As a college student 20ish years ago, I attended a protest against the invasion of Iraq where a vague acquaintance performed a tendentious, constitutionally-protected protest: burning the American flag. I watched impotently as police officers beat him to the ground and then dragged him through the street to a paddy wagon. The Supreme Court may have repeatedly protected his protest, but this kid got stuck with trumped-up arson charges, and our ragtag little protest group enjoyed the occasional visit from a federal agent thereafter. It was a weird time. You had to be there.

We weren’t alone in this uniquely American weirdness. Decades before “cancel culture” caught cable news ratings, Bill Maher got the axe because he said something controversial about 9/11 on a show designed to court controversy. A red hot pop country act was drummed off the charts because they didn’t support a pointless war. Clear Channel Radio (now iHeart Media) effectively shadow-banned Rage Against the Machine’s entire discography. Fox News mainstay Michelle Malkin published a book defending Japanese-American internment in WWII and racial profiling of Arab-Americans post-9/11. Islamophobic hate crimes spiked off the charts and have never returned to pre-9/11 levels. 

I could go on and on and on.

The endlessly repeated mantra was that “they hate us for our freedoms.” What specific freedoms they hated was never clear, but assuming the speakers had the First Amendment classics of speech and religion in mind, then it seemed that, cribbing Orwell, some acts of expression were more free than others.

Twenty years later, the new mantra is that zealous campus leftists pose the greatest threat to political discourse. But the numbers tell a different story. In one estimation in line with many others, a faculty member at an American university is about four times more likely to be terminated for leftist speech than for conservative speech. Outraged students deplatforming Charles Murray may dominate headlines, but the reality now, as back then, is that critiquing American orthodoxy from the left carves the surest path to trouble.

You can guess where I’m going. On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, a WashU student was filmed removing some of the 2,977 American flags that the campus chapter of the College Republicans, as part of a nationwide initiative led by the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), had placed in memory of those that died in the tragedy. By the next day the action had wound through the media ecosystem and into the national press. The chancellor has issued a statement. Calls for expulsion abound.

Let me be clear: Members of our campus community have personal connections to innocent lives lost in the tragic horror of 9/11, and removing markers for those lives, American flags or otherwise, disrespects the dead and personally hurts our living community members who are connected to them. I do not support the act, and I wish it hadn’t happened.

And now as a nationwide online mob coopts our community’s pain to feed its endless thirst for reactive rage, rife with the familiar stench of Islamophobia, justified hurt and anger at the method of protest are subsumed into backlash at its content.

Though I disagree with that method, I can’t avoid the sting of déjà vu at the anger crashing down on our campus, most heavily on our Black and brown students and colleagues. Yet the message the student meant to convey was as important to hear as it was dangerous to express in 2001, and it hasn’t fared much better since then, even as the US finally ceases ground operations in the first ‘forever war’ started in response to 9/11.

In the bleak months and years after the towers fell, it gradually became clear that shameless cynics with an agenda much older than the attacks would leverage our collective grief and confusion to enact policies that liberals, Trumpists and leftists now criticize in a rare display of consensus. The entire political intelligentsia of this country now acts like they were in the bathroom when our government decided to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, form Homeland Security and ICE and eviscerate our civil liberties with the Patriot Act.

So how did we wind up launching pointless wars that, conservatively, killed a million people across North Africa and the Middle East, spending trillions we could have spent on healthcare and climate change and handing our privacy rights over to the unholy alliance of Big Tech and Big Brother? Reader, I’m telling you: Some of us tried to stop it at the time. But we lost because, as the protesting student puts it, “those who use the victims of 9/11 as a political cudgel” to quash dissent.

As The Chicks and Bill Maher and Rage and the kid in my activist group all learned, bad actors would transmute criticism of American foreign policy into an attack on America itself, and thus on the victims of 9/11. By wrapping those victims in the American flag, the war-thirsty cynics tied emotions for the victims to the policy decisions of the government that the flag represents, even though that flag surely meant varying things to many victims, even though some victims’ families insisted they didn’t want the wars, even though several hundred of them weren’t even American citizens. Dissent over how to respond to 9/11 became un-American, and so our government was free to respond to the murder of 2,977 innocent souls by killing a million more people.

