The Right-Wing Culture War Scam Comes Full Circle

Newsweek

22-05-2025

Last week, a New York University (NYU) student named Logan Rozos delivered a short commencement address condemning Israel's brutalization of Gaza. The beliefs expressed in the address—which (quelle horror!) apparently departed from university guidelines—were unremarkable and at this point widely shared among younger Americans. Instead of quietly moving along from a speech that was received quite well by its audience, NYU has taken the unprecedented (and cowardly) step of withholding the student's diploma altogether.
The imbroglio is a perfect encapsulation of where the GOP's "cancel culture" scam has been headed all along, which is not to the mythical "viewpoint diversity" disingenuously demanded by the kinds of people who have spent the past decade bizarrely obsessing over minor dining hall controversies at Oberlin College or parsing silly Halloween emails from Yale administrators but rather to a different, more open and unapologetic censorship regime, one designed and policed by the far right rather than the far left.
A group of faculty, staff, and students of George Washington University meet in the yard where there was a pro-Palestine encampment last year, on May 8, 2025, in Washington D.C.
A group of faculty, staff, and students of George Washington University meet in the yard where there was a pro-Palestine encampment last year, on May 8, 2025, in Washington D.C.
AANDREW THOMAS/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
Left-wing ideological excesses at American colleges and universities were always massively overblown. College campuses, after all, cannot and should not be anarchic free speech zones where any maniacal provocateur like Milo Yiannopoulos can come and deliver an outrageous address designed to do nothing other than generate controversy without any pushback. You don't actually have a constitutional right not to be protested, and when you visit a college, you are also setting foot in a place where other human beings live and work. You should not always expect your opinions to be received calmly or warmly.
But yes, occasionally the anti-speaker fervor of left-wing student groups went overboard and in general some academics and writers on the left should have been more outspoken about maintaining climates of open discourse on campus. I'm thinking in particular of former International Monetary Fund (IMF) honcho Christine Lagarde pulling out of her Smith College commencement address in 2014 because of protests. At the same time, conservatives in the 21st century have consistently claimed speech rights for incendiary campus speakers that they do not believe should be enjoyed by professors with unfashionable views about Israel and Palestine.
And it's worth noting that according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, since 2023 "students and student groups were mostly targeted by administrators, for expression about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" and that "government officials and politicians led more attempts to punish student speech than in any other period" that the organization has studied. So, to the extent that cancel culture is running amok on college campuses today, it is almost entirely perpetrated by those on the political right.
It's also telling that nearly all of the prominent public figures who made their careers warning about the dangers of woke "cancel culture" on college campuses have been completely silent as students are not just attacked but in some cases disappeared into America's immigration gulag for the crime of leading protests or writing op-eds. With a few prominent exceptions like The Atlantic's Connor Friedersdorf, who to his credit has condemned the new witch hunts against Palestinian activists, their commitment to campus free speech has turned out to be nothing but empty clout-chasing and bad faith.
And it should be no surprise that Israel is the leading edge of the new right-wing censorship regime. For more than 20 years, apologists for Israel have sought to shame, blackball, and fire professors who criticize Israeli policy. Today's incarnation of silencing Palestinian voices is called "Project Esther" but 20 years ago it was called Campus Watch, which still hosts a web page that re-runs in its entirety an utterly innocuous 14-year-old article from my university's student newspaper about students studying the Arab Spring.
It's all the same thing. Something—in this case it is the accusation that Israel is committing war crimes or genocide in Gaza—is declared beyond the scope of criticism and free speech and then a million little busybodies start sifting through syllabi, social media, and research to find thoughtcrimes. Academics who study the Middle East are more than accustomed to dealing with this kind of blowback, and many have paid for their views with their careers, without any support from the Free Press crowd.
But what's new is both the effort to silence and harm the career prospects of student dissidents as well as the coordinated effort to force universities to shutter entire programs of study for fear that criticism of Israel's policies—and America's complicity with them—might escape containment. What's also new is the effort to strip entire institutions of completely unrelated funding if they do not do the bidding of people whose fragile outlooks cannot bear a moment's criticism of Israel.
Administrators must either resist this new, MAGA-led witch hunt, or watch the independence and freedom of universities disappear along with their integrity.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in Slate, The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.