For years, we’ve been hearing breathless warnings about a “campus free speech crisis” from self-proclaimed free speech warriors. Their evidence? College students doing what college students have done for generations: protesting speakers they disagree with, challenging institutional policies, and yes, sometimes attempting to create heckler’s vetoes.
This kind of campus activism — while occasionally messy and uncomfortable — has been a feature of American higher education since the 1960s. It’s how young people learn to engage with ideas and exercise their own speech rights. Sometimes that activism is silly and sometimes it’s righteous. Often it’s somewhere in between, but it’s kind of a part of being a college student, and learning what you believe in.
But now we face an actual free speech crisis on campus that goes beyond just speech. It’s an attack on personal freedoms, due process, and liberty. The federal government isn’t just pressuring universities over speech — it’s literally disappearing students for their political expression. If you support actual free speech, now is the time to speak up.
The latest example of this authoritarian overreach is particularly chilling: Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts who was here legally on a student visa, was abducted by masked agents in broad daylight. She was disappeared without due process or explanation — only later did we learn she had been renditioned to a detention center in Louisiana.
Her supposed crime? A year ago, she co-authored an op-ed in The Tufts Daily criticizing her university administration’s stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Not advocating violence. Not supporting terrorism. Not even criticizing the U.S. government. Just exercising core First Amendment rights by publishing criticism of her own university’s policies in a student newspaper.
When does America cross the Rubicon?
When is this country no longer a democracy?
When does it become something else?
I’ve been asking these questions of people for a few months now, and there’s no consensus answer. When a president runs for a third term? When an administration ignores the rulings of the Supreme Court? (Trumpets will say Biden already did this.) When the president jails people, citizens or not, that oppose him, First Amendment be damned?
Not satisfied with effectively buying a co-president role in Donald Trump’s administration, Elon Musk has turned his attention — and money — towards a key race in the swing state of Wisconsin. The billionaire’s America PAC is claiming to give $100 to registered voters who sign a petition against “activist judges.”
It’s not the first time Musk has promised money in exchange for signatures on petitions: he did the same thing leading up to the presidential election in November. It’s illegal to pay someone to vote or to register to vote, but Musk’s approach is meant to intentionally toe the line. Some election law experts say the tactic is legal because the offer doesn’t require a person actually vote; others say that requiring signatories be registered voters is what violates the law.
Fuck Elon and fuck billionaires meddling in our politics.
I have absolutely no time for campus protests that go over the line into intimidation of other students. If crimes have been committed, I have no problem prosecuting. But offensive speech? It’s allowed in America. Handing out fliers? It’s how America began! A campus can (and should) discipline its students; but the federal government intervening to seize a legal resident and trying to deport him for speech — along with a dragnet for finding others to throw out — is an outrage in a free country.
Very few American citizens have read the Constitution. Most treat it as they do their holy books: they cherry-pick the rules they like, have no problem judging others by those particular rules, yet seem to know hardly anything about the rest of the document.
Or worse, they know nothing of the Constitution — not a single article or amendment. They just speak with confidence about what it does or does not contain, the document itself be damned.
This ignorance feels particularly galling when coming from the Right, which it so often does, because those that so fervently support Trump and his ilk seem to fetishize the Constitution, always going on (and on) about their love of America and the "rule of law” while wearing at least one piece of clothing brandishing Old Glory. So you'd think they'd care a bit more about America's founding document, about the Emoluments Clause or the Twenty-second Amendment or, hell, the most famous amendment of them all.
But let's not bullshit each other: this isn't about the rule of law.
This is about hate.
This is about hating someone so much that you openly choose to ignore the rules laid out in the document you claim to love so much. You'll do anything to punish people that disagree with you because — and let's not stop being honest now! — your ego is so fragile, your skin so thin, that you can't stand even the smallest criticism.
You can almost hear the rage-sputtering from the Trumpets. "But! BUT!! BIDEN!!" To that, I respond, "Yeah, Biden. And Bush and Clinton and FDR and Eisenhower." What does it matter who the current president is? It's the power of the presidency I find so dangerous, hence the need to keep it in check. But going on about Biden seems to be less about Biden than Trump, more about airing of grievances as a smokescreen for the guy you support being able to do whatever he wants.
