The ‘repressive tolerance’ of Trump - The President has learnt from his enemies | UnHerd

[Scott75]

Just finished reading the article that shares the title of this thread. I thought it was quite good. Quoting from its conclusion:

**

The broader implication of the original Free Speech Movement’s demand was, again, that intramural speech be protected by the First Amendment in the same manner as extramural speech. The effect of this demand — like the other factors that eroded in loco parentis — was to merge the university with the broader space of rights-granted citizenship. But a further implication of this move, not necessarily evident to the student protesters when they made their demands, was to weaken the specificity of the university’s function within society: to form young adults.

It was perhaps an inevitable reaction to this drift and evacuation of institutional purpose that new forms of paternalism reemerged to substitute for in loco parentis, not least the differentiated speech regime outlined by Matsuda. This helped define a new moral, values-imparting mission for universities, which over decades became ever more explicitly oriented around social justice.  

Conservative and centrist critics of campus politics have documented the divisive and intellectually stultifying effects of this regime. Now that the Trump administration is attempting to force top-down change on the system, many who opposed it are celebrating.

Yet it should be clear from the administration’s single-minded focus on reining in pro-Palestinian protest — justified on the grounds of protecting Jewish students from harassment — that what it is offering is not at all a fundamental change from the status quo ante. On the contrary, Matsuda’s basic idea that speech must be regulated on the basis of whether it causes harm to a “subordinated community” remains fully in force; it is simply that a different minority group is now asserted to be in need of special protection. In other words, Trump is merely adjusting the dials of the prior campus speech regime, applying greater tolerance here and greater intolerance there. 

The real problem with this shift isn’t the apparent inconsistency with conservative opposition to cancel culture, but that the administration is leaving the deeper assumptions of the prior system for regulating speech intact. Universities need to be reformed, and reimagined, on a much more fundamental level. The post-in loco parentis integration of campuses into the broader realm of citizenship has failed to facilitate the responsible exercise of the citizenship. Rather, it has only succeeded at evacuating institutional purpose in favour of an incoherent mix of anything-goes consumerism and tendentious moralism.

Trump’s heavy-handed actions will succeed in suppressing some of the campus radicalism to which conservatives object. But they will leave intact the divisive and infantilising speech regime.

**

 

Full article:

https://unherd.com/2025/03/the-repressive-tolerance-of-trump/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3

[suds]

2 hours ago, Scott75 said:

Yet it should be clear from the administration’s single-minded focus on reining in pro-Palestinian protest — justified on the grounds of protecting Jewish students from harassment — that what it is offering is not at all a fundamental change from the status quo ante.

Is it true that Jewish students are being harassed on campus and is it true that Khalil is in some way encouraging this harassment? If this is all true then there is a fundamental change from the 'status quo'. If not, then what reason has the government got to deport him?

[Scott75]

17 minutes ago, suds said:

3 hours ago, Scott75 said:

Yet it should be clear from the administration’s single-minded focus on reining in pro-Palestinian protest — justified on the grounds of protecting Jewish students from harassment — that what it is offering is not at all a fundamental change from the status quo ante.

Is it true that Jewish students are being harassed on campus and is it true that Khalil is in some way encouraging this harassment?

I suspect that a few jewish students are harassed, but I doubt that Khalil has anything to do with that. 

  

19 minutes ago, suds said:

If this is all true then there is a fundamental change from the 'status quo'.

How so?

19 minutes ago, suds said:

If not, then what reason has the government got to deport him?

Sometimes, what matters to politicians is not what is true, but what their voter base believes to be true.

[suds]

9 minutes ago, Scott75 said:

How so?

Conservatives as a rule don't get involved in violent campus protests. I fail to see any implied moral equivalence. It's always the left.

[Scott75]

1 hour ago, suds said:

1 hour ago, Scott75 said:

2 hours ago, suds said:

5 hours ago, Scott75 said:

Yet it should be clear from the administration’s single-minded focus on reining in pro-Palestinian protest — justified on the grounds of protecting Jewish students from harassment — that what it is offering is not at all a fundamental change from the status quo ante.

If this is all true then there is a fundamental change from the 'status quo'.

