West Virginia is the future of red states

The abandoned, crumbling Coalwood High School in West Virginia

Coalwood High School, WV – Kelly Michals, CC BY-NC 2.0 Deed

What happens when white nationalists and anti-immigrant bigots get what they want? They’re finding out right now. There’s an article in the Wall Street Journal whose title sums it up: “Desperate for Workers but Dead Set Against Migrant Labor: The West Virginia Dilemma“.

West Virginia is suffering a slow-rolling demographic crisis. People are having smaller families, and because its economy never transitioned away from the dying coal industry, young people are moving away to find jobs. The result is an aging and shrinking population, and businesses desperate for workers and unable to find them:

There are so many elderly people and so few workers to take care of them that some old folks have died before getting off the wait list for home visits by health aides.

…Later that evening, at the Pendleton County High School boys’ basketball game, the gray-haired spectators outnumbered the students. Declining enrollment has meant that for the school to field teams, many athletic students need to play football, basketball and baseball, said Athletic Director Jackee Propst.

West Virginia’s population is among the oldest of any state. As a consequence, its labor-force participation rate is the second-lowest in the country, behind only Mississippi. It actually has fewer residents today than in 1940, the only state to have that grim distinction.

And the problem feeds on itself. The more people who move away, the fewer ties there are for the ones left behind, making them more likely to leave in turn. It’s a downward spiral that’s hard to stop:

The number of locations where business is conducted in West Virginia declined 9.3% between 2011 and 2021, according to the Census Bureau, the biggest drop in the U.S.

“We suffer from this vicious cycle,” said John Deskins, director of West Virginia University’s bureau of business and economic research. “The people who move away tend to be younger, more educated, more prepared for the workforce. And it makes the remainers older.”

The solution is obvious. West Virginia needs an infusion of fresh blood. It needs new people to move in, to buy property, to settle down, to start businesses and fill jobs, to build lives and have families.

To be clear, the problem isn’t that there are too few people in the world. Global population is still predicted to peak around ten billion by the end of the century. That’s enough human beings to accomplish anything we might reasonably imagine. The problem is there’s a mismatch between where people live and where labor is needed.

In other words, we need immigration.

That’s where the story takes a darkly ironic turn. Because while West Virginia desperately needs immigrants, its blood-red Republican government is doing everything it can to keep them out:

Since last year, Republican Gov. Jim Justice has signed legislation banning “sanctuary cities” in West Virginia and deployed that state’s own National Guard troops to the Mexican border in Texas. State lawmakers have introduced bills that would: require businesses to conduct additional screening for unauthorized workers; punish companies for transporting migrants who are deportable under U.S. law; create a program to enable state authorities to remove even some immigrants with legal status to work; and appropriate money for Texas to install more razor wire along the Rio Grande.

By all reason, West Virginia should be trying to rebrand itself as an attractive destination to move to. It should be touting its cheap land, abundant natural beauty (I want to see the New River Gorge in my life), low cost of living, and culture of hospitality. It should be throwing the gates wide open.

Instead, its state government is signaling by every means available that newcomers aren’t wanted. One Republican state representative (one of the very few foreign-born ones, no less!) has even proposed a bill to kick out refugees who’ve been legally granted asylum by the federal government:

This year, he co-sponsored a bill that would apply to a category of immigrants called “inspected unauthorized aliens”—those who haven’t entered the U.S. through an official port of entry but whom the federal government has allowed to stay and work while their legal status is in limbo.

If the bill becomes law, it would establish a program to transport them out of West Virginia.

The absurdity is beyond measure. The elderly are dying for lack of care, businesses are going bust because they can’t hire anyone, and at the same time, the state literally wants to expel people who are willing and able to work!

This is the paradigm example of how conservative ideology makes true believers’ lives worse. Republicans have ginned up a panic over immigration, trying to make it into an issue to attack Democrats with. Their tabloids and pundits scream about terrorists and gangs and faceless hordes flooding over the border. Their presidential candidates and governors traffic in white supremacist rhetoric about “shithole countries” and border walls topped with razor wire.

