Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee
A few days ago, I wrote an extension piece of a project I am working on that investigates terror ties that span the world from Hamas and the PFLP cells in Gaza to radical mosques in Australia and activists and university intellectuals on campuses in America. I am far from finished with this project, as there always seems there is something new to read or to watch–whether it is a government report, a website linked to a terror network, or a sermon from a radical mosque. In the process of covering the unfolding chaos, schools like Columbia University and the activists that have sowed the seeds of division and fomented the violence we are now seeing unleashed on much of the western world keep coming up again and again.
Activists like Mahmoud Khalil, who I briefly name dropped in my previous piece as a dangerous actor turned civil rights symbol–a person that pro-Palestinain activists have claimed was arrested without due process but also a person who helped coordinate the violent occupation of Hamilton Hall where two custodians were violently assaulted and called “Jew Lovers.” I argued that Mahmoud Khalil is in fact a terror threat based on evidence I have collected from articles I have read–most notably his connections to UNRWA, his strange Algerian Passport (Algeria and the PLO have a unique relationship), the fact that he lied on his visa application, and the fact that he coordinated with organizations like Samidoun and Within Our Lifetime that have direct connections to terror organizations like Hamas and the PFLP.
However, this piece isn’t about Mahmoud Khalil, and it’s not about terror organizations at all–what I feel compelled to write about today is free speech.
A few days ago, another student on a different campus was arrested without due process by the Trump administration. Her name is Rumeysa Ozturk and she attends Tufts University. Her only crime, as far as I can tell, was writing an anti-Israel Op-Ed in her student newspaper. Ozturk who is originally from Turkey was detained by ICE and has since “disappeared” without a trace. I have searched for Ozturk’s name and keywords related to terror organizations to see if anything else has come up that may further justify her arrest, and so far, it’s been crickets.
I didn’t think I needed to write a piece like this but I have to–because I have to state plainly that to conflate the Khalil case which involves reputable connections to terror networks and that of Ozturk whose only crime appears to be an essay is extremely dangerous, disturbing, and in the end equivocates the red herring of “thought crimes” with the real domestic threat of terrorism.
This is how authoritarianism wriggles its way into society–by equivocating free speech with imagined violence.
It also on a personal level, makes my work that much harder, since I am going after real terror networks connected to real domestic threats that have implanted themselves in 501c3 non-profits and university systems. If Ozturk is seen as the equivalent of Khalil, how will anyone take anything I have to say seriously? How will anyone take anything Jews have to say about antisemitism on college campuses seriously? We are once more being used as political football by the right and the left for their own power consolidating purposes, being flung like hot potatoes where whatever side catches us gets flack for antisemitism while the other cries about freedom of speech and the encroaching threat of fascism.
And while the issue of the moment is antisemitism, terrorism, and activism on college campuses, only a few short years ago, it was viruses, lab leaks, and “trusting the science.” While this pivot may seem like a “whataboutism” and a deflection on my part, allow me to explain myself and also transport you to the not so distant past.
In December of 2021 I was living in Seattle and working in a Covid-19 processing lab. To briefly describe the standard operating procedures of such a place, we were the guys who would get your nose swabs, input all your information into our patient data system, process your nasal swab and separate the mucus and other gunk, turn your DNA into RNA, and then measure your viral load via Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) to see if your mild cold or intense fever was in fact the ‘rona. We would then report the results back to you in three days or less. In addition to the standard covid-test, we also studied and tracked variants of the virus and reported that data back to Washington State and the WHO.
Everyday I suited up for work in a bioSafety level two lab. My PPE included a lab coat with tight sleeves to protect liquids from dripping down my wrists, two sets of nitrile gloves so I could safely take off one set if they got contaminated without risking exposure, two sets of masks which made breathing difficult on occasion, and goggles. The facility we worked in was an old server room that had been haphazardly converted into a virus processing lab. There were generally five to six of us working per shift which could last from ten to twelve hours depending on the week–during the Delta and Omicron waves twelve hour shifts were the norm.
It got hot in the lab–with the amount of layers we were expected to wear, with the five to six human bodies working in close quarters in a cramped space that was originally meant for computers instead of people; you can probably imagine the body heat and the exhaustion that could occasionally make the work uncomfortable.
One of our normal tasks was “watching the robots.” This was a passive but necessary activity where one of us would be assigned to stay in the lab while the others could take a breather as the DNA to RNA extraction process was taking place. While we were all required to know how to do this extraction manually, with the amount of samples that came through our facility on a daily basis, automation was necessary in order to save our hands from physical exhaustion. However, robots occasionally have mechanical errors, pipet into the wrong wells, get jammed, or experience software crashes–things that only a human observer can troubleshoot and fix. Therefore, when I was on robot duty which could last around two hours, I would listen to podcasts to make the time I was assigned to stare at the machine more bearable.
During the month of December, 2021, an episode of the Joe Rogan experience featuring the controversial scientist Dr. Robert Malone was released on Spotify to much outrage and vitriol from certain factions of the left. My Instagram feed was filled with posts from friends, artist colleagues, and political “influencers” posting screeds about how Joe Rogan is dangerous and that the Robert Malone episode should be taken off the platform and “de-monetized.”
