YouTube suspended Senator Rand Paul for questioning mask mandates, and who whined when universities blocked conservative speakers for “security reasons,” are the same ones now cheering when ICE uses an obscure Cold War-era immigration law to deport a Turkish grad student for writing an op-ed.
Apparently, the First Amendment is sacrosanct until someone with the wrong accent has a dangerous idea. The same people who once called this “cancel culture” now call it “law and order.”
Which brings us to the larger point. Conservatives once ridiculed campus “safe spaces.” Now they want speech banned because it makes them feel unsafe. They mocked trigger warnings and microaggressions, but now they want slogans banned, students expelled, and foreigners jailed. It’s funny how fast “suck it up, buttercup” becomes “call the cops” when someone else is holding the megaphone. Who are the snowflakes now?
Of course, the left doesn’t get to play innocent. They built this censorship machine, celebrated it, and only started noticing the stench when it wafted into their protest tents. They labeled the COVID lab-leak theory a racist conspiracy until the Washington Post changed its mind. They dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation until the New York Times quietly admitted it was real. They banned current NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya from social media for questioning Covid lockdowns, then cheered CDC-approved “get out of Covid free” passes for the “essential” George Floyd protests. When Joe Rogan hosted Dr. Robert Malone to discuss mRNA vaccines and ivermectin, Neil Young tried to cancel Spotify itself.
It wasn’t science but tribal warfare dressed up as public health. And now that it’s their student groups facing expulsion or deportation, they’ve suddenly remembered the First Amendment. How convenient.
Even the groups that claim to champion academic freedom can’t resist hypocrisy. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) will scream about Florida’s ban on teaching critical race theory (CRT), but barely squeaks when progressive mobs get conservative professors fired for alleged “speech code violations.” The National Association of Scholars (NAS) rails against compelled DEI statements and cancel culture at American universities, then cheers when Republican governors muzzle professors or ban the teaching of “divisive concepts” like CRT. Only the Association of Libertarian Educators, on whose board I proudly sit, consistently defends free speech for everyone, not because we like our opponents’ views, but because we’re not afraid of a fair fight. If you’re trying to tilt the playing field, it’s probably because you know you can’t win otherwise.
And don’t tell me it’s about “encouraging atrocities” or “supporting terrorism.” Öztürk’s detention for an OpEd, with no incitement, flouts Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), which says speech can only be punished if it incites imminent lawless action, not hurt feelings or State Department snubs. Even Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010), which narrowed the rules for material support to terrorist groups, requires direct coordination, not just agreement with their political agenda. Distributing a leaflet written by Hamas or arguing for the same political outcomes as the IRA or the ANC doesn’t equate to material support for terrorism, unless you are taking direct orders from them. If it did, half of Twitter would have been locked up for retweeting bin Laden’s letter to America.
According to The Intercept, there’s no evidence Öztürk was involved with vandalism, harassment, or coordination with Hamas or any group on the State Department’s terror list; she is being deported just because she wrote an essay they didn’t like, in America, as a student.
Religion doesn’t escape the hypocrisy either. One commenter on my OpEd declared that all morality comes from religion, then qualified the remark by insisting Islam isn’t even a religion. That’s not a worldview; it’s buffet-line theology. Personally, I don’t know and don’t much care whether your god exists or not. What I do care about is people using their imaginary friends as an excuse to silence each other. If your deity is so fragile that it needs ICE, Elon Musk, or Mark Zuckerberg to defend it, maybe it’s time for a new deity.
In the Middle East debate, logic and morality both seem to go out the window in favor of tribalism. Like most Americans, I found the October 7 attacks horrific, and I also lament the egregious loss of tens of thousands of lives in the retaliatory bombing of Gaza. This shouldn’t be controversial. But this display of basic human empathy earned me accusations of downplaying antisemitism from one side and being an apologist for genocide-denial from the other. Nuance is now heresy.
It’s time the U.S. stopped trying to referee theological turf wars, whether it’s Sunnis vs. Shiites, Jews vs. Muslims, or Catholics vs. Protestants.
But instead of common sense, we get cowards in cosplay – patriots on the outside, authoritarians underneath. In 1977, the ACLU defended the rights of literal Nazis to march in Skokie, not because they liked Nazis, but to defend the constitution – something far more critical. That took guts. Today, people report professors to HR for “wrong-think,” and call ICE when a student writes something mildly discomfiting. A 2024 FIRE survey found that most college students regularly engage in self-censorship, and these arrests will only increase their number. We’re not educating citizens, we’re training bureaucrats for the Ministry of Truth.
Free speech doesn’t need protection when someone says, “puppies are cute.” It needs protection when someone says, “Puppies are delicious.” I happen to think both are valid propositions, and neither should get you jailed, fired, or deported.
So yes, go ahead and call me disloyal, immoral, antisemitic, Islamophobic, naive, or worse. But let’s be honest: you’re upset because Rümeysa Öztürk calmly and effectively made her case, and you know it will be difficult to defeat her in the marketplace of ideas. So instead of debating her, you attack me for defending her right to speak. Instead of engaging with her argument, you celebrate when the government silences her so you don’t have to. That’s not a defense of your position; it’s an admission of insecurity. If your ideas were truly robust, you’d welcome the challenge. But by seeking to suppress her voice, you reveal an extreme lack of confidence in your own.
Joseph D. Terwilliger is Professor of Neurobiology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where his research focuses on natural experiments in human genetic epidemiology. He is also active in science and sports diplomacy, having taught genetics at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, and accompanied Dennis Rodman on six “basketball diplomacy” trips to Asia since 2013.