But their bigotry blows back onto them. Inevitably, conservatives don’t stop at using xenophobia as fodder for their attack ads. They internalize it and come to believe it themselves. And real crises, like the one West Virginia is now suffering, are the consequence.

Immigrants aren’t a problem, but a massive opportunity! West Virginia isn’t the only place that needs a shot in the arm. The fact that so many people still dream of coming to America is an asset most countries only wish they had. Barring the doors against them is like turning down a lottery jackpot. Immigrants are the solution to many woes, if only there weren’t so many bigoted Americans dead-set on keeping them out.

Unfortunately, West Virginians show no sign of reversing course. They’re clinging to their suspicion and hostility. And they’re going to get what they want: businesses shutting down for lack of workers; abandoned elderly people dying alone; vacant, rotting houses; once-prosperous communities becoming ghost towns; bridges and roads crumbling, communities reverting to wilderness, the light and life of civilization vanishing like a retreating tide.

To be clear, not all the people of West Virginia are ignorant hicks who deserve what they get. There are good people there, just as there are in every state. They don’t deserve to suffer the folly of their neighbors. My long-time, now sadly departed, correspondent and co-author Jim Haught was from West Virginia, and he was as staunch an atheist and a progressive as you might hope to meet.

However, it’s fair to say West Virginia is one of the reddest states in the country. In the 2016 election, it was the most Trump-loving of all the states, giving him 68% of its vote; and in 2020, an astonishing 69%. They adore his white supremacist rhetoric and anti-immigrant scaremongering. And they’re reaping the consequences. In a very real sense, the crisis consuming them is the one they voted for.

What makes the church choose tolerance?

[Previous: Let’s chat with Justin, the Catholic apologist AI]

My chat with Justin, the Catholic apologist AI, got me thinking. How does the Catholic church – or any church – decide what should be a matter of conscience for individual believers, versus what they want to make into law for everyone?

As an example, I asked whether the Catholic church believes contraception should be outlawed. This was Justin’s answer:

The Catholic Church teaches that contraception is morally wrong, based on the natural law and the divine plan for marriage and human sexuality. This is stated in the encyclical Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI. However, the Church does not necessarily advocate for making contraception illegal in civil law…. the Church also respects the freedom of conscience and the responsibility of individuals to make moral decisions.

I also asked about divorce. Here too, I got a similar answer from Justin’s canned repertoire:

The Catholic Church holds the belief that marriage is a lifelong commitment, as Jesus himself taught in the Gospel of Matthew: So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate. However, the Church does not necessarily advocate for making divorce illegal in civil law…. Remember, the Church’s teachings are about promoting the sacredness of the marital bond and the dignity of the human person, not about imposing religious beliefs on others.

I hope you noticed the giant loophole Justin left for itself. It said the church “does not necessarily advocate” outlawing divorce or contraception.

A weasel word of this magnitude means this response is only answer-shaped. It hasn’t actually answered the question at all. It means the church can put up a pretense of tolerance, while still claiming it’s consistent with Catholic doctrine if bishops start lobbying to revive the Comstock Act and to prosecute women for using birth control pills.

However, Justin’s answer was unambiguous on one point: the church respects individuals’ freedom of conscience.

Except when it doesn’t – because we all know that’s not the whole story. The Catholic church, like many other religious sects, can and does try to make it illegal for people to make choices the Vatican doesn’t think they should be making.

The church spent years and millions of dollars lobbying against marriage equality. They fought against all proposals for same-sex marriage, even when those proposals were strictly for civil commitments and didn’t require churches to participate.

And they’ve kept on fighting. Years after same-sex marriage was legalized by the Supreme Court, Catholic bishops were still lobbying against the Respect for Marriage Act, even though it did nothing more than give Congress’ stamp of approval to the decision that was already on the books. The church is also still punishing its members who support LGBTQ rights, seemingly at random.

Abortion is an even more relevant example. Justin gave a hair-raising answer about whether it should be legal:

The Catholic Church teaches that all human life is sacred from the moment of conception until natural death, as stated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. Therefore, the Church opposes abortion in all circumstances, including when the pregnancy threatens the mother’s life.

