Today, we’re launching “War & Speech,” a podcast exploring the free speech fallout of the war in Israel and Gaza. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be talking to scholars, advocates, and others about the ways in which the war taking place half a world away is testing our system of free speech here in the United States. We’ll consider whether our system of free speech is failing us, what can be done to protect the space for discourse about a war in which the United States is deeply implicated, and how the events unfolding now might influence the evolution of the First Amendment and free speech culture.

These questions could hardly be more urgent. The war in Israel and Gaza has unleashed a veritable tidal wave of censorship and suppression here in the United States. Public and private universities have suspended student groups, imposed new restrictions on protests and demonstrations on campus, and canceled film screenings and events. University students, alumni, and donors have signed letters demanding that universities fire faculty deemed to have justified or celebrated the Oct. 7 attacks. Students and others have torn down posters calling for the release of Israeli hostages, and shouted-down speakers invited to campus by other student groups. One advocacy group sponsored truck-mounted billboards to condemn as anti-Semites the students who had signed letters placing the blame for the Oct. 7 attacks on the Israeli occupation; another called for pro-Palestinian student groups to be investigated under laws that ban the provision of “material support” to terrorists. A congressional committee berated university presidents for their failure to suppress what legislators described as calls for genocide, and New York’s governor threatened to sanction universities that failed to discipline students who made those calls. Prominent donors demanded the resignation of the university presidents, and two of them resigned. 

The wave of censorship and suppression has washed over many other institutions as well, not just universities. The Art Museum of Indiana canceled a restrospective for a Palestinian American artist after she compared the treatment of Palestinians by Israel to the treatment of Jews by Germany during the Second World War. The 92nd Street Y in New York City canceled an event with a prominent novelist after he condemned Israel’s “indiscriminate violence” against Palestinians. American social media companies engaged in what human rights organizations described as systemic censorship of speech supportive of Palestinians, including of posts documenting human rights abuses. Legislators and others called for a ban on TikTok because of the platform’s purported bias against Israel. The Harvard Law Review backtracked on an offer to publish an essay by a Palestinian writer proposing that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza should be understood as an unfolding genocide; Guernica, the literary magazine, retracted an essay by an Israeli writer that some Guernica staff faulted for “normalizing Zionism.” The White House engaged in a concerted effort to delegitimize dissent, labeling progressives who’d called for a ceasefire “repugnant” and “disgraceful”; other political leaders from both major political parties proposed, without evidence, that dissenters were doing the bidding of China or Russia.

This is only a partial account, but even this partial account is enough to show that our system of free speech is being tested in myriad ways. And perhaps this partial account is also enough to tee up some of the questions that we address in the first episode—a conversation with Professor Genevieve Lakier, one of the country’s leading theorists of free speech. I talk with Genevieve about the climate for speech in the United States right now, the lessons of history, how to distinguish between counterspeech and cancellation, whether employers should be required to hire people they disagree with, and how we should respond to political slogans and symbols whose meaning is contested. In future episodes, I’ll be talking to Eugene Volokh (UCLA School of Law), Radhika Sainath (Palestine Legal), Will Creeley (FIRE), and others. Please listen and subscribe wherever you get podcasts.