Trump Tramples Free Speech to Shut Down Palestine Protests
Donald Trump and his allies are claiming to restore “free speech” in America even as they yank federal funding from Columbia University to punish student protesters. They were never serious about defending free speech.
Pro-Palestinian student protesters face police as they demonstrate outside Barnard College in New York City on February 27, 2025. (Timothy A. Clary / AFP via Getty Images)
In his address to Congress on Tuesday night, Donald Trump bragged that he’d “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.” Seemingly amazed by his accomplishment, he repeated, “It’s back.”
In reality, Trump has already been more brazenly hostile to free speech norms than any other recent president. He’s blustered about taking away the broadcast licenses of cable networks he feels are unfair to him and has filed a number of defamation lawsuits against them. He’s retaliated against the Associated Press for refusing to redesignate the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” in its reporting. He’s even floated a constitutional amendment that would make it so that people could be imprisoned for flag burning, saying that the punishment should be a year of incarceration.
But here’s the cherry on top: the very same day that he claimed to have resurrected free speech, Trump also took to Truth Social to threaten to pull federal funding from any university that doesn’t crack down hard enough on protests against Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza, writing:
All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests.
Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on…the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.
What the Trump administration means here by “illegal” protests is anyone’s guess. It could easily apply to the time-honored civil disobedience tactic of peaceful sit-ins. It could also apply to protesting without proper permits or outside college-designated “free speech zones.” Edge cases are also implied: If a university administration negotiates with students holding a sit-in instead of immediately calling the cops on them, does that constitute “allowing” illegal protests? How about if it simply fails to expel them after the fact?
In response to the wave of protests against the US-backed atrocities in Gaza last year, campuses imposed draconian new restrictions on previously permitted protest tactics. Some banned “amplified sound,” which, as I noted at the time, is a nearly universal feature of protests on every issue. Many prohibited wearing masks at protests, which must be understood in the context of the widespread threats by employers to blacklist anyone who protested the horrors in Gaza from future jobs. Suppose administrators fail to call the cops or expel participants after a protest where masks were worn or speakers addressed the crowd through a bullhorn. Would this violate Trump’s edict and result in the loss of federal funding? That seems to be the intent, especially given Trump’s mention of masks.
Free Speech Was Never the Right’s Issue
On Friday, the Trump administration made good on its threat. Four federal departments and agencies jointly announced that they were canceling $400 million of federal contracts for Columbia University, supposedly because of “the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”
In 2023 and 2024, Columbia was a significant site of student activism against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Shouting matches between protesters and counterprotesters indeed happened, but the claim that the (highly disproportionately Jewish) protesters at Columbia were “harassing” anyone for being Jewish is a dispatch from an alternate reality.
The notion that the Columbia administration sat back and let protests happen is even more surreal. In fact, the administration cracked down far more harshly than they had against similar demonstrations in the past. When Columbia students occupied the university’s Hamilton Hall in the Vietnam era, the administration waited a week before calling the cops. When protesters called for divestment from apartheid South Africa, they occupied the same building in 1985, and the protest ended voluntarily after three weeks. When protesters against the genocide in Gaza occupied Hamilton in 2024, the NYPD was brought in to storm the building on day one.
Still, Trump is trying to make an example of Columbia as a message to other universities: get your student activists under control or face consequences. The administration is trying to get other schools around the country to crack down on dissent even more harshly than they already have.
One of the four agencies that made the announcement on Friday was the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). When the review of Columbia’s contracts was first announced, just four days before the decision, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr proclaimed that campus “antisemitism” was a public health problem. If that sounds like a right-wing caricature of “woke” discourse at its most insufferable, what followed was worse. Kennedy’s statement maintained that antisemitism is a “spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies” and that universities have turned into “greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence.” The idea that dissenting political views are a noxious element requiring suppression from the federal health bureaucracy is jaw-droppingly censorious. And the announcement on Friday proved that it wasn’t just bluster.
In recent decades, many progressives have veered away from the Left’s historic commitment to the importance of free speech, preventing odious speakers from visiting college campuses or even making libertarian arguments that censorship doesn’t count when it comes from the private sector. As I’ve argued a great many times over the years, this is a serious mistake. First, no movement for fundamental social change can trust existing centers of power (whether state or corporate) to enforce censorship rules in its favor. Second, our project is to extend and deepen democracy, which means we must trust ordinary working-class people to hear alternative viewpoints and make up their own minds.
The raging, in-your-face hypocrisy of the Right on free speech is a perfect opportunity for the Left to correct course. Free speech has always been a core left-wing value, and it’s high time we reclaimed it.