In other words, the Catholic position is that human life must be protected under all circumstances – except when the life is a pregnant woman. If the pregnancy threatens her life, then the church says to do nothing, even if the inevitable outcome is that both woman and fetus die. It’s a cult of maternal martyrdom in action. It’s the same deadly belief that killed Savita Halappanavar, and that’s now moved on to killing women in red states all across the U.S. They’re not willing to allow any latitude for freedom of conscience here!

One more example: the church is opposed to marijuana legalization. Their reasoning for this is that, if it can be abused, then it should be banned. This makes it especially inexplicable that they aren’t opposed to alcohol:

Msgr. Steven Rohlfs, a spiritual director at The Seminaries of St. Paul in St. Paul and a moral theologian with a specialty in medical ethics, told The Catholic Spirit Sept. 16 that marijuana is not “intrinsically disordered,” or something that by its very nature is not right with God, such as the acts of abortion, euthanasia and contraception. But “for most people, most of the time,” using marijuana is not a good idea, Msgr. Rohlfs said. With the best interests of individuals and society in mind, the Church opposes its recreational use. That can be said for many drugs, including alcohol and prescription medicines, he said.

So why is the church talking out of both sides of its mouth? What makes it choose tolerance on some issues, while demanding the imposition of theocratic law on others?

The answer isn’t theological, but political. There’s no principled reason for why the Catholic church has fought to block same-sex marriage and abortion and assisted dying and green burial, but isn’t lobbying to outlaw divorce or contraception or IVF. It’s nothing but a political judgment about the chances of success.

When the church doesn’t think it’s going to win the fight, it backs down and offers pious words about respecting human dignity and individual freedom. When the church does think it can win the fight, it goes to the mat to outlaw anything that offends Catholic dogma.

(Granted, the bishops have picked plenty of losing fights. They lost on same-sex marriage. They’re losing on marijuana legalization. They’re getting steamrolled on abortion everywhere the voters have a say and the choice isn’t made for them by right-wing courts or a gerrymandered legislature. I didn’t say it was good judgment.)

This is why we need secularism. We should never trust any church or sect to make laws for the rest of us, because they’ll legislate their beliefs to the exact extent of their power to do so. Laws that are for everyone have to be made on the basis of reasons and evidence that are available to everyone, not on any church’s peculiar beliefs about what God does and doesn’t approve of.

Lauren Southern is a victim of her own beliefs

More than anything else, right-wing culture warriors live to trigger the libs. They compete to one-up each other in saying the cruelest, most outrageous ideas they can dream up, and glory in the outrage they provoke.

But what happens when you try to build a life for yourself on an ideology like that? How well does it serve them when they’re not engaging in internet slapfights?

To find out, let’s meet Lauren Southern.

From alt-right to tradwife

In the 2010s, Southern emerged on the political scene as an alt-right provocateur. She built her career on mocking feminism and multiculturalism, as well as beating the drum for religious war (“The Crusaders did absolutely nothing wrong”).

Southern was also a member of Defend Europe, a white supremacist gang which claimed that immigrants fleeing war and disaster were invaders coming to conquer the West. In 2017, she tried to blockade a medical ship that was rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean. She talked about raising money to buy nets to snarl the motors of refugee vessels and made videos arguing for the “great replacement” conspiracy theory.

In 2019, Southern took the next logical step of her anti-feminist views. She announced that she’d gotten married and had a baby. She was embracing the “tradwife” lifestyle promoted by the religious right, which holds that only men should have jobs and women should be obedient, stay-at-home housewives.

After that, she disappeared from view.

“An ant-infested cabin without clean running water”

In 2023, Southern popped back up. She revealed that she had divorced her husband after just two years (warning: Daily Mail link). He had abandoned her and her son, without alimony or child support, and they were living in poverty in “an ant-infested cabin without clean running water” in a trailer park.

Her explanation was that her husband, a Catholic conservative, had a job with a security clearance that he lost because of his association with her:

‘The reality of losing his life’s work became too much for him… Going from living a James Bond lifestyle to being reduced to a boring middle manager with little to no upward mobility is crippling for ambitious men.’

