I Came to America for Free Speech—Then I Saw How It’s Policed: Part 2
We’ve gone from cancel culture to capture culture. The woke revolution may be over in 2025—but the MAGA revolution is just getting started.
Hey, Thought Criminals—
This is Part Two of my personal essay on free speech in America. If you haven’t read Part One yet, I hope you’ll go back and check it out. It’s the story of what happened when I arrived at an American college ready to write, debate, and think critically—only to discover that certain truths were off-limits, and silence had become the tuition fee for social acceptance. It’s about ideology masquerading as education, digital witch hunts dressed up as accountability, and the cold chill of cancel culture when your classmates start treating your Instagram like it’s evidence in a trial for wrongthink.
This second installment is about what happened when I got to NYU—where institutional neutrality went out the window, and activism started sounding more like orthodoxy. It’s about how the progressive movement began devouring itself with moral absolutism… and how, in the void it left behind, the authoritarian Right swooped in with its own brand of censorship, deportation threats, and red-hatted retribution.
This essay is personal. It’s political. And it’s meant to provoke—not because provocation is the goal, but because real conversation is impossible without it. So read it. Sit with it. Argue with it. Just don’t scroll past it like it’s another hot take on the algorithm’s conveyor belt.
Because the fight for free speech isn’t left or right. It’s yours.
—Jay Sophalkalyan
In mid-2021, I was back in Cambodia, holed up in my bedroom with the AC on life support and the WiFi dropping every time it rained. COVID was still in full swing, everything had moved online, and the last gasp of my inner social justice warrior was croaking under a damp, smothering blanket of reality.
As it turned out, it was hard to stay outraged about microaggressions when the power cut out six times a day. Harder still to stay invested in the ideological cage matches of Western academia when I was in a place where people were too busy bribing traffic cops and boiling rainwater to notice—or care—that someone had misgendered them. What actually mattered? Whether one of my relatives might get arrested for criticizing the prime minister’s pandemic response.
And identity politics? That is a luxury belief—a boutique import from countries wealthy enough to bicker over bathroom signage. Here, the ground is too dry, too cracked, for the soft vocabulary of safe spaces and land acknowledgments to take root.
Back in the United States, my classmates were still locked in Zoom debates over “Latinx” versus “Latine,” while I was wondering whether the neighborhood power outage was from a transformer explosion or just another blackout nobody was going to fix. And somewhere between the flickering lights and endless Instagram videos about privilege, I felt it: the slow, humiliating death of my ideological idealism.
By the time I finished my undergraduate studies and moved to New York City for my master’s in 2022, the U.S. was still reeling from the twin blows of the pandemic and political unrest. One of the most jarring indicators of the post-2020 unraveling was the surge in violent crime. In the first quarter of 2021 alone, homicides rose by 24% compared to the same period in 2020—an increase of 193 deaths. Compared to 2019, the jump was even starker: a 49% rise, with 324 more lives lost. Aggravated assaults were up 7%, and gun assaults spiked by a staggering 22%. The violence hit hardest in low-income neighborhoods, where school closures, job losses, and gutted community programs created a perfect storm of despair and volatility. The social fabric frayed in real-time.
However, the story of that spike isn’t complete without talking about what happened to the police. After the killing of George Floyd and the eruption of nationwide protests under the Black Lives Matter banner, policing in America didn’t just come under fierce criticism—it underwent a kind of existential crisis. In cities like New York, cops didn’t just feel abandoned—they felt politically orphaned. Morale tanked. Department veterans walked off the job in record numbers, convinced no one had their backs. Many felt disheartened by mounting public hostility and the growing ambiguity of their role—trapped between calls for reform and a creeping sense that their entire profession was being delegitimized wholesale.
Then came the reforms—chief among them, cashless bail—designed to level the playing field for low-income defendants who couldn’t afford to buy their way out of jail while awaiting trial. The premise was straightforward: do not incarcerate people solely because they are poor, especially for misdemeanors or non-violent offenses. In theory, it was about justice. In practice, it played out like a bad sitcom: repeat offenders cycling in and out of jail like there was a revolving door, with cops standing by like exasperated doormen. A string of high-profile cases involving re-arrested individuals quickly soured public opinion. What started as a progressive push for “equity” morphed into a public safety headache. Officers, already running on empty mental fuel, took the blame for a system that kept undoing their work before the ink on the arrest reports had even dried.
