The Woke Right Overcorrects on Campus Speech

what did y'all think free speech meant? vibes? papers? essays?

1. Encampment, Again

Tuesday night, a couple hundred protestors took over Yale’s Beinecke Plaza to rally against Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who’d been invited to give a talk in New Haven on Wednesday. Ben-Gvir is a bad dude—a self-avowed Kahanist, he wants to expel Palestinians from Gaza and to annex the West Bank. He’s also a convicted terrorist, and reportedly threatened Arabs with a handgun at an East Jerusalem riot he attended while a sitting member of the Knesset. If there were one Israeli worth protesting, it’d be him.

Regardless, the Yalies4Palestine protest on Tuesday was unauthorized—even more unauthorizedly, the protestors pitched a half-dozen tents, preparing to stay the night.

Between the general contempt for university policy and protest leaders’ blatant threats to violate time, place, and manner restrictions, administrators decided to distribute notices to the protestors around 10 pm reading:

You are now in violation of Yale University policies regarding free expression, peaceable assembly, and/or disruption.

Please stop your current action immediately. If you do not, you may risk university disciplinary action and/or arrest.

The protestors left, and their tents were taken down by midnight. So, all good?

No! Not all good!

While their encampment was up, the protestors simply could not resist hurting their own cause. A Jewish student, Netanel Crispe, approached a line of masked activists, asking to pass through the plaza. They resisted him, so he recorded a video and put it on Twitter where it got many millions of clicks:

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Now, in no world did Crispe actually need to get through the Plaza. He could’ve simply walked around the protest without much trouble. Beinecke isn’t totally out of the way on Yale’s campus, but there was no reason for Crispe to be there—for instance, if he were walking back to his dorm, he would’ve been just about anywhere else.

The “colleges” are Yale’s residence halls. Crispe, for some reason, found himself right on that little star icon.

But, in all likelihood, the young man wanted to make a scene! And the protestors inexplicably obliged, when they could’ve simply let him through. Bernard Stanford had the right take:

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Predictably, Crispe’s video set off a massive social media firestorm. Even the House Committee on Education & Workforce got involved:

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Realizing the implicit threat (given what’s happened to Harvard and to Columbia), Yale acted quickly. By early Wednesday afternoon, the Yalies4Palestine club had its status as a registered student organization revoked. Yale’s statement emphasized that the university “condemns antisemitism and will hold those who violate our policies accountable through our disciplinary processes,” while affirming their support for “free expression on campus, including permitting peaceful vigils, rallies, protests, and counterprotests that comply with the university’s time, place, and manner rules.”

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2. An Actual Jewish Secret Society

Around the time Yale made its announcement, Itamar Ben-Gvir arrived in a New York airport, greeted by a small crowd of expat Israeli protestors. He was planning to speak that night at a dinner hosted by Shabtai—the “Global Jewish Leadership Society” at Yale, a group officially unaffiliated with the university.

Shabtai was founded in 1994 as the “Chai Society” by a group of Jewish graduate students at Yale, along with future New Jersey Senator Cory Booker and rabbi Shmully Hecht. It was meant to be an elite club for Jews, modeled after Yale’s historically-Jew-excluding secret societies (Skull & Bones, and so forth).

Most of the group soon moved on to bigger and better things, but Hecht stuck around, shaping the society into a premier vehicle for intellectual debates over shabbat (shabbos, to hear him tell it) dinners. Its prestige grew quickly—in 2012, after Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was released from Hamas captivity, he was welcomed to a Shabtai event, and by none other than Cory Booker himself.

Interestingly, Yale’s classic secret societies—whose historical WASP-only policies were responsible for Shabtai’s creation—have been thoroughly wokeified in recent years. In The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch writes:

In 2020, Skull and Bones had its first entirely nonwhite class. (Every year, the society admits around 15 rising seniors; selections must be unanimous, and members have final say.) Many of the societies now have only one or two students each year who aren’t from historically marginalized groups.¹

But, under Shmully Hecht’s guidance, Shabtai has remained as elite and conservative as ever, opening its doors to non-Jews disaffected by Yale’s general leftward turn. When 2024-presidential-hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy attended Yale Law School in the early 2010s, he reportedly spent every Friday night at Shabtai dinners.

In the years since leaving Yale, Ramaswamy and his wife, Apoorva — who also attended Shabtai events while studying at Yale’s medical school — have maintained ties to the organization. Ramaswamy said he’s made annual donations to Shabtai, which Hecht confirmed, though neither would disclose the sum total. They’ve hosted events at their home and returned to New Haven to speak. Shmully Hecht said he doesn’t go three or four days without speaking to Ramaswamy — sometimes about politics, but mostly about life.