And to my friends on the Right, yes, I'm aware Biden did some very-likely-illegal shit. He certainly made some moral decisions I disagree with, and I've grown deeply suspicious of his extended family and the privileges they’ve enjoyed since he became vice-president. Put another way, the Right has raised some good points about Biden’s moral failings — and the corruption of the Democratic Party.
But to criticize Trump is not an endorsement of Biden, just as criticizing Biden is not an endorsement of Trump.
What does it say about us that we can't seem to really understand that? The level of vitriol I experience from Liberals and Conservatives alike who seem to assume I'm endorsing the "opposing team" when I criticize theirs is, well, I think you'd be shocked at what people feel entitled to say to my face, all because I don't tow their party line.
We've all somehow lost our ability to be rational in the face of hating the "other team."
Wokesters? Trumpets? I'm looking at you both.
You need to knock it off.
You need to learn that your hatred of the people you disagree with has been engineered and cultivated. It's what keeps you watching your videos, and thus what sells ads on those videos. It's a cruel irony that rage is what keeps our brains engaged, keeps us clicking and scrolling. There's an evolutionary reason for this, but we live in a very different world than the one in which our species evolved. (We have computers, for fuck's sake.)
Seriously, if we deserve to keep this country — and if we’re still being honest, maybe we don't — we have to stop hating each other. Pay attention to your thoughts — if you experience a flash of hatred for someone because they're a Democrat or Republican, you're sick. You've been infected with a toxin and you need to seek treatment.
Admitting you're unwell is the first step. Being around people who don't think like you is important, too. Having conversations with people who don't think like you is even better. You'll realize that not every Wokester hates personal liberty and not every Trumpet is a bigot.
This is not some grand epiphany, I know, but I'm going to keep writing it: we need to stop hating each other. I don't care how you manage to do it, but the United States will not survive if you don't.
Yes, you.
Mark my words: we lose this republic if our hatreds control us.
Those three words — “the free world” — mean nothing to Trump and never have. And he has now fatefully told the entire world, including our former allies, that this is America’s position now as well. He has updated Reagan with these words: “We were with you then. We see no reason to be with you now. In fact, we’re siding with a dictator who threatens you.”
This is a Rubicon, I’m afraid, that cannot be fully uncrossed. But I have a feeling that the American people, including many who voted for Trump, will see this new alliance with Putin against a beleaguered, little democracy with the same disgust and nausea that I do.
This is who Trump is. But it isn’t who Americans really are. I have faith that the West, now mortally wounded, can yet survive Trump and Putin, and re-emerge at some point. But it may be a dark, dark few years before the dawn’s early light breaks out again.
Whichever way this goes, do not let the outcome make you cynical.
Don’t gloat if you win. Don’t throw a tantrum if you lose.
We’re adults. Listen to the people that disagree with you. Ask them questions. (Cherish the people that ask you questions in return.) Be open to being wrong.
I traveled to four battleground states and interviewed dozens of election officials, activists, lawyers and ordinary citizens, read through hundreds of pages of court transcripts and sat in on many hours of local meetings like the one in Washoe. What I found was that although the Stop the Steal movement of 2020 has evolved into the considerably more sophisticated “election integrity” movement of 2024, its success is still premised on persuading election administrators of two things that are not true: that widespread election fraud is a real and present threat to democracy and that they have not only the authority but also the legal duty to do something about it — that they must “do their duty” and deny certification.
Capitalism is the first socio-economic order which de-totalizes meaning: it is not global at the level of meaning. There is, after all, no global “capitalist world view,” no “capitalist civilization” proper: the fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East. Capitalism’s global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without-meaning, as the Real of the global market mechanism.
This, then, is what drives millions to seek refuge in our opiums: not just the new poverty and lack of prospects but the unbearable superego pressure in its two aspects: the pressure to succeed professionally and the pressure to enjoy life fully in all its intensity. Perhaps, this second aspect is even more unsettling: what remains of our life when our retreat into private pleasure itself becomes a brutal injunction?
If I had to choose between these two tendencies I would obviously have to choose the blue MAGA over the red. Doing so would protect abortion and environmental regulations and the NLRB, among many other things. It’s not a contest, for me. But of course I’d prefer to choose neither. Blue MAGA is very, very real; the paranoid style has spread like a coronavirus from Republicans to Democrats. Put “The New York Times” into the Twitter search bar on any given day and you’ll find relentless, enraged invective coming from Democratic loyalists who insist that the paper of record is on a mission to reelect Donald Trump. They used to laugh at Republicans when they groused about “skewed polls,” but now they do the exact same thing - any poll that emerges that suggests Biden is losing is a conservative op, run by a firm with a well-known Republican bias.