I am not a regular Rogan listener–but I was bothered by the censoriousness of my peers. It was clear to me from the anti-Rogan fervor on social media that no one had in fact watched or listened to the interview they were enraged by. And in addition, none of these people would say why they wouldn’t engage with the Malone podcast, just that we should all comply with shunning the show and the episode. In fact, no one posting these anti-Rogan screeds had appeared to be familiar with Dr. Robert Malone at all, up until Joe Rogan had invited him to speak on his podcast.
So, I was of course interested in figuring out what the interview was about, and who Dr. Malone was, and what his positions on the vaccine, the origins of the virus, and Covid-19 policy might be–I did work in a covid lab after all. And, in a “close friend’s” story on Instagram, I made a post stating my intention of listening to the interview in its entirety.
Dressed in full covid lab gear sweating like a pig staring as my robot pipetted samples of goo into wells filled with more goo, I listened to the Rogan and Malone conversation in full. And was it batshit crazy and too long? Yes. It was. But the worst thing that happened wasn’t my experience of listening to a once reputable scientist spout scientifically inconsistent and questionable data to a comedian turned podcast host, but the reaction I got from certain friends that hadn’t engaged with the interview at all.
People who were staying comfortably in their homes getting up at 11 to sit in their pajamas to go to “work,” people who were not in the covid trenches like I was, suddenly had strong opinions on whether the covid content I was consuming was acceptable. When I asked them what was wrong with engaging with media that was considered contentious they couldn’t answer me–all they could blubber out was that Joe Rogan was bad and by taking any time out of my day to listen to it at all was considered engaging in self-induced “thought corruption.”
Unfortunately I like poking ideological bears, and I stupidly thought that they should know everything I had learned by consuming this dangerous media. So, I summarized the points Malone had made about the vaccine and the viruses and highlighted the previous work he had done with HIV and told them where his scientific arguments may have led him astray in an extremely long winded text message-with links! And of course this only enraged them further and all I got back was a text that said in all caps “OH MY GOD I DON’T CARE!”
Ok then.
During the Covid-19 era, certain stories and dialogues were repressed, and there were interviews and articles published like that of the Robert Malone-Rogan podcast I did not agree with. However I listened to the episode because I also do not agree with the knee-jerk reaction to censor others without understanding their arguments and ideas, regardless of how “dangerous” I find them. I was also extremely disturbed (and still am) by the knee-jerk reaction of certain friends and family to media they didn’t like pushing narratives and arguments they did not agree with. If you do not consume articles and podcasts because they present arguments you strongly disagree with that’s one thing (but I still think you are intellectually stunting yourself) however if you are actively dissuading and bullying others from consuming that media to “protect them” from those ideas, that’s suppression of thought and discourse, which makes you an authoritarian. Congratulations.
I also push so hard on this issue because there were other even more dangerous consequences of censoring speech that came out of the Covid-19 pandemic era–most notably the limits on speech under the pretext of “safetyism” from our own federal government. For instance, the actual origin of the virus itself was literally censored off the internet and the story suppressed by the Biden administration. People’s Twitter accounts were suspended, their careers destroyed, and their livelihoods lost, because they dared to challenge the overarching narrative that the virus originated in a wet market rather than a laboratory. We now know–five years later, that the lab leak origin story is most likely the most plausible explanation of where this virus came from, as “gain of function” research involving coronaviruses was being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the time.
But because free speech was repressed on a massive scale by the Democrats (yes both parties are guilty!), and enforced socially by leftist authoritarians online, alternative narratives were squashed, and skeptics were branded heretics and socially excommunicated.
The reason I didn’t vote for president, as I have written about in a previous essay (see here) was in part because I see free speech as under threat from both sides of the aisle, and I have lost faith in a large swath of the American public to fight for this right as a non-partisan issue. Free speech for me but not for thee is free speech for no-one.
The Covid-19 Pandemic was a serious global threat–I lost family to the virus, and my parents lost friends. I knew people who died–so do not think I am downplaying the danger of this significant world event. However I also saw the ways in which the real threat of the viral contagion brought out the equally dangerous social contagion of authoritarianism.
Which takes us back to the present day.
Global terrorist networks are real–and as I can attest from all the work I have been doing they are getting more brazen by infiltrating our public institutions and co-opting the language of social justice movements to further their dismantling of western civilization. However, we cannot allow these very-real dangers to erode our right to free speech–because in the end that lands us all in exactly the same place, under a totalitarian regime with civil liberties taken away.
Being pro-speech means fighting for everyone to have that ability–especially when it’s a person you disagree with. Ozturk has a right to voice her dislike of Israel in a university paper. She also has a right to participate in non-violent pro-Palestinian protests on campus. To conflate a Mahmoud Khalil who engages in physical violence and dialogue with terrorists with a Rumeysa Ozturk who simply wrote an article criticizing the Israeli government in a crude way–is the same as conflating a dangerous contagious virus with a Joe Rogan podcast featuring a scientist who disagrees with governmental Covid-19 policy. It is a power play by the federal government to violate freedom of speech under the guise of protecting “national security.”
We cannot allow the government to make free speech equivalent to real violence. And while the left unfortunately laid the groundwork for this type of thinking years ago with their concept of “words are violence” this doesn’t give the right free reign to further weaponize this concept when it suits their political ends.
Free speech for Rumeysa Ozturk means free speech for me–and it’s time we all start remembering that.