How so?

Conservatives as a rule don't get involved in violent campus protests.

Ah, now I see your point of view. You believe that the pro-Palestinian protests are by default violent and that it is the pro-Palestinians who are the cause of this violence. From what I've seen, it's the other way around:

https://scheerpost.com/2025/03/01/new-report-details-police-repression-of-palestine-activism-at-ucla/

[suds]

5 hours ago, Scott75 said:

Ah, now I see your point of view. You believe that the pro-Palestinian protests are by default violent and that it is the pro-Palestinians who are the cause of this violence. From what I've seen, it's the other way around:

https://scheerpost.com/2025/03/01/new-report-details-police-repression-of-palestine-activism-at-ucla/

So the Left (who originally began the free speech movement in the 60's), buys into the theories of critical race theorist Mari Masuda. They begin 'cancelling' those they label as oppressers, and ensure the oppressed are granted the tolerance of hateful speech that comes from the experience of oppression. As a result, free speech becomes more muddled and oriented to social justice. Conservatives and Centrists claim this is divisive and intellectually backward. Trump comes along and does the same thing except there's a difference of opinion about who are the oppressers and who are the oppressed.  In doing so, he's reinforcing the Left's position on speech. But there is a difference if it's true that protesters are harassing Jews on campus (in America) while right leaning speakers get cancelled because of their views or what they may or may not say. If Palestinians want to harass Jews or Jews want to harass Palestinians.... then go back to Palestine. Have I got this about right?

Edited March 21 by suds

[Scott75]

1 hour ago, suds said:

7 hours ago, Scott75 said:

Ah, now I see your point of view. You believe that the pro-Palestinian protests are by default violent and that it is the pro-Palestinians who are the cause of this violence. From what I've seen, it's the other way around:

https://scheerpost.com/2025/03/01/new-report-details-police-repression-of-palestine-activism-at-ucla/

So the Left (who originally began the free speech movement in the 60's), buys into the theories of critical race theorist Mari Masuda. They begin 'cancelling' those they label as oppressers, and ensure the oppressed are granted the tolerance of hateful speech that comes from the experience of oppression. As a result, free speech becomes more muddled and oriented to social justice. Conservatives and Centrists claim this is divisive and intellectually backward. Trump comes along and does the same thing except there's a difference of opinion about who are the oppressers and who are the oppressed.  In doing so, he's reinforcing the Left's position on speech. But there is a difference if it's true that protesters are harassing Jews on campus (in America) while right leaning speakers get cancelled because of their views or what they may or may not say. If Palestinians want to harass Jews or Jews want to harass Palestinians.... then go back to Palestine. Have I got this about right?

I definitely think you got some of it right. Your bring up Mari Matsuda, which certainly seems to be fundamental to the type of speech that's been censored for a while now on both the left -and- the right. Again quoting from Geoff Shullenberger's article:

**

In the wake of the October 7 Hamas terror attack against southern Israel, however, conservatives dramatically shifted their criticisms of the progressive campus speech regime. From the Nineties battles over political correctness to the early 2020s wars over wokeness, their main concern was with universities’ censoriousness towards conservative-coded views. But their new focus is on the same institutions’ permissiveness towards extreme speech by Leftists — most notoriously, celebration of terrorist violence against Israeli civilians.

In other words, the criticism directed at universities shifted away from the “intolerant towards the Right” side of Marcuse’s equation, and toward the “tolerant towards the Left” side. Meanwhile, the Left correspondingly pivoted from demanding “intolerance towards the Right” — keeping Milo off-campus — to “tolerance towards the Left” — letting pro-Palestinian protesters protest, even if their speech may offend some. 

However, this reversal of positions was possible in part because it’s not only the Right/Left polarity that came to determine the range of permissible speech on campus in the post-Sixties era. Indeed, the unofficial campus speech regime didn’t so much legitimise itself in Right/Left terms as in terms of victimhood and oppression. A programmatic statement of this rationale can be found in the pioneering critical race theorist Mari Matsuda’s article “Public Response to Racist Speech”, published in 1989. In Matsuda’s account, it is speech by members of or on behalf of “historically dominant groups” and against “subordinated communities” that should be subject to “intolerance”, while speech going in the opposite direction, even if hateful or violent, should be subject to “tolerance”. 