This, it seems, is where we are: two warring political tribes who share the foundational principle that anything that goes wrong for them is the product of a rigged system. Two angry players, too busy working the refs to concentrate on the game, looking for some higher authority to declare that the other side broke the rules. This isn’t fair. They’re breaking the rules. I’m telling the teacher. They’re denying us what we’re owed. Today the parties are united only in their belief that, on a neutral field and playing a clean game, they cannot lose. If a single voter endorses the opposition, their opponents must be cheating. How could it be otherwise? Surely only conspiracy could defeat us. Surely only The Man could pull the wool over the eyes of millions. This was much more of a Republican thing, and I know that people hate any argument that sounds like “both sides.” But both sides, in fact, are now operating this way. The notion that Democrats cannot fail in a clean election, cannot stumble but through illegitimate outside force, is now fully enculturated into the party. They hate Trump so much they’ve adopted his signature contribution to American politics. And I don’t know how you get out of this without violence, at this point. I really don’t.
The speed with which the paranoid insanity — the same that took hold on the Right a generation or two ago — has consumed the Left is alarming. I can’t quite make sense of how many people refuse to acknowledge Biden’s disaster of a debate performance simply because they’re terrified of Trump.
Trump or no, Biden is unfit for the office.
As a friend put it, “how is it possible we have a choice between two emperors, both of whom insist they’re wearing clothes?”
…watching him barely capable of finishing a sentence, staring vacantly into the middle distance, unable to deliver a single coherent message even when handed an ideal question, incapable of any serious rebuttals to Trump’s increasingly deranged lies … well, the first thing I felt was intense sadness. This was elder abuse — inflicted, in part, by his wife.
The second thing I felt was rage. His own people chose to do this. That alone reveals a campaign so divorced from reality, so devoid of a rationale or a message, so strategically incompetent, it too has no chance of winning. It is an insult to all of us that a mature political party would offer someone in this physical and mental state as president for the next four years. And it has always been an insult. That the Democrats would offer him as the only alternative to what they regard as the end of liberal democracy under Trump is proof that they are either lying about what they claim are the stakes or are utterly delusional. If Trump is that dangerous, why on earth are you putting forward a man clearly in the early stages of dementia against him? Have you decided to let Trump win by default because you’re too scared to tell an elderly man the truth?
I think it's time I say publicly what I've been thinking privately for months: unless something drastic changes in the next few months, I'm voting for RFK.
I've told a few select people, each time as something of a 'coming out.' Predictably, this inspires the derision and mockery you'd expect, and far more from liberals than conservatives.
My followup question is always this: have you actually heard RFK speak for a full interview, unedited? Or have you made up your mind simply based on what you've heard other people say about him?
A few weeks ago, I listened to an episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour titled 'Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Could Swing the Election. Who should Be More Worried—Biden or Trump?' I challenge you to listen to the first ten minutes. Listen to the tone of the hosts, the condescension with which they talk about him. He was once a drug addict! He owns up to cheating on his wives! He'll steal votes from Biden!
Once you listen, do you still trust his coverage in the media? Can you hear the fear in their voices? Fear that he will somehow pull enough votes away from Biden to guarantee Trump a win?
As far as I'm concerned, my vote comes down to this issue: corporate rule. RFK is the only candidate consistently speaking out about the role of corporations in our politics. It is the issue that undergirds all others in our politics. Corporations do not give a shit about democracy, they are designed only to maximize profit for their shareholders. (I am one of those shareholders, so I know how this game works. I have money invested in the market, and I make more money simply by having money invested — it's that simple. Do I labor for that money? Nope.)
Whether its Biden or Trump, corporations are donating millions to each campaign, hoping for favorable laws and regulations, tax breaks, etc. All in service of making more money…and making people like me, their shareholders, wealthier. This is the engine of inequality.
Again: corporations do not care about democracy. They only care about electing the candidate most likely to increase their profits.
This cycle must be broken.