Southern said her ex ‘took his resentment for this out’ on her, adding that he used a ‘variety of lesser reasons to propose divorce’ two years ago – including her ADHD.

Now we know that wasn’t the full story. In a new interview with Unherd, she says her husband was abusive. Her tradwife dream turned out to be a nightmare.

(Content note: The author of the Unherd interview espouses anti-trans and other right-wing views I don’t endorse. I’d have used an alternative source if I could, but there isn’t one. As always, examine sources carefully and exercise skepticism!)

Southern says:

There were warning signs from early on. “If I ever disagreed with him in any capacity he’d just disappear, for days at a time. I remember there were nights where he’d call me worthless and pathetic, then get in this car and leave.” But she didn’t see them, thanks to the simplified anti-feminist ideology she’d absorbed and promoted: “I had this delusional view of relationships: that only women could be the ones that make or break them, and men can do no wrong.” So she didn’t spot the red flags, even as they grew more extreme. “He’d lock me out of the house. I remember having to knock on the neighbour’s door on rainy nights, because he’d get upset and drive off without unlocking the house. It was very strange, to go from being this public figure on stage with people clapping, to the girl crying, knocking on someone’s door with no home to get into, being abandoned with a baby.”

Her husband forced her to do everything: all the household labor, all the child care. He even made her do his university homework for him. At the same time, he yelled at and insulted her for being lazy and worthless:

“I was told daily that I was worthless, pathetic. Deadweight. All you do is sit around and take care of the baby and do chores.” When Covid shut down all real-world public life, her situation became “hell on earth”. It was, she said, “the only time in my life where I idealised dying.”

… “He would just give me impossible tasks all day. Tasks that I simply could not finish. It felt like he would almost send me on errands with the intent of having me fail.”

According to the tradwife ideology she’d imbibed, women are always to blame for marital problems. If her husband was unhappy with her, it had to be her fault. The solution was to pray more, be more submissive, and try even harder to please him. But no matter what she tried, nothing worked. Eventually, when she went home to Canada for a funeral, he told her their marriage was over and abandoned her.

She further admits she’s not the only conservative woman in this predicament:

She tells me she knows many other women still suffering in unhappy “tradlife” marriages. One of her WhatsApp groups, she says, “is like the Underground Railroad for women in the conservative movement”. Some of these are prominent media figures: “There are a lot of influencers who are not in good relationships, who are still portraying happy marriage publicly, and bashing people for not being married while being in horrendous relationships.” She hopes that in speaking out she can reassure “all of these women who are thinking in their heads: I’m uniquely terrible, and I’m uniquely making a mistake” that no: something is more generally amiss.

Be careful what you wish for

Lauren Southern’s story is an ideal example of why you should be careful what you wish for. She wanted to be a tradwife: a traditional wife, in a traditional family, with traditional gender roles. Well, she got that – and everything that comes along with it.

After all, it’s extremely traditional for the man to be the tyrannical ruler of the household who forces his wife and children to obey, with violence if necessary. For most of history, beating a disobedient wife was a husband’s right. That’s still the case in many countries today, like Russia.

If you position yourself as an advocate of traditional values, this is what you’re signing up for. The past wasn’t peaceful or harmonious. It was defined by cruelty, brutality, and might-makes-right thinking. Anything less is sheer fantasy – the Disney-theme-park version of history.

By contrast, egalitarian marriage isn’t traditional. It’s modern, even (gasp!) feminist. The idea that it should be a crime for someone to coerce or abuse their spouse is very recent. In fact, it’s a radical notion that flies in the face of centuries of patriarchal tradition.

To be clear, I’m not gloating at Southern’s misfortune or saying she got what she deserved. I am saying that this is a warning for young people. Her story is an object lesson in why to reject conservative propaganda which promises life will be perfect if you stick to rigid gender roles.

It’s not as simple as saying Southern was just unlucky in her choice of husband. The tradwife ideology, because it teaches that men are entitled to absolute power, is inherently attractive to those with an unhealthy desire to dominate others. It’s very likely that a man who espouses these ideas is more likely to be abusive than the general population.