Did the students who made the memorial intend to replicate any of that alchemy with their memorial? I don’t think so. Should it stop the family and friends of victims from commemorating? Absolutely not. Does it excuse the student’s method of protest? No. But I say this: If we had had the necessary conversation back then, they may never have needed to protest now. 

To his credit, the chancellor seems, behind a veil of grammatical abstraction, to endorse the right to dissent. His statement calls the memorial an “act of speech,” and so seems to understand that waving a flag is an act of political speech as much as burning one, and that waving a flag thus invites political conversation. “The free exchange of ideas is central to a vibrant university,” he says, and “there should be space both for recalling the traumatic memories of that day and for considering its long-term historical implications.” I take this to mean that the student protestor’s message, unspeakable as it was after 9/11, deserves a hearing in any institution seriously committed to the exchange of ideas.

The issue, it seems, doesn’t reside with the message, but stems from its offensive delivery. “Students have the right to express their viewpoints,” Chancellor Martin reassures us, “but they also have the obligation to respect others’ expressions.” I take it this statement intends to sketch a preliminary criterion for how to moderate difficult conversations in our era of political polarization.

In that case, I pose a challenge to the Chancellor: What exactly would acceptable counterspeech have looked like? How do you propose that we mourn the million souls killed by America’s knee-jerk response to 9/11 along with the 2,977 who died on the terrible day? And if our students have never lived in a United States that honestly engaged dissent from the War on Terror, how can they possibly know, and frankly why should they care, what we expect productive dissent to look like?

The offense here was expressing an issue of vital public interest in a way that failed to anticipate unwritten rules governing the method of expression. Yet not only does the campus code of conduct, as far as I’m aware, contain no such formal provision, but as a society we have never in the 20 years since 9/11 held a robust discussion over how we respect the trauma from the attacks while protecting the democratically vital process of political dissent.

Chancellor, I’m so very tired of seeing children and young adults blamed for not appreciating the nuances of a tremendously difficult political process that the adults in the room have never coherently stewarded. If they don’t understand what we wish they did, it’s because we have not explained what we want nor have we modeled it — we have failed them. We cannot allow the most fundamental processes of democracy to unravel on our watch and then blame our youth for devaluing those processes when they’ve known no world but the one that we have broken. 

This is a school; the protestor is a student and we are teachers. I hope we respond with a restorative and pedagogical model rather than a punitive one. If our school has an “opportunity for community” by taking up America’s long-delayed conversation on how all perspectives on 9/11 are heard, then I hope the community determines how to govern controversial counterspeech while also embracing the necessity for that counterspeech. I hope the conversation demarcates between objecting to how a protest is expressed and objecting to what the protest says. I hope our community members most closely impacted by 9/11 find redress for the harm done by this protest, and I hope we find space to mourn the million dead from the War on Terror.

The online mob however, demands a one-sided outcome. The protestor’s family has been doxxed, Twitter accounts threaten to send vigilante mobs to campus and I and several faculty colleagues have become targets of harassment. A well-funded and tightly organized media ecosystem ensures that trash-talking on r/Conservative one day is on Fox News in prime time the next, making a national spectacle out of a community grievance. This system aims to intimidate opponents into silence in the name of supporting free expression, and it works far, far too well for something so transparently hypocritical.

The administration’s past response to such media pressure has been to hastily reassure outraged strangers nationwide that their ideas are safe here, while our community member receiving death threats is left in the cold. That’s not stewarding the free expression of ideas. It’s public relations.

If this administration truly intends to hold space for all perspectives, it must denounce all attempts to silence speech, not just the unpopular attempts. If it wants to define protest guidelines for anti-racist and leftist activists, it must hold far-right speech to the same standards, and it can begin by issuing a full-throated denunciation of Islamophobia and expresssing a specific commitment to the right of brown and Muslim students to speak their minds about the legacy of 9/11. I truly hope we do the difficult and overdue work the Chancellor circuitously suggests might happen. Thanks to the online outrage engine, the world is now watching.