Of course, just as thoughtful Yale conservatives like Ramaswamy and J.D. Vance have abandoned their dignity for populist appeal, so it appears has Hecht.

His decision to invite Ben-Gvir was met with resignations from two Shabtai members—they wrote that while the society “was founded as a space for fearless, pluralistic Jewish discourse … this event jeopardizes Shabtai’s reputation and very future.”

Hecht appealed to his free speech values in response, but also commented, “I admire Ben Gvir … Itamar promotes what he believes is best for his people that democratically elected him.”

And there’s good reason to think Hecht’s become much less serious about free speech than he used to be. While Shabtai has in the past hosted figures like “William Schabas, a former United Nations investigator who led an investigation into possible war crimes committed by Israel during the 2014 Gaza war” and “Philip Weiss, the Jewish creator of the anti-Zionist publication Mondoweiss,” no one close to an anti-Zionist has been invited since the October 7 massacre.

In fact, Hecht even started a Change.org petition which sought to cancel—or “excommunicate”—Jews who “have incessantly badgered, harassed, antagonized and misrepresented the State of Israel in their public writings and talks.” Self-described Zionists Tom Friedman and Jeremy Ben-Ami made the list of public intellectuals Hecht called to cancel, alongside figures like Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky. Hecht wrote:

We will no longer welcome them into our synagogues, schools, community centers, non profits, weddings, and bar mitzvahs. We will ban them from burial in Jewish cemeteries. We will encourage the Israeli Government to deny them entry to the Jewish State.

Hecht didn’t invite Ben-Gvir out of a commitment to free speech—the stunt is best understood as a Jewishly-flavored version of

Richard Hanania

’s Based Ritual.

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3. The Libs Got So Triggered

The event was, all told, a dream come true for Hecht and Ben-Gvir. As the Minister climbed the steps to Shabtai’s meeting house, a mob of pro-Palestinian protestors began shouting at him, showing him their middle fingers, and throwing debris. Ben-Gvir turned around, grinned, and in a display of astonishing political aptitude, made a peace sign to the protestors.

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Seriously, look at that smile!

That is not the face of a man who’s afraid of a dozen Ivy Leaguers in keffiyehs. Ben-Gvir loves the attention, and he loves how this clip will play on Israeli TV. He knows that for every Palestinian flag waved in his face, for every bottle flung at his rotund behind, Otzma will win another seat in the Knesset.

See, Israelis certainly don’t love Ben-Gvir—his net approval rating usually sits around -30%—but his party has undoubtedly benefitted from the war against Hamas. They’ve got only six seats in the current Knesset, which shot up to ten in polls after the war started. Even as other government parties lose ground, Otzma Yehudit’s popularity has proven sticky.

Otzma’s the orange one in seventh place

Aggrieved Israelis want populism, and Ben-Gvir delivers it exceptionally well. Much of his recent rhetoric has had a lot to do with the United States. Last year, when encampments popped up on many American college campuses, Ben-Gvir wasted no time appropriating Jewish students’ antisemitism concerns. In late April, he even called for Israel-backed security forces to protect American Jews on campus, writing:

Diaspora Jews are currently suffering from a harsh wave of antisemitism in communities and on campuses in the US, Europe, and around the world.

…

I asked the police commissioner to draft a plan to aid in the creation of local response teams that will protect Jewish communities and institutions overseas, through professional tutelage, including a training program and technological solutions for security.

…

Our Jewish, national, and moral obligation is to help them.

Of course, this never came to anything—but in Israel, where, as

Theodore Yohalem Shouse 🔸

has written, news about Gazan suffering is often suppressed (at least on right-wing networks like Channel 14), Ben-Gvir could play the role of hero. On May 7, Otzma polled higher than it ever had, or has since, at 12 seats.

Since Trump’s election, Ben-Gvir’s loudly praised the President’s nonsensical and inhumane policies. In return, the US reversed its Biden-era policy of not letting crazy terrorists into the country, and Ben-Gvir was allowed to make his trip—first to Mar-a-Lago, and then to Shabtai.

He said outrageous things, was met with vitriol, the vitriol had a barely-antisemitic edge, and so he won—he won sympathy, popularity, power. Everything someone like Ben-Gvir shouldn’t have; everything the Israeli deep state’s been working so hard to deprive him of.

This is nothing more than a big fat L for pro-Palestinians and democracy-supporting Zionists alike.

