Four Years After COVID, Cancel Culture Returns

Guest opinion column from Leighton Woodhouse and Jenin Younes argues that the Israel-Palestine debate has resurrected an ugly form of cancel culture.

A brief note to readers:

I am delighted to publish a guest opinion column from Jenin Younes and Leighton Woodhouse. I have known Leighton for over a decade and have the utmost respect for him. He recently left Michael Shellenberger’s Public and is writing on his own Substack, Social Studies. I met Jenin while researching my first detailed investigation of the Department of Homeland Security's social media censorship apparatus. She is a tireless advocate for free speech and recently served as one of the lead outside attorneys for Missouri v. Biden (now Murthy v. Missouri), challenging government censorship — a case now before the Supreme Court.

Leighton and Jenin attempted to publish the following opinion column on several much larger independent media outlets known for “heterodox” debate and free expression. They were turned down. So, I am publishing them exclusively here on my Substack. -Lee

Four years ago, we found ourselves politically homeless when politicians across the United States adopted an enforced lockdown and restriction approach to COVID-19. Over the past six months, following Hamas’s attack on civilians and Israel’s ensuing military actions in Gaza, we have once again found ourselves loners in our professional and social circles.

Until the outbreak of COVID-19, we considered ourselves left-leaning civil libertarians. Jenin was a New York City public defender, while Leighton was a Bay Area journalist who had once worked as a labor organizer. Both of us voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016, and given our professions and geographic locations, spent little time around non-progressives. But in 2020, in the wake of the Covid outbreak, everything changed.

It was not just that governments at all levels — local, state, and federal — practically competed with each other to pass the most authoritarian restrictions they could dream up in an effort to be seen as opposing Trump and his more laissez-faire approach to the pandemic. Worse still, a quasi-priestly, self-appointed expert class suddenly dictated the boundaries of acceptable discourse on COVID-19 in a mostly successful effort to control our thoughts on the subject. We weren’t allowed to openly question whether school closures would lead to learning loss, especially among less economically privileged students; whether firing people for declining a rushed and, as it turned out, less-than-entirely-efficacious vaccine was an abrogation of workers’ rights; or whether shutting down the economy would hurt working people most of all. To even raise these concerns in polite company, as we both did, led to accusations of selfishness, support for former President Donald Trump, and eventual exile from the circles in which we ran. We watched the activist left descend into a mindless, totalitarian cult, in which the punishment for wrongspeech and wrongthink was the social equivalent of the death penalty.

History repeats itself, a harsh lesson we both learned firsthand not four years later.

Since October 7, we have found ourselves once again watching people we befriended and came to admire during the Covid era embrace a blind dogma that replaces evidence, civil discourse, and logic with censorship, bullying, and accusations of antisemitism designed to chill dissent. This time, though, those engaging in these rhetorical tactics have clustered on the political right, as well as in the “heterodox” space that purports to transcend the tribalism of the left-right divide and with which we both briefly identified. 

Along with everyone else with a semblance of a conscience, we were horrified by Hamas’ hostage-taking and murder campaign on October 7. But there is no contradiction in also opposing Israel’s indiscriminate bombing and intentional starvation of civilians in a one-sided military operation that has killed tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children. Nor should it be taboo to point out that October 7 did not occur in a vacuum. Just as after 9/11, it was only logical to try to grasp the motivations of our attackers instead of blindly accepting that they “hate us for our freedoms,” or are uniquely evil because of their religion or ethnic identity. We can morally condemn Hamas’ attack while also seeking to understand the perpetrators’ historical context.

Since 1967, when Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza in the six-day war, Palestinians residing in those areas have lived in extremely oppressive circumstances with which most Americans are unfamiliar. The West Bank and East Jerusalem, which would constitute part of a Palestinian state, have been under Israeli military rule since that time. Palestinians residing in those areas are deprived of the basic civil rights most of us take for granted. They must pass through military checkpoints to travel from village to village; they can be imprisoned, tried in military court, their houses bulldozed, and their land taken by Israel for any or no reason.

Jewish settlers, many who come from the United States and other Western countries to live in the West Bank for religious reasons, harass, beat, and kill Palestinians on a regular basis with impunity, as was recently reported in the New York Times. The situation had become even worse for Palestinians in the years prior to the October 7 attack, as Israel’s increasingly right-wing, extremist government has encouraged settler violence against Palestinians and their property. Munther Younes is the father of one of the co-authors of this piece. He was born in the West Bank where he lived until the 1970s. Under the Jordanian rule that preceded Israeli occupation, he explains, “ordinary Palestinians never felt that their homes could be bulldozed or their land taken away at any time. They never had to cross a military checkpoint every time they wanted to visit a family member in the next village.”

While Gaza has technically not been under occupation since Israel withdrew its military presence there in 2005, the living conditions — the result of a blockade imposed by Israel (with Egypt’s cooperation) — are, if anything, even worse. Robots with machine guns patrol the border, firing at those who attempt to get in and out without Israel’s express permission. Travel outside of the enclave is severely restricted, trapping the population and leading many human rights groups to deem it an “open air prison.”  The blockade strangles the economy, impoverishing the Palestinians who live in Gaza. Fishermen who stray too far from shore risk being fired on by IDF soldiers. 