America quickly learned that the aftermath of the woke revolution was far from a triumph. The rallying cries of “defund the police” and the refrains about modern policing tracing back to slave patrols didn’t in the least inspire long-term commitment from officers already stretched thin and teetering on burnout. Many simply hung up their uniforms for good. In 2022 alone, the NYPD saw 3,701 officers resign or retire—the largest exodus since 9/11. And it wasn’t the anarchist utopia some had imagined. Because when there are fewer cops, crime doesn’t take a sabbatical. It throws a victory parade.
All of a sudden, the progressive ideals that had reached a fever pitch just a few years earlier—toppling statues, renaming institutions, and redefining social norms—were no longer riding the same wave of unchallenged momentum. The cultural tide had crested. America had lived through the revolution—and now it was standing in the quiet wreckage, trying to make sense of what came next.
In New York, the pendulum swing came with a badge. In 2021, voters elected Eric Adams—a Black former NYPD captain—as mayor, and by 2022, he was in office with a message that hit differently: you can want police reform and still want the police to show up when you call 911.
It wasn’t just a campaign. It was a recalibration. Many New Yorkers—especially in working-class and Black and Brown neighborhoods—felt the calls to defund the police were big on moral urgency but light on practical alternatives. Adams tapped into that fatigue, offering something rare in the post-2020 landscape: pragmatism. He portrayed public safety not as a betrayal of progressivism but as its prerequisite. His pitch? We don’t have to choose between justice and safety. Reform the system, sure—but do not throw out the entire infrastructure while people are still getting shot. For many, that was enough. Ideology had met its match: reality.
And I carried that reckoning with me to NYU.
When I arrived on campus in the fall of 2022, I was no longer the starry-eyed idealist I’d once been. I had seen too much. Felt too much. Cambodia had burned the fuzz off my vision; America had stripped away the rest. Yet, you’d think all that ideological whiplash might’ve taught me some caution—maybe sparked a little instinct for self-preservation. But no. I marched straight into the lion’s den, syllabus in hand, and enrolled in a master’s program called Experimental Humanities—NYU’s avant-garde sandbox for the philosophically restless.
It was the kind of place where we read Marx in the morning, Butler in the afternoon, and spent our evenings wondering whether language was even real. A heady mash-up of philosophy, literature, media theory, and art history—shot through with high culture, radical critique, and the occasional existential free-fall. The coursework examined how technology reshapes culture, how language refracts power, and how meaning is made (and unmade) in the age of algorithms. Bold. Bizarre. Often impenetrable. And I was all in.
Not just out of masochism—though, let’s be honest, there was some of that—but because I was still curious. Or maybe just too stubborn to disengage from the world of ideas. And this—this intellectual gauntlet of code, discourse, platforms, and pixels—was where the real fight over meaning was unfolding. Not in courtrooms, but in classrooms. In servers. In syntax.
Because even after everything—the brownouts, the ideological disillusionment, the culture-war fatigue—I still believed in the power of ideas. I just didn’t believe they should be immune to cross-examination anymore. And this? This was the crucible of ideas.
One of the required courses in my first semester at NYU was an Interdisciplinarity class—essentially a crash course in Marxist, poststructuralist, and postmodernist thought. And God, I have never despised Michel Foucault more in my life.
I remember that class vividly—not just for the dense readings or the weekly ritual of showboating dialectics—but because it marked the first time I found myself doing something borderline heretical for a humanities student: defending the scientific method. The moment came during our discussion of “The Egg and the Sperm” by feminist scholar Emily Martin. The essay critiques how scientific literature historically describes fertilization in gendered terms: sperm are “active,” “heroic,” and “penetrating”; eggs are “passive,” “receptive,” and “docile.” These metaphors, Martin argued, don’t just describe biology—they reinforce cultural stereotypes about men and women. The essay was then leveraged as evidence that science itself is inherently biased, that objectivity is a myth, and that truth—like gender—is socially constructed. Cue the postmodernist victory lap.
The irony, of course, is that Martin’s critique only works because of the scientific method. It is precisely through advancements in imaging technology, cellular biology, and biochemistry that we now know the egg is not passive at all. It releases chemical signals (chemoattractants) to guide sperm. Its surface molecules facilitate binding. In some species, it even extends microvilli to reach out and “grab” the sperm. That is not cultural metaphor—that is empirical observation. That is science doing what science does best: correcting its own errors.