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4. Return of the Woke

Last April, a University of Michigan student group called Facts on the Ground (who describe themselves as “dedicated to ‘clearing the fog’ of disinformation on campus related to the Middle East”) invited former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to Ann Arbor.

Bennett is usually considered a pretty hard-right figure—after Trump was elected in 2016, he commented that “[t]he era of a Palestinian state is over,” and advocated for an even more aggressive policy toward West Bank settlements than then-PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

But Anshel Pfeffer’s reporting in Haaretz casts some doubt on this picture:

People who have worked closely with [Bennett] insist he’s actually much more moderate and the hard-right statements are largely electioneering to differentiate himself from Netanyahu. “Just wait until Netanyahu goes and there’s a bit more space,” one of them once said. “Naftali will become much more moderate and try to appeal to centrist voters.”

This view was basically totally vindicated when Bennett entered a coalition with left-wing parties in 2021 and became Prime Minister. He pledged to freeze new settlement constructions in the West Bank, officially recognize Bedouin settlements in Israel’s south, and to fight violent crime within Arab Israeli communities—even as he faced death threats over his moderation.

Bennett was slated to give the keynote address at an event called “Division to Dialogue: Bridging Perspectives in the Middle East.” Naturally, Michigan’s campus exploded with pro-Palestinian protests, but Facts on the Ground remained committed to their event, hoping to dispel disinformation about the war.

And then, just hours before Bennett’s talk began, organizers abruptly announced that it would be moved online. FOG’s executive director explained that he’d discovered hundreds of tickets sold to attendees with names like “Unalive Zionists,” “Nazi Zionists,” and “Israel Hitler.”

Protest leader Salma Hamamy explained that “there’s a lot of grief and pain that comes with (Bennett) being present here.” She criticized the event’s pro-peace billing, accusing its planners of “pushing the Zionist propaganda and narrative under this guise of saying ‘We’re just trying to simulate peace’.”

To me, this looks like a near-exact mirror of the story of Ben-Gvir at Yale. And I think we can all agree that, even though it involves protestors protesting, it’s Not Really Free Speech.

Since this time last year, the vibe has absolutely shifted—but, as

Bentham's Bulldog

has argued extensively, wokism isn’t dead. If anything, it’s become stronger—a woke president is in the White House; woke feline excrement rules the discourse.

When Shmully Hecht tries to cancel insufficiently Kahanist Jews, boasts about his Based admiration for Ben-Gvir, and needlessly stirs shit up on campus, I think we can all agree that, even though it involves a controversial speaker speaking, it’s Not Really Free Speech.

Sticking to principle is difficult. Few are capable of it. Hananias are the exception, not the rule.

For higher education to survive, for Yale to remain a useful, interesting place where useful, interesting debates are held, the left and the right must both abandon illiberalism. Organizations and societies committed to balanced and free dialogue should engage in balanced and free dialogue. Protestors committed to progressive causes should remain nonviolent, shouldn’t play into their political enemies’ hands.

Free thought in the US is under attack. It’s time to quit the infighting, quit the bottle-throwing, quit the Jew-passage-blocking, and quit the lib-triggering. Time to act like mature adults and trustworthy elites. Or else it’s all over: the deep state loses, the populists win.

1. I can’t recommend this article enough. It’s utterly hilarious to see extremely privileged Skull & Bones members doing somersaults to prove how oppressed they actually are. For example:

In 2021, Caleb Dunson, then a Yale sophomore, published an op-ed in the school newspaper with the title “Abolish Yale.” In the essay, he described his discomfort attending an opulent holiday feast for students while homeless people suffered in the cold nearby. The school operates “under the assumption that only a small group of remarkable people can push humanity forward,” wrote Dunson, who is Black. “It started off excluding women and people of color from its student body and now parades them around for diversity photos and social justice brownie points.” Even if the university made marginal changes—which Dunson argued it had been reluctant to do—its nature would remain the same. “Since we can’t change Yale, we have to tear it down,” he wrote.

Today, Dunson is a member of one of the Ancient Eight societies. He knows how that looks. When I asked him about the apparent contradiction, he said he decided to join in order to make new friends and be part of a community, but acknowledged that he was attracted to the status that being in a society confers. “Once you get a tap for a society, it’s funny how quickly you get invested in the preservation of that society,” he told me. Ultimately, he said, given that his political views are at odds with attending Yale in the first place, “there’s already a bit of cognitive dissonance,” so joining a secret society wasn’t such a big leap.

Go off, king.