But, of course, there are abusive people on every part of the political spectrum. The other issue is: what do you do when you find yourself in that awful situation? What tools does your worldview give you to protect yourself?

Here, too, tradwife ideology leaves its true believers defenseless. It teaches women to blame themselves, to submit and obey, to make themselves small. Every abuser dreams of meeting someone who’s conditioned to be docile. It’s obvious what men get out of it, but there’s nothing that this worldview offers women other than misery.

Let’s chat with Justin, the Catholic apologist AI

Screenshot via Catholic Answers

Catholic Answers, a lay-run apologetics organization, is joining the AI-for-everything fad. In April, they launched “Justin“, an AI chatbot that answers questions about Catholicism.

(Initially, the character was called “Father Justin” and was dressed in priestly vestments, but Catholic Answers faced a wave of criticism for that branding. After only a few days, they decided that wasn’t such a good idea and defrocked their chatbot.)

Naturally, I had to give this AI a test run. I was curious to see how it would handle common atheist arguments. Also, I wonder if this is the future of religious evangelism. Instead of comic books left at bus stops, can we all look forward to spam from a babel of AIs, each one hardcoded to hawk its creators’ belief system?

Look and feel and technical specs

I assumed Justin would be a text interface, like ChatGPT and other large language models, where you type a question and get a written response. Not so.

Justin runs in a browser window, which displays an animated image of the avatar: a middle-aged, mustachioed and bearded white man, with a smile that’s probably meant to be serene but really just looks smug, posed in front of a palatial Roman vista.

There’s no text interface. You have to use a microphone to speak your question out loud, and the AI gives a spoken response. You can download a transcript of the conversation, but that’s the only concession to accessibility.

Whatever the reason for this choice, it takes a powerful machine to run it. I tried out Justin on a nearly-new gaming laptop with 32 GB of RAM and a built-in GPU, which I bought a year ago specifically to play around with AI models. Even this computer occasionally struggled to handle Justin’s resource demands. If I tried to run any other program in the background, the avatar’s speech broke up into laggy, echoey gibberish, and it could no longer comprehend my questions.

So, how does it do?

With ChatGPT and other LLMs, you can have something resembling a real conversation. That’s not the case with Justin.

I got the impression that Justin isn’t really conversing at all, in the sense of composing its own original answers to a query. Instead, it picks out keywords in your question, then selects a response from what I’m fairly sure is a pre-written list. It’s less like talking to a person – even a simulated one – and more like getting press releases from the Catholic church’s corporate PR department.

It makes sense that Catholic Answers would want to keep their AI on a tight leash, lest it start making up nonsensical answers as LLMs are prone to do. (Even so, Justin committed some comical missteps, like accepting people’s virtual confessions and granting them absolution, or giving the OK for siblings to marry each other.)

However, if you’re looking for consistency, you’re bound to be disappointed. You can’t back it into a rhetorical corner, because it will give one canned answer to one question, then a different canned answer to another question, without any concern for whether these responses contradict each other.

For example, I asked Justin if the Catholic church has ever changed any of its teachings. It said no:

The Catholic Church’s doctrines, especially those concerning faith and morals, have remained consistent throughout its 2,000-year history. This is based on Jesus’ promise in Matthew 16:18, And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. However, the Church’s understanding and expression of these truths can develop over time, as guided by the Holy Spirit. This is not to say that the Church has made mistakes in its teachings, but rather that our understanding can deepen and become more nuanced over time. For example, the Church’s understanding of religious freedom and the rights of the human person has developed significantly, especially in the last century. But these developments are always in continuity with what the Church has always believed and taught.

(Aside: Saying that the church’s beliefs on human rights have “developed significantly” ought to win a prize for the worst religious euphemism of all time. You can’t sweep an elephant that size under the carpet.)

So, if Catholic teachings on faith and morals have never changed, would Justin excuse the infamous atrocities the church is responsible for?