Yes, biases exist in scientific discourse, but science is a self-correcting enterprise that identifies and refines our understanding over time. It doesn’t claim to be infallible; it claims to be falsifiable. That is the whole point. What struck me most wasn’t just the class’s casual dismissal of objectivity—it was the sense that acknowledging science’s limitations had become license to abandon it altogether. As if recognizing bias meant we could retreat into relativism rather than press forward with better tools and sharper scrutiny. Martin’s essay, in my view, doesn’t undermine science. It vindicates it. Because what ultimately dismantled those outdated metaphors wasn’t radical theory—it was better data.
I doubt the professor was particularly fond of me after that.
For our final project, we were instructed to select a research topic that demanded an interdisciplinary approach. Most of my classmates dutifully delivered titles like “Epistemic Violence in Digital Archives,” “The Biopolitics of the Gaze,” or “Liminality in Postcolonial Sonic Landscapes.” All very on-brand. The kind of academic Mad Libs that guarantee polite nods and zero follow-up questions.
I took a different route. My project was titled: “Black-White Binary & The Misdiagnosis of Violent Crime in Asian Communities.” The premise was blunt: after 2020, violent crime spiked across the country—something both FBI data and local police reports confirmed. But when that violence hit Asian American communities, particularly during the pandemic, the story shifted. Facts became footnotes. Ideology took center stage.
Take March 16, 2021. A gunman attacked three massage parlors in the Atlanta area, killing eight people—six of them women of Asian descent. The shooter was white. Within hours, headlines declare, “White supremacy and hate are haunting Asian Americans.” Instant outrage. National soul-searching. Think pieces by breakfast.
Yet, the truth, inconveniently, was more complicated. According to Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds, there was no evidence the crime was racially motivated. The shooter had been a patient at HopeQuest, an evangelical rehab center for sex addiction, located near the first spa he targeted. His stated motive? To purge himself of lust by eliminating what he viewed as “sources of temptation.”
Most reports left out the detail that he was apprehended en route to Florida, where he allegedly planned to attack a non-Asian-owned pornography business. That alone muddies the racialized narrative. This wasn’t a hate crime in the traditional sense—it looked more like an American-style honor killing: a misogynistic moral crusade disguised as spiritual redemption. But let’s face it—“Evangelical Sex Panic Ends in Tragedy” doesn’t trend as fast as “White Supremacy Strikes Again.”
Even more troubling, as political scientist Wilfred Reilly noted in Commentary magazine, the majority of violent crimes against Asians during the COVID era were not committed by white supremacists. They were committed by Black offenders—often in blue cities, governed by progressive leaders, where police departments had been defanged in the name of justice reform. But because identity politics runs on a strict binary—white equals oppressor, Black equals oppressed—these incidents created a logistical nightmare for the narrative-industrial complex. So, they were either ignored, reframed, or chalked up to the nebulous specter of “structural whiteness.”
Somehow, even when the attacker wasn’t white, whiteness still took the blame. Structural racism became a kind of ghost in the machine: invisible, omnipresent, and always Republican. And when Trump called COVID-19 the “Chinese virus,” every punch thrown at an elderly Asian in Oakland or Queens was supposedly his fault—regardless of whether the assailant had ever seen a press briefing, let alone voted for Trump himself.
This is what my project interrogated: What happens when the black-white binary becomes the only lens through which we are allowed to interpret crime, victimhood, or justice? The answer, it turns out, is that we stop seeing what is actually happening and start asking how fast we can blame the usual suspect. Because what essentially drove the uptick in attacks wasn’t ideology—it was policy and impunity. Fewer cops. Slower response times. A public safety system hollowed out by slogans.
I got a B in that class (which, if you’re Asian, is basically academic purgatory). But it wasn’t exactly a shocker. By then, I’d made my peace with it. I hadn’t played the game, hadn’t recited the liturgy, hadn’t wrapped my arguments in enough layers of poststructuralist cotton to make them palatable. What I did do was engage—really engage. I questioned assumptions. I treated academic texts like they were meant to be treated—as ideas, not commandments. And I kept dragging the conversation back to where it mattered most: the real world.
Because for all its theoretical rigor, that class was allergic to application. We could spend forty-five minutes unpacking Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author—deconstructing the tyranny of intention, exalting the primacy of the reader—but recoil at the idea that critical race theory might, just maybe, have consequences when misapplied outside a syllabus. That it might create blind spots. Misdiagnose problems. Or be used not as a lens, but as a weapon. My sin wasn’t ignorance. It was irreverence.
