How October 7 Changed America’s Free-Speech Culture
America’s free-speech culture is in sudden flux and some peril. Since October 7, when Hamas launched an attack that included killing, raping, and kidnapping, the Israel-Palestine debate has been the most common trigger for street protests in America. Reports of hateful speech and hate crimes are surging. And for the first time in the “cancel culture” era, campaigns to get people fired from their job are more likely to involve Israel or Palestine than controversies about race, gender, or sexual misbehavior. Even if the Middle East faded from the headlines tomorrow, Congress, the federal civil-rights bureaucracy, and many elite colleges have already upended the coalitions that have shaped our free-speech culture.
Old-school liberals can simply go on championing free-speech values. But the “woke” or “identitarian” left cannot go on as before. Having long agitated for more sweeping speech restrictions and taboos, they now confront a dilemma: They do not want “woke” hate speech or sensitivity standards applied to Palestinian-aligned activists, and they are unwilling to police speech that unnerves many Jews in the way that they policed speech they considered upsetting to other identity groups; yet they cannot subject Jews to such a blatant double standard without alienating many Americans and losing moral standing and attendant influence.
[Conor Friedersdorf: Students for pogroms in Israel]
It is too early to know what the next phase of America's speech culture will look like. One faction wants to resolve the double standard by treating Jews as the woke left treats Black and brown people and members of the LGBTQ community—to grant them the status of an oppressed group and to police speech on their behalf. A more farsighted faction wants everyone to get equal treatment, regardless of identity, when speaking or being?