It is in this context that Hamas rose to and maintained power, albeit not with the population’s ongoing consent, as no elections have been held in Gaza for almost two decades.  Discussing the events of October 7 without understanding the conditions in which Palestinians are forced to live is akin to assessing Nat Turner’s revolt without addressing slavery.  A “solution” to the horror Hamas unleashed on October 7 that fails to address the underlying causes — the deprivation of Palestinians’ civil rights and commensurate impoverishment in the West Bank and Gaza —is no solution at all. Yet these accurate and reasonable points, which we and many others made during in-person conversations and on social media fell on deaf ears at best and, at worst, earned us attacks, including from friends. Once again, we found ourselves outcasts in our professional and social circles.

But our problem isn’t that people we know disagree with us over a foreign conflict. It is that the current situation is yet another manifestation of a jingoistic culture that has emerged over the past decade or so and that eschews nuance, reduces a complex world to a children’s fable of good and evil, and demands the silencing and ostracism of anyone who dissents from its orthodoxy. It is the same authoritarian spirit that suffocated our social circles during the Covid era. It is another manifestation of the cancel culture that the right claims to oppose but has now cynically adopted to suit its own political ends. 

Public examples in the current era are plentiful. As soon as a college protest movement emerged vociferously opposing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, critics deployed a truck hauling a billboard display to doxx student activists at Harvard, Columbia, and Yale in hopes this action would silence them. A billionaire and his CEO friends demanded a blacklist of pro-Palestinian Harvard students with an eye towards banning them from professional employment. Many people have lost their jobs over pro-Palestine speech.

In a similar vein, a right-wing pundit who ostensibly opposes cancel culture applauded the prohibition of pro-Palestinian protests in France. Republican Senator Josh Hawley called for a Department of Justice investigation of student groups that advocated for Palestine. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who portrayed himself as a free speech advocate during COVID-19, banned a prominent pro-Palestinian student group from the state’s public university system. Former President Donald Trump has vowed to deport non-citizen student protestors who support Palestine, while the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to outlaw speech on campuses critical of Israel in a bill that is now under consideration in the Senate.

Because criticizing a foreign government’s war is so obviously First Amendment-protected speech, proponents of these measures succeed in passing them by conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. The notion that criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza, the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians, or even the morality of Zionism is off-limits is anathema to the First Amendment. There is no difference between this fanaticism on the part of Israel’s most vocal American supporters and that of the Covid zealots who censored speech the government found threatening to its political agenda. Perhaps the most outrageous aspect of the current situation is that many of the people who claimed to be free speech proponents during the Covid era —for example, Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Governor DeSantis, and various Republicans in Congress — have now embraced censorship in order to stifle criticism of Israel and advocates of Palestinian rights

It is true that some pro-Palestinian protesters have engaged in unprincipled and occasionally even genuinely bigoted speech. But that’s the case in every large protest movement, and is all but certain to occur in one that includes tens or hundreds of thousands of participants.  Ironically, this is no less true of pro-Israel protests, in which counterprotesters have wished rape upon pro-Palestinian activists, advocated for turning Gaza into a parking lot,  and explicitly called for genocide of Palestinians–— although you wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media. And as revolting as this speech is, it is without question constitutionally protected: contrary to the claims of politicians and others, there’s no recognized “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. Actions that go beyond speech, such as blocking egress or engaging in violent activity, are the purview of university administrators or law enforcement and are punishable as violations of laws or codes of conduct. 

Notably, the only documented episode of violence against people – as opposed to property – that has stood up to scrutiny occurred on UCLA’s campus and involved pro-Israel students attacking the pro-Palestine encampment. But we would never argue that this incident justifies a clampdown on pro-Israel speech, the banning of pro-Israel student groups, or the criminalizing of Islamophobic speech. The principle underpinning the First Amendment free speech clause is that open discussion and debate, not censorship, is how we discover the truth and develop solutions to political problems.  Claims that some pro-Palestinians protestors’ misbehavior warrants banning the protests are clearly a pretext to abridge Americans’ freedom of expression in a craven effort to limit debate on the subject of Israel-Palestine. It has no support in First Amendment free speech case law.

But in this climate, discussion is not what many in the pro-Israel camp are seeking. Mirroring the left during Covid, their objective has been to silence ideological opponents through shame, slander, and blatant abridgments of Americans’ First Amendment free speech rights. The last six or eight months have made clear that despite their proclamations to the contrary,  the right shares as much blame for the degradation of free speech in America as the left.

The first image is from the Getty Images editorial archive. The second is a photo taken by Joel Carillet from Getty Images, showing Israel's barrier in Ayda, West Bank, near Bethlehem. An Israeli military vehicle stands watch in the center of the photo.