To find out, I asked about the Doctrine of Discovery, the pope’s writ of permission to European colonizers to conquer the New World and subjugate its indigenous inhabitants. Here’s what Justin said:

The Doctrine of Discovery refers to a series of papal bulls issued in the 15th century that gave Christian explorers the right to claim lands they discovered for their Christian Monarchs. This was during a time of significant exploration and colonial expansion by European powers. However, this doctrine has been criticized for its role in the subjugation and exploitation of indigenous peoples. It’s important to note that the Church’s understanding of the rights of indigenous peoples has developed significantly since then. In his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, Pope Francis criticized the idea that man has absolute dominion over the earth and called for a new respect for nature and for the rights of indigenous peoples. While the Doctrine of Discovery is part of the historical record, it does not reflect the current teaching of the Catholic Church on the rights and dignity of indigenous peoples. The Church now firmly upholds the principle that every person and every culture has inherent dignity and rights, as stated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

From our current understanding and the Church’s teachings on the dignity of all human life, we can say that the negative consequences of the Doctrine of Discovery, particularly the harm done to indigenous peoples, were indeed morally wrong. The Church today recognizes and deeply regrets these historical injustices. As Pope John Paul II said in his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, Not even a murderer loses his personal dignity, and God himself pledges to guarantee this. This reflects the Church’s belief in the inherent dignity of all people, regardless of their race, nationality, or creed. The Church continues to work for justice and reconciliation among all peoples, following the command of Christ in Matthew 5:9, Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

But when I asked the obvious followup question – “Since the Catholic Church now disavows the Doctrine of Discovery as immoral, that means the Church’s teachings on morals have changed, correct?” – Justin just circled back to its earlier response, insisting that the church has never changed any of its teachings:

It’s important to distinguish between the Church’s unchanging moral teachings and the actions of individuals within the Church. The Church’s moral teachings, rooted in Scripture and Tradition, have remained consistent. However, the actions of individuals, even those in leadership, can and do fall short of these teachings. The Doctrine of Discovery, and the harm it caused to indigenous peoples, is an example of this. It’s a reminder that the Church, while divinely instituted, is made up of human beings who are capable of sin and error. The Church’s disavowal of the Doctrine of Discovery is not a change in its moral teaching, but a recognition that the actions of some of its members were not in line with that teaching. As it says in Romans 3:23, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The Church continues to seek forgiveness for these sins and to work for justice and reconciliation.

This is obviously absurd, because the Doctrine of Discovery wasn’t an example of fallible Catholics violating the church’s moral teachings. It was an example of the church itself, as an institution, teaching and justifying ideas which we now recognize as gravely evil, and which more recent statements have disavowed.

Still, this was a hollow victory. Unlike flesh-and-blood Catholic apologists who proclaim that the church’s moral teachings have never changed, then backpedal furiously when you ask questions like this, Justin lacks the self-awareness to notice the problem or to care about it. You can’t force it to acknowledge a contradiction, because it has no concern for its answers being consistent or plausible.

As another example, I asked about whether slavery in the Bible was moral. Justin’s answer:

The Bible, particularly in the Old Testament, does describe societies in which slavery was practiced. However, it’s important to understand these passages in their historical and cultural context.The forms of servitude described in the Bible were often very different from the chattel slavery practiced in more recent centuries. Moreover, the Bible’s descriptions of these practices are not endorsements.The New Testament, in particular, contains many passages that emphasize the equal dignity of all people in Christ, such as Galatians 3:28, There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Over time, the Church has come to a deeper understanding of the implications of these teachings for the institution of slavery, leading to its unequivocal condemnation of slavery in all its forms.

“The Bible’s descriptions of these practices are not endorsements” – except, you know, when God endorsed them by giving the Israelites instructions on how to buy human beings as slaves and how hard you’re allowed to beat them.

But again, I found this unsatisfying, because a chatbot can’t get embarrassed or defensive about an obvious howler. It can’t make any concessions or recognize obvious-but-unflattering truths. It’s literally programmed not to.