I don't care about RFK's thoughts on vaccines, just as I don't think it's wise to vote based solely on a small-scope issue like abortion. Does it seems strange to me that we give infants ever-increasing numbers of vaccines shortly after birth, even for diseases that are sexually-transmitted (and thus presumably won't need for at least 15 years)? Yes. Do I think the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, passed in 1986 and which eliminates financial liability of vaccine manufacturers, is suspiciously in favor of large pharmeceutical corporations? Yes. Not that I don't understand why the law was passed — to incentivize said corporations and companies to research life-saving vaccines, many of which have been a tremendous net-positive for our culture! But both things can be true. Good intentions can also increase corporate profit.
Am I onboard with everything RFK thinks or says? No. But I've listened to hours of his interviews and I think he's mostly cogent, clear-headed, and equanimious.
I encourage you to listen, in full, to some RFK interviews:
After Biden's performance at the debate last night, I cannot fathom how anyone can in good conscience vote for him. And let's be honest: they can't. They're merely voting against Trump.
We live in a time when our political opinions cost us relationships. I won't pretend I'm not angry or bitter about having lost several myself, but I will not let the fear of losing even more due to my political opinions keep me from speaking my mind.
Do I agree with everything RFK says? One more time: no, I do not.
But at this point, do I think he's the best candidate in the race? I do.
Donald Trump is going to be the nominee. In November 2024, tens of millions of Americans will vote for him. The only uncertainty is whether or not he will eke out enough votes in a handful of states to carry the Electoral College.
Even if you are highly confident that Trump will lose, how confident are you? Put a number on that, for me. Do you think Biden has a 9-in–10 chance of being re-elected?
Now answer me this: Would you get onto an airplane if I told you that it had a 1-in–10 chance of crashing?
I don’t know whether the board was right to fire Altman. It certainly has not made a public case that would justify the decision. But the nonprofit board was at the center of OpenAI’s structure for a reason. It was supposed to be able to push the off button. But there is no off button. The for-profit proved it can just reconstitute itself elsewhere. And don’t forget: There’s still Google’s A.I. division and Meta’s A.I. division and Anthropic and Inflection and many others who’ve built large language models similar to GPT–4 and are yoking them to business models similar to OpenAI’s. Capitalism is itself a kind of artificial intelligence, and it’s far further along than anything the computer scientists have yet coded. In that sense, it copied OpenAI’s code long ago.
…
…if the capabilities of these systems continue to rise exponentially, as many inside the industry believe they will, then nothing I’ve seen in recent weeks makes me think we’ll be able to shut the systems down if they begin to slip out of our control. There is no off switch.
Our status as a haven for human rights has always been dubious, a self-serving mythology that massages the ego while covering up real horror. Our closest allies can hardly boast of better behavior, even as they claim their own commitments to democracy. Such claims rest on selective memory, forms of national amnesia that ignore the bad while emphasizing only the most superficial good. In the U.S., there are few reckonings for our actions overseas, and little accountability for bad actors. Ghouls like John Yoo can author torture memos and enjoy a comfortable sinecure thereafter. Luminaries fêted Henry Kissinger for his recent 100th birthday. The U.S. rehabilitates its own worst and expects the world to acquiesce.
What, then, does America mean to the world now? People still risk their lives to come here, but the overall portrait is one of imperial decline. Though the election of Joe Biden repaired some reputational damage from the Trump years, our elderly president polls badly at home while he props up abusive regimes overseas. Congress looks little better. One party cannot govern, while the other mostly fails to check Biden’s worst foreign-policy impulses. The U.S. has extended a national culture of impunity to its friends, including Israel, and the subjugated pay the price, which is violence.
In such times, dissent takes on new importance. It serves both a pragmatic and moral function. Dissenters can remind the U.S. of the promises it makes not just to its own people but to the world. Should the powerful listen, they seize an opportunity. There is time, still, for the U.S. to do the right thing: to stabilize the damage it has inflicted on the oppressed and itself, to regain an edge over its competitors on the global stage.
