Censorship is Anti-American

Some on the left and the right agree that unwelcome speech should be punished

Rare agreement

On March 25, Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University — “a Fulbright scholar working on a PhD in child study and human development on an F-1 student visa” — was detained by six plain clothes government officials as she walked down a Boston street.

Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that a State Department memo, prepared in the weeks before Ozturk was detained, concluded that the federal government did not have a legal basis for revoking her visa or deporting her:

Days before masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk to deport her, the State Department determined that the Trump administration had not produced any evidence showing that she engaged in antisemitic activities or made public statements supporting a terrorist organization, as the government has alleged.

The finding, contained in a March memo that was described to The Washington Post, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not have sufficient grounds for revoking Ozturk’s visa under an authority empowering the top U.S. diplomat to safeguard the foreign policy interests of the United States.

Ozturk is one of almost 1,000 foreign students at universities across the country whose visas have been revoked by the Trump Administration, according to a database compiled by Inside Higher Education, illustrated below.

Source: Inside Higher Education

In Ozturk’s case, the U.S. government has claimed that she engaged in support of terrorist activities, specifically, “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.” The government has not charged Ozturk with a crime, nor has it provided any evidence of her alleged support of terrorist activities under the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the State Department to deport individuals whose presence in the U.S. leads to “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

When asked about Ozturk’s case a few days after being detained, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained,

We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.

What was Ozturk’s “social activism”?

Along with three other Tufts students, she wrote an op-ed critical of the president of Tufts University for failing, in their view, to respond adequately to three student resolutions related to the Israel-Palestine conflict (the op-ed did not mention Hamas).¹

Here is how that op-ed begins:

On March 4, the Tufts Community Union Senate passed 3 out of 4 resolutions demanding that the University acknowledge the Palestinian genocide, apologize for University President Sunil Kumar’s statements, disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel. These resolutions were the product of meaningful debate by the Senate and represent a sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law. Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.

Unfortunately, the University’s response to the Senate resolutions has been wholly inadequate and dismissive of the Senate, the collective voice of the student body.

The student resolution and op-ed are a plain vanilla, and very benign, example of campus activism among students that goes back generations. The idea that a student op-ed has “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” is laughable.

The detainment and deportation of student activists is government censorship of free expression — a core tenet of American democracy expressed in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Student detainments and deportations are just one element the Trump Administration’s broad attack by on free speech in the United States. Other examples include:

• The monitoring of social media of those legally in the United States for expressing views deemed to be antisemitic;

• The exclusion of the Associated Press from the White House press pool for its refusal to follow a government directive on what it calls the “Gulf of America”;

• A large-scale campaign to defund universities that the Trump Administration views as “woke”;

• The Trump Administration is proposing massive cuts to research and data that it views as contrary to its agenda;

• Executive Orders targeting specific individuals and law firms that the Trump Administration believes have expressed views contrary to its interests;

• After watching the U.S. news program 60 Minutes last night, President Trump issued a message demanding that they be taken off the air.

Whether you, I, or anyone else agree with the Tufts op-ed, the political views of U.S. immigrants, the name of the large body of water between Central America and the U.S., university curricula and politicization, and the views of Donald Trump’s political and legal opposition — All of that expression, all of it, is legally protected expression under the U.S. Constitution. This is not complicated.

Ironically, the urge to censor expression is one topic that finds strong agreement among the MAGA right and the progressive left.

Many THB readers will be familiar with my own experiences in censorship — attacked by the Obama White House, investigated by a member of Congress, the focus of a social media cancel storm, and pushed out of a university. All this came from the political left, for expressing mainstream views on climate deemed inconvenient or unwelcomed.

Just yesterday, I learned that there is a new effort to censor me and THB (and apparently about 300 others). The new censorship project is called Hot Air and is funded by energy companies (wind, solar, gas, coal) and Al Gore’s investment fund. The effort is led by the University of Exeter and a new media venture called Tortoise Media.²

More than 1200 THB posts have been labeled as “climate denial” by Torotise Media in their new enemies list. Many of these posts are accurate characterizations of conclusions of the IPCC and discussions of peer-reviewed research.

Tortoise Media arrive at their new list of “climate deniers” using AI to identify public statements that are deemed to express “misinformation” and specifically, “falsehoods and conspiracy theories.”

What are the “falsehoods and conspiracy theories” that get one on the list to be censored? The table below shows some of the claims deemed to be unacceptable in public discourse and necessitating censorship.

Source: Coan et al. 2021, cited by Tortoise Media as the underlying basis for the Hot Air enemies list.

Whether you, I, or anyone else agree with the claims in the list above, just as with the MAGA examples above — All of that expression, all of it, is legally protected expression under the U.S. Constitution. Even stating, falsely in my view, that humans do not affect the climate system is protected speech. Again, this is not complicated.

How do we protect the U.S. Constitution’s protections of free speech in an era when some on the right and the left agree that certain expression should be censored? And when some in positions of influence, including the current U.S. president, are willing to use state powers to censor?

First, it is important to accept that despite the long tradition and norms of free speech in the United States, not everyone believes in the importance or necessity of the First Amendment. In particular, some appear perfectly happy to censor the speech of those who they view as political opponents or even enemies — Free speech for me but not for thee.

Second, for those who do support free speech in the American tradition, the most important action for us to take is to loudly oppose efforts to censor those who express views that you or I most disagree with. As Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote more than a century ago, invoking Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” More on point, in the U.K in 1923 Lord Justice Scrutton observed, “You really believe in freedom of speech if you are willing to allow it to men whose opinions seem to you wrong and even dangerous.”

Last words today come from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, writing in a concurring opinion in Whitney vs. California (1927)

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. . .

Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom.

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1. The op-ed was endorsed by 32 other Tufts graduate students. Are these other 35 students (3 co-authors plus 32 endorsers) going to be detained and deported also?

2. With ~36,000 subscribers here at THB, I am not much worried personally about being censored. However, not everyone has the platform that I do, and efforts to censor do have consequences. They should be pushed back against strongly.