By definition, it’s not arguing in good faith, engaging in give and take with the objective of honestly seeking the truth. It’s mindlessly repeating the party line, and never changes its mind no matter what anyone says to it. In that sense, AI makes an ideal religious apologist.

What’s the right way to protest Israel?

The Columbia University lawn strewn with Palestinian flags and protest signs

Columbia students’ protest encampment (CC0)

[Previous: The First Amendment doesn’t have an Israel exception]

The pro-Palestine college protests all over the country feel personal to me. First, a BDS resolution passed at Binghamton University, which I attended as an undergraduate. Now, as you’ve probably heard, there’s a much bigger eruption at Columbia, where I earned a graduate degree.

When Columbia’s president Minouche Shafik rejected students’ demands to divest from Israel’s war machine, protesters staged a sit-in on campus. They set up a tent city and, later, broke into and occupied Hamilton Hall. Eventually, Columbia locked down the campus and called in an army of police in riot gear to arrest the protesters. It was an uncanny echo of the 1968 demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

I can’t in good conscience claim that Columbia students had an absolute right to set up an encampment on the university lawn, or to break into a building and take it over. They were engaging in civil disobedience, we all know that, and one consequence of that strategy is that you should expect to be arrested.

Of course, this in no way excuses violence by the police or excessively harsh punishment. For all the tabloid fearmongering, it seems clear that the Columbia protests were consistently peaceful. At worst, there were some angry exchanges of words and minor property damage. If anyone had been seriously hurt, much less killed, by one of the protesters, you can be sure that Israel’s defenders would be screaming at the top of their lungs about it. They aren’t, because they can’t point to any such incident.

It’s the same all over the country. As soon as students start demonstrating for Gaza, governors and university presidents panic and lash out with overwhelming force. Their knee-jerk response is to treat protests as a threat to be suppressed by any means necessary:

Last week, from New York to Texas, cops stormed college campuses clad in riot gear. They weren’t there to confront active shooters, thank goodness, or answer bomb threats. Instead, they were there to conduct mass arrests of students protesting the war in Gaza.

…After sending a phalanx of state law-enforcement officers into the University of Texas at Austin campus, for example, Governor Greg Abbott announced on X that students “joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled.”

(The district attorney immediately dropped all charges against the UT students, citing lack of probable cause.)

And more:

At Emory University, in Atlanta, police officers reportedly used tear gas and Tasers against protesters. State troopers with rifles directed toward protesters stood watch on a rooftop at Ohio State University. At Indiana University, administrators rushed out a last-minute, overnight policy change to justify a similar show of force from law enforcement, resulting in 34 arrests. It’s hard to keep up.

Students nationwide are watching how the adults who professed to care about free speech are responding under pressure. And they are learning that those adults don’t really mean what they say about the First Amendment.

All these denunciations and shows of force beg the question. If “from the river to the sea” is hate speech… if the word “intifada” is a threat… if BDS is “not allowed” and students who advocate it should be expelled… then what methods of protest are acceptable? How can we, as Americans, express disagreement with Israel in a way that its defenders would accept as reasonable and legitimate?

What Zionist groups say about this doesn’t have to be the last word. Obviously, no person or group has absolute authority to decree how it is or isn’t acceptable to criticize them. But it’s a starting point from which there can be a debate.

On the other hand, if their answer is “nothing” – if every opinion that’s not unswerving support of Israel is deemed hateful or antisemitic – then that would prove they’re not arguing in good faith; they’re only trying to silence dissent.

Protests aren’t meant to be nice. They’re supposed to cause discomfort and agitation among the people they’re targeting. That’s the whole point. If a protest doesn’t make anyone upset or uncomfortable, it failed to serve its purpose. There’s no reason to protest on behalf of an uncontroversial cause that everyone agrees with. Absent any actual violence, no one has the right to shut down a protest merely by claiming it makes them feel unsafe.

It’s a consistent theme across history that people protesting injustice and war always get told it’s not the right way, or the right time, or the right place. This advice is almost never offered in good faith. In almost every case, it’s nothing but a majority trying to shut down a message they don’t want to hear. If Zionists don’t want to be part of this illiberal tradition, they should prove it.