Conservatives must defend free expression, including rights of pro-Palestinian protesters

Alexis de Tocqueville, the political theorist revered by many of my conservative peers, believed that an unlimited freedom to associate for political goals was essential in preventing a tyranny of the majority. When associations remain free, secret societies remain scarce — and it’s better to have factions than conspirators.

He called this freedom the “mother science,” one which every citizen can study and apply. This reasoning, shared by the Founding Fathers, has led the Supreme Court to continuously grant American’s political (and religious) expression the most legal protections.

The right to criticize government, therefore, is not a mere aspect of the First Amendment, it is its very reason for being. The freedom to protest American foreign policy decisions is exactly what the First Amendment is all about, which leads me to ask: Where have all the conservatives who love the Constitution gone when restraint is abandoned in the name of shutting down the expression of pro-Palestinian protesters?

On Friday, Columbia University cracked down on pro-Palestinian campus protests, leading to the arrest of more than 100 students. 

“Out of an abundance of concern for the safety of Columbia’s campus, I authorized the New York Police Department to begin clearing the encampment from the South Lawn of Morningside campus that had been set up by students in the early hours of Wednesday morning,” University President Nemat Shafik wrote in a statement Thursday. “The current encampment violates all of the new policies, severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students.”

While I can certainly see how the environment may be intimidating to some, it is difficult to blindly accept a policy of shutting the protest down. If anything, it appears that sending police forces to dismantle the entirety of the protest could’ve resulted in much more violence than, say, arresting those who have in fact issued actual threats and perpetrated actual violence. 

These actions are creating a precedent of safetyism to justify crackdowns on free speech. After all, in the name of promoting order to deter not violence but an “intimidating environment,” the same framework could be used to shut down virtually any protest about a contentious issue. 

I get it. I wouldn’t feel particularly safe confronting some of these folks — and I can only imagine how scary it would be to hear some of the things being said there if I were Jewish. Chants like these, for example, are grotesque: “Al-Qassam [Hamas’s military wing], you make us proud, take another soldier out”; “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground”; “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets too.”

Even if radical and ugly, though, that is still free expression. Real harassment and violence should obviously be prosecuted, but free expression protects all of the aforementioned statements. It also protects most abstract calls for violence, the use of slurs and advocacy for evil causes.

It is normal for conservatives to have disagreements with our liberal friends over what free expression entails, with many of us often ridiculing those who think that free speech translates to an inherent right to access pornography, for instance. Here, however, there shouldn’t be much disagreement.

The speech of those we disagree with — the speech of those we even hate — is the very speech that our Founding Fathers would invite us to hear. It may be true that many of our liberal peers have looked away, if not joined the mob, when conservatives’ free expression has been targeted, but defending the First Amendment is not just a good thing to do when it is convenient. It is our duty. 

Juan P. Villasmil is an Intercollegiate Studies Institute editorial fellow at The Spectator World and a Young Voices contributor.