Republicans Walk Back the Talk About Free Speech on Campus
It was not so long ago that Republicans were loud and proud proponents of campus free speech.
But that was back when the speech being defended was that of conservative provocateurs. People like Ben Shapiro, a speaker at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2016, who gave demonstrators briefly interrupting his talk a two-middle-finger salute, scrawled “MORONS” on a blackboard, and produced a diaper for his critics. Or Milo Yiannopoulos, who during his “Dangerous Faggot Tour” stop at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee ridiculed a transgender student in the audience by name, waved the student’s picture from the stage, and made a crude sexual reference.
Both of these individuals, at both of these universities, were allowed to speak. But, as I detailed in The Progressive in August 2017 (“Shut Up, Already!”), the hostility they received, however reciprocated, got up the nose of Wisconsin’s Republican lawmakers. They joined other GOP-led states in backing legislation drafted by a conservative think tank to punish students who shout others down.
Wisconsin’s bill called for disciplinary action against any student “found responsible for interfering with the expressive rights of others,” including mandatory suspension after two infractions and expulsion after three. It passed the state assembly and would have passed the state senate, had the university system not, on its own authority, adopted these rules. (UW reports for the first six years since this change show that just three students statewide received minor discipline for violating the speech rights of others, suggesting this is not such a big problem after all.)
Now there is a new campus intolerance, led by Republicans, toward speech that is critical of Israel’s bloodletting in Gaza. As Ruth Conniff, editor-at-large here at The Progressive and editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner, has pointed out, Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman has gone from declaring in early 2023, “There’s no better place than a university for the marketplace of ideas to flourish,” to positions seemingly at odds with this ideal.
In May, Rothman backed the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s decision to have police tear down “illegal” pro-Palestinian tent encampments, and publicly chastised University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone for reaching an agreement with student protesters to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, condemn genocide, and engage in discussion about disclosure and divestment from Israel.
“Demanding your right to free speech is easy,” Conniff wrote. “Sustaining a commitment to productive dialogue is hard. It involves exposing yourself to views you might find repellent. Especially on an issue as complex and painful as the trauma of Palestinians and Israelis, we need more free speech, more free listening, and less dividing into hostile, self-righteous camps.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson even traveled to Columbia University to threaten the private school with the loss of federal funding for not doing more to punish students who criticize Israel, which in his mind is synonymous with antisemitism and that has occurred only in isolated cases.
“We just can’t allow this kind of hatred and any antisemitism to flourish on our campuses, and it must be stopped in its tracks,” Johnson said. He added, without a trace of irony, “You cannot censor and silence viewpoints you disagree with.”
But that is exactly what is happening at campuses across the country, at the insistence of the right.
Exposing the Big Lie About the Need for Nuclear Secrecy
The dismissal of charges against former President Donald Trump for having expropriated and wrongfully withheld classified documents is not necessarily the last word on the subject. The July 15 ruling by Trump-appointed federal Judge Aileen Cannon that the special prosecutor who brought the charges, Jack Smith, was improperly appointed is being appealed and could be reversed.
But even if that happens, and it should, the charge that Trump, as The Week put it, “willfully absconded with nuclear secrets,” thereby putting the nation at risk, has always been questionable. The fact is, nuclear secrecy does not protect the nation so much as it endangers it.
After a search of his Palm Beach estate turned up more than 300 classified documents, Trump was charged with thirty-seven felonies for unlawfully retaining national defense information and attempting to obstruct the government’s investigation. That’s a crime, whether or not his action threatened to reveal critical nuclear secrets. And there’s good reason to suspect it did not.
Over the past eight decades, at least eight countries besides the United States have independently managed to pull together the technology, materials, and vast infrastructure needed to produce these devastating weapons, with no help from the Rosenbergs. Nuclear secrecy is a myth; the number, kind, and even the location of U.S. nuclear weapons are widely known.
In 1979, The Progressive boldly challenged the nuclear secrecy mystique when it set out to reveal a closely guarded secret of hydrogen bomb design. The federal government, at the behest of then President Jimmy Carter, blocked the magazine from publishing or otherwise revealing the contents of an article by a freelance writer named Howard Morland.
It was only the second time in U.S. history that the federal government sought to block publication, known as prior restraint, on national security grounds; the first was in 1971, when the administration of President Richard Nixon sought to suppress the Pentagon Papers. Both attempts failed, with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against the Nixon Administration and the Carter Administration having to abandon its case after more than six months when the “secret” came to light through other news outlets, affirming The Progressive’s contention that it was not much of a secret after all.
Erwin Knoll, the magazine’s editor at the time, blamed bogus claims about nuclear secrecy for nearly all of the repression—the spy scares, witch hunts, and loyalty oaths—that were deployed during the Cold War to beat back movements for progressive change in America. To this day, the notion that there is a broad national need for nuclear secrecy continues to stifle discussion and debate over the objectively insane quest to build weapons capable of destroying all life on the planet.
Trump took records that did not belong to him and refused to return them when asked—flagrant violations of the Presidential Records Act for which he deserves criminal prosecution, whether or not the courts allow it. But a far greater threat to the country and the world comes from the fact that Trump—who, as a convicted felon, is not legally allowed to own a gun—could once again find himself in possession of the nuclear codes.