How to Sitcom a War Crime
Gaza is not a culture war, but it’s easier to treat it like one
Who can say how many students will have been been brutalized, arrested, suspended, and evicted by the time you read this post, but that number will not be enough for the people who want these protests not just silenced but obliterated. The message is clear: protest the war in Gaza and we will snuff out your future. You will not get your degree, you will cease to be a professor, you will find a new career.
All these years of knock-down drag-out handwringing thinkpieces over speaking events getting cancelled at universities. All those arguments about whether free speech means the right to a microphone, about discourse and dialogue and debate and the other words that only ever stand in for “arguments I agree with.” I have written a few times about the potluck theory of discourse — people are allowed to put food you don’t like on the table, but they are not allowed to put human feces there. For some people, this went too far in the direction of censorship. Now, many of those same people are howling for the arrest the people they see as excrement-bearers, which I have never advocated and have always opposed. See also: the rare short piece of fiction I wrote about what ought to happen to Actual Goddamn Nazis in America.
