I think I have adequately demonstrated my hostility to antisemitism.
If not, you should know I despise them, and am disgusted by the rise of antisemitism everywhere, but especially on college campuses.
But, man, this is dumb.
“It’s also easy to see how the use of ‘monitors’ for hateful speech could be expanded to cover just about any controversial topic, suppressing any speech that runs foul of a representative’s pet issue.” – @emmma_camp_ https://t.co/AmzqhZDQOU
— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) April 29, 2024
A bipartisan group of congressmen has decided they have had enough with campus antisemitism–good!–and have decided to demand speech monitors to combat it.
Very bad. Stupid. Anti-American. Call it what you will. It is no different from what others and I have been railing about for several years. Government needs to get out of the speech policing business once and for all.
On Friday, several House representatives introduced legislation that would permit the Education Department to create third-party antisemitism monitors at any college receiving federal funding. The purpose of the bill—the full text of which is not yet available—is to crack down on rising antisemitic speech on college campuses. However, the bill’s supporters fail to consider how an “antisemitism monitor” would create a chilling effect, curbing academic freedom and encouraging colleges to punish protected expression.
Following a growing number of pro-Palestine protests on college campuses, universities are facing increasing scrutiny over their handling of student demonstrations—especially as photos and video footage from these protests have often captured extremely inflammatory, offensive rhetoric from student activists.
In response, Reps. Mike Lawler (R–N.Y.) and Ritchie Torres (D–N.Y.) introduced the, ahem, carefully named College Oversight and Legal Updates Mandating Bias Investigations and Accountability (COLUMBIA) Act. According to a Friday press release, the bill would allow the Education Department to appoint a third-party antisemitism monitor to any college receiving government funds. The department would have broad power to set the “terms and conditions of the monitorship,” and the colleges would be forced to pay the costs of their own antisemitism monitor. Schools that don’t comply with the monitoring would risk losing federal funding.
You do have to admire the acronym, though: C.O.L.U.M.B.I.A. Most government acronyms suck. This one was pretty clever.
One of the last things we need is more blathering about hate speech or disinformation by government officials. They are more than welcome to participate in the conversation, vigorously rebut bad ideas and even disparage the speakers of ideas they find hateful.
🧵 To find the legally adopted definition of antisemitism, one must go to this website below.
Not only is the definition listed there, but one also finds specific examples of antisemitic speech.
Are those examples made part of the law as well?https://t.co/wbKGNsAGoD
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) May 1, 2024
But they should not engage in any form of government coercion short of a national security threat. Americans are, on the whole, smart enough to see for themselves how hateful these people are. When they break the law, arrest them. When they are merely being a**holes and bigots…well, there are plenty of those, and they have rights too.
Trust me, lots of people think that these congressmen are a**holes and bigots too.
It’s a terrible, awful, and unconstitutional bill.
Congress should reject it immediately.https://t.co/i8MiRBS4mN
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) May 1, 2024
A far better path would be dramatically cutting back government spending on colleges and universities altogether rather than picking and choosing based on preferred ideological positions. Colleges are promoting all sorts of harmful ideologies and it isn’t clear to me that higher education serves much of a purpose for most people who attend, other than radicalizing them.
Reducing support for all post-secondary education would be good for both our economy and our society as a whole. Transferring some funds to trade schools would be smart, but cutting back funding and focusing on scientific research would make sense. That serves a public purpose.
Universal ollege does not, which is why so much dreck is taught in colleges that is totally unrelated to student success in the future. Why Americans are subsidizing classes on Taylor Swift, pornography, and Queer Theory is beyond me. There is no national purpose to it, so if people want to study those things, they should do so on their own dime.
What we shouldn’t do, though, is pick and choose which ideas we will allow to be spoken.
If monitoring speech is a good idea, we should have been censoring communists long ago. We decided that was stupid and unconstitutional, but we wound up funding it to the tune of billions of dollars instead.
Instead, we should just quit meddling, and that includes quitting the wholesale subsidization of the institutions.
In the meantime we should speak loudly and often about antisemitism on campus. That is the job of citizens, not the government through laws.
We just went through this with the pandemic, for God’s sake.