Matsuda offered, in effect, an update on Marcuse’s “liberating tolerance”, processed through the classifications of civil-rights law. Instead of “the Left” being granted extra leeway, as Marcuse had demanded, it was members of oppressed groups who were to enjoy what Matsuda calls the “victim’s privilege”. In practice, this meant that when any speech generated controversy, the task was to identify oppressor and oppressed, then ensure that the latter is granted “the tolerance of hateful speech that comes from an experience of oppression”, whereas the former is subject to maximum intolerance. 

This is how the attempts to shut down controversial speakers at the height of last decade’s Great Awokening were justified. For instance, in 2017, New York University provost Ulrich Baer argued in The New York Times that efforts to prevent figures like Yiannopolous and Charles Murray from speaking on campus “should be understood as an attempt to ensure the conditions of free speech for a greater group of people, rather than censorship”. Intolerance toward oppressors, that is, equals tolerance toward the oppressed.

Matsuda defined universities as a “special case” because college students are “at a vulnerable stage of psychological development”. Accordingly, “tolerance of racist speech in this setting is more harmful than generalised tolerance in the community-at-large”. Gesturing back at Berkeley and other Sixties protest, Matsuda reaffirmed support for the protesters’ speech rights, but not on grounds of “pure tolerance”. Rather, she appealed to the “power imbalance” between students and “university administrators, multinational corporations, the US military, and established governments”. In other words, insofar as students can be construed as victims, their speech must be protected — but once they can be construed as victimisers, they can no longer lay claim to that privilege. 

**

I think the main case that Shullenberger is making is that Matsuda helped open the door to bias on both the left and the right, since all they had to do was state that their side was being victimized in order to censore speech on the other side.

The question that should always be asked, whether the speech being censored is from the 'left' or the 'right', is whether allowing such speech is truly victimizing anyone or whether, instead, it is simply exposing a truth that is uncomfortable to powerful interests.

[suds]

7 hours ago, Scott75 said:

I think the main case that Shullenberger is making is that Matsuda helped open the door to bias on both the left and the right, since all they had to do was state that their side was being victimized in order to censore speech on the other side.

The question that should always be asked, whether the speech being censored is from the 'left' or the 'right', is whether allowing such speech is truly victimizing anyone or whether, instead, it is simply exposing a truth that is uncomfortable to powerful interests.

I think it may have been a big help if you would have posted this right off the bat instead of me staying up half the night trying to make sense of everything. But I learned a few things so I'm contented.  I'm a free speech advocate, as I believe Shullenberger is also. So, not a big fan of censorship by either side including the President of the United States who's motives (which have yet to be determined) will prove to be the case or not.

[Scott75]

44 minutes ago, suds said:

9 hours ago, Scott75 said:

I think the main case that Shullenberger is making is that Matsuda helped open the door to bias on both the left and the right, since all they had to do was state that their side was being victimized in order to censore speech on the other side.

The question that should always be asked, whether the speech being censored is from the 'left' or the 'right', is whether allowing such speech is truly victimizing anyone or whether, instead, it is simply exposing a truth that is uncomfortable to powerful interests.

I think it may have been a big help if you would have posted this right off the bat instead of me staying up half the night trying to make sense of everything.

You think I just breezed through the thing :-p? It was definitely a dense article.

45 minutes ago, suds said:

But I learned a few things so I'm contented.  I'm a free speech advocate, as I believe Shullenberger is also. So, not a big fan of censorship by either side including the President of the United States who's motives (which have yet to be determined) will prove to be the case or not.

Agreed 🙂

 

[Nationalist]

And in the end...ya gits wut ya pays fer. 

Will someone come along and allow the democratic tub of water to settle? Maybe...hopefully...But not today.

So many moves have been made to erode the lives of "We the people". We know it's being done, yet we tolerate this path to destruction. 

I can't blame Trump for using every tool in his possession to exact some revenge. What's gone on is beneath dignity.

Edited Sunday at 04:19 PM by Nationalist