Censorship Violates The Rights Of The Speaker And Of The Hearer

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The Trump administration is targeting another Columbia University student for deportation due to speech crimes against the state of Israel. This time they’re going after a 21 year-old woman who was born in South Korea but has been in the US since age seven and is a legal permanent US resident.

The New York Times reports:

“The student, Yunseo Chung, is a legal permanent resident and junior who has participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the school. The Trump administration is arguing that her presence in the United States hinders the administration’s foreign policy agenda of halting the spread of antisemitism.”

This “foreign policy” narrative is the same as the one being used by the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Mahmoud Khalil for his pro-Palestinian activism at Columbia; Trump himself posted on social media that Khalil and his activism are “counter to our national and foreign policy interests.” The legal argument here is that because these activists are obstructing the foreign policy goals of the US government, it’s okay to remove them because they are not citizens.

What people are missing about Trump’s new policy of deporting pro-Palestine protesters on the grounds that their activism is contrary to US “foreign policy interests” is that it’s not just an attack on the activists’ political speech, it’s also an attack on US citizens’ right to hear criticism of their government’s foreign policy.

As Frederick Douglass said, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.” Even if you believe people who aren’t US citizens should have no free speech rights and that it’s fine for the US government to deport them for criticizing its actions, you can’t use that same logic to argue that the US government should also have the right to prevent US citizens from hearing those criticisms.

But that’s exactly what the Trump administration is doing. By making it clear that it is deporting pro-Palestinian activists not for any crime but for obstructing their “foreign policy goals”, they are admitting that they are taking action to stop Americans from hearing criticisms and objections to their own government’s actions in the middle east. It’s tantamount to blocking Americans from reading certain political books or viewing certain political websites because the criticisms of US foreign policy contained therein might contaminate them with wrongthink.

Governments around the world inflict this sort of censorship all the time, but the United States is supposed to have constitutional restrictions on Washington’s ability to violate people’s freedom to hear dissenting political speech. And until very recently, patriotic conservative Americans tended to pride themselves in those freedoms their country provides. But apparently they’re willing to light the whole thing on fire as long as it advances the interests of the state of Israel.

Americans who are not fully brainwashed into the cult of Trumpism should be asking themselves if this is the kind of country they want to live in, though. Do you really want your government deciding what kind of political speech you are allowed to hear, and protecting your fragile little mind from wrongthink? Or do you want to decide such matters for yourself?

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