The fact remains, though - and it is a fact, an objective fact, an empirical fact, no matter how mad it makes people - that Hamas has always been empowered by Israel’s violence and oppression. Forgive the cliché, but each side’s extremists are a gift to each other. I’m sorry if this is hard to accept, but Palestine is a Chinese finger trap; the more forcefully Israel acts, the more tightly the conflict will grip the country. The only way out is through de-escalation and the only permanent de-escalation is through formal legal recognition of Palestinians in the territories as full citizens in a democratic system. This might come from the establishment of a Palestinian state, or it might come with the absorption of the territories into a secular state of Israel-Palestine that extends perfectly equal legal and political rights to all people within it, as liberal values require. Permanent statelessness and dispossession for the Palestinians will ensure violence for generations. Only freedom for Palestinians can bring peace, and that’s the most hardheaded, ruthlessly pragmatic point anyone can make about this horrid crisis. And if Israel’s defenders feel put upon, othered, alone, it’s because Israel and Israel alone has the power to make Palestinians free. I’m sorry, but it’s not a moral principle that says that Israel must bear responsibility for achieving peace and freedom. It’s a purely pragmatic statement of the reality of Israel’s overwhelming power in the region. Choosing sides has nothing do with it.
Or, I suppose, they could go through with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, as a disturbing number of people are calling for. I doubt the world would stop them; that’s the upside of being Goliath. But such an act would destroy whatever hope there is left for Israel as a democratic state, a symbol of human rights, however tarnished that symbol stands now. And I think that if you love Israel, the idea of Israel, you should fight like hell to stop that from happening. Because afterwards you’ll never be the same again.
A commitment to the principles of democracy, to human rights, is never easy. If we are to have them at all, they must exist for both you and the people that hate you.
This is a depressingly common, entirely predictable, completely relatable thing about human nature: we want, at all times, to feel secure, to preserve the illusion of control (and it is an illusion). Even if this security comes at the expense of others, and especially if those ‘others’ are nebulous and unseen.
Many of us at Tablet believed strongly, and still believe, in the possibility of creating a better world. But something bothered us from the very beginning about these ideas, and the people pushing them. Every time we pressed on one of the newly mass-embraced policy proposals or narratives—intersectionality, decolonization studies, the Iran nuclear deal, Russiagate, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, critical race theory, COVID lockdowns—a weird thing would happen: The idea itself fell apart at the seams within seconds of contact with reality, and yet its defenders got more sure of themselves, more performatively boastful, more passionate and gleeful about smearing anyone who dared to question them.
The more we listened to freshly minted universal experts, the more we were struck by the increasing lunacy of their pronouncements on every topic under the sun, always backed by “studies” and “science”—where COVID–19 came from, how many genders there are, which skin tones and personal experiences qualify a person for protection status and which do not, whether it was OK for a Syrian dictator to bomb and gas 500,000 of his people, whether the U.S. should ally itself with a Holocaust-denying medieval theocracy, whether the president of the United States was secretly a Russian agent, whether large American cities should let drug addicts and violent schizophrenics get high on the streets and steal stuff—and more. Indeed, over time, we were struck by how little the ideas themselves seemed to matter; what so many people seemed most attached to was power.
When you know you’re picked at random, you don’t experience enough power to be corrupted by it. Instead, you feel a heightened sense of responsibility: I did nothing to earn this, so I need to make sure I represent the group well.
A lottery would also improve our odds of avoiding the worst candidates in the first place. When it comes to character, our elected officials aren’t exactly crushing it. To paraphrase William F. Buckley Jr., I’d rather be governed by the first 535 people in the phone book. That’s because the people most drawn to power are usually the least fit to wield it.
I just finished, laying here in my bed, the dogs and cat asleep beside me. Crickets chirp out my window. In the distance a train’s whistle breaks and rolls over the valley.
More than anything, I prize seeing things clearly. Nothing fills me with that particular and precious joie de vivre — that electric sizzle — quite like close proximity to the truth. But most people don’t like the truth. We’ll do anything to avoid it, if we know it at all. So it’s a rare thrill to read something so transgressive in its honesty, so clear-eyed.
Credit to Brian T. Watson for his courage to accept the inevitable, and then to write it. May his acceptance be an inspiration.
Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart.
A lot has changed since I first read this almost 15 years ago, but it has only become more prescient.
The long history of human society compiled in our database suggests that America’s current economy is so lucrative for the ruling elites that achieving fundamental reform might require a violent revolution. But we have reason for hope. It is not unprecedented for a ruling class—with adequate pressure from below—to allow for the nonviolent reversal of elite overproduction. But such an outcome requires elites to sacrifice their near-term self-interest for our long-term collective interests. At the moment, they don’t seem prepared to do that.