the free speech those students engaged in is disgusting. It’s support for authoritarianism. Columbia is doing this because of Trump’s revocation of millions of dollars in grants, something the anti-free speech proponents likely support. While they applaud the attack on higher education, they stand with the far right and its efforts to turn the USA into Russia or Nazi Germany. It’s incredibly short-sighted since the right’s ultimate goal is to see all Jews dead. If anyone believes Trump cares about antisemitism, they are woefully gullible. Neo-Nazis fill his base as well as close advisors like Miller and Musk. What Trump hates is Muslims, while he promotes the same ethnic cleansing as championed by Israel’s current government. Bibi, for example, voiced no opposition to Trump’s plan to remove all Palestinians from Gaza and turn it into a resort.
I wonder if those who applaud these actions wanted Vietnam protestors stripped of their degrees or deported as well, or perhaps their embrace of authoritarianism is limited to Muslims? Do they also support the shackling and deportation of Latinos and Canadians, the latter for a crime of an incomplete visa, the former for being undocumented or American citizens born to undocumented parents? The actions are all connected. This pretense of a concern about crime is a transparent ruse to abolish free speech.
Striking workers regularly engage in the kind of civil disobedience that these students did. The result is fines, not being stripped of their jobs or deported. Does no one learn any history? Haymarket was a crime, a rather serious one. It’s also part of the history of labor formation in this country. Anarchism and Socialism were crimes, but those movements gave us the 8 hr day.
Then there is the Civil Rights movement, where civil disobedience was common. They occupied buildings through sit ins. Would you have had them expelled, stripped of Degrees and deported as well? If the answer is no, the only explanation is hypocrisy of the worst kind, since it is aligned with authoritarianism.
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