I wrote what I believed. Spoke up when I disagreed. And somewhere along the way, I stopped flinching at the low hum of potential cancellation vibrating under the seminar table. That dull, omnipresent buzz—like an electric fence surrounding every conversation. Don’t say this. Don’t cite that. Phrase it just so.
But I’d already lived through blackout-induced epiphanies in Phnom Penh. I’d already watched ideology unravel at the edge of its usefulness. So, I stopped forfeiting my First Amendment rights in exchange for polite silence. And once I did, the sky didn’t fall. No mobs, no manifestos, no digital torches. Just a grade that said, “We see you—and we don’t quite like what we see.”
To be fair, it was just that one class that felt dogmatic—the kind of echo chamber where dissent didn’t quite vibe with the aesthetic. NYU, overall, was nowhere near the ideological minefield I’d tiptoed through at Springfield College. I don’t know if it’s because New York City is genuinely bigger, louder, and more intellectually diverse, or if I just got better at curating my coursework. Or maybe I merely stopped caring about fitting in with the orthodoxy.
For a while, it felt like I’d found a fragile equilibrium—a space where nuance could still breathe, where disagreement wasn’t automatically heresy. Little did I know, that brittle sense of intellectual openness wouldn’t last.
If my undergraduate years were shaped by the upheaval following George Floyd’s killing, then the political climate of my graduate studies would be defined by a different flashpoint: October 7, 2023.
That day, Hamas launched a brutal, coordinated attack on Israel, killing over a thousand people, many of them civilians. The images that emerged were harrowing. Entire families murdered in their homes. Concertgoers gunned down. Children taken hostage. It was, by every standard of international law and civilizational sanity, an act of terrorism. Nevertheless, what came after, especially on college campuses across America, was something I was not prepared for.
University administrators suddenly found themselves in a strange bind. For years, they’d embraced a posture of moral clarity—a kind of performative certainty that made their jobs easier. When in doubt, side with the marginalized. The oppressed. The voiceless. The moral calculus was simple: power plus privilege equals villainy. Victimhood equals virtue. Yet, after October 7, that equation stopped balancing.
In the context of Israel and Palestine, who ultimately was the oppressor, and who was the oppressed? Palestine is a stateless, war-torn territory with limited resources. If it goes to war with Israel, it does so from a severe disadvantage. However, Israel is also a country born out of genocide—a refuge for Jews who, after the Holocaust, needed a homeland. The lines weren’t clear. History had blood on both hands.
Still, many in academia tried to flatten it—tried to construe it through the only lens they knew. The melanin math. Israel became a stand-in for white colonialism. Palestinians were cast as indigenous victims. Zionists were slotted into the same villain category as cops, landlords, and fossil fuel executives. Even if the reality was far more intricate, the script was already written.
And then the institutions started to crack.
The reckoning came in December 2023, during a congressional hearing that summoned the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT to answer for the surge of antisemitism on their campuses. What transpired wasn’t just a hearing—it was a public unmasking. A case study in what happens when moral absolutism collides with a crisis too convoluted for campus slogans. It was also a glimpse into the consequences of what happens when institutions abandon neutrality in favor of ideology—and then find themselves unable to navigate the fallout.
Congresswoman Elise Stefanik posed a direct question to UPenn President Liz Magill: “I am asking, specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?”
Magill answered, “It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.”
Context-dependent. That was the phrase.
To be clear, there are many political slogans—“Globalize the Intifada,” for instance—that are intentionally vague, emotionally charged, and legally protected by the First Amendment. Speech like that, even when incendiary, is part of the rough-and-tumble of free expression. But explicitly calling for the genocide of Jewish people? That’s not nuance. That’s not criticism. That’s incitement.
Yet, this was the new posture of elite institutions: hedged, hesitant, haunted by the very purism they once wore like armor. Back in 2020, silence was violence. In 2023, violence was… contextual.
Meanwhile, at NYU, students were filmed tearing down posters showing photos of kidnapped Israeli civilians with the message: “Please help bring them home alive.”
I’ll be honest—Middle Eastern geopolitics isn’t my strong suit. I don’t have a dogmatic stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. But why is it that, time and again, the instinct among progressive activists is to meet competing ideas not with better arguments, but with erasure?
What else can you call it when expressive materials are torn down, when speech is met with vandalism or shouted down in the name of justice? Disagreement is not violence. But silencing dissent? That’s how free societies start to curdle. This isn’t just about campus theatrics. It’s about the core tenet that underpins any functioning democracy: the right to speak—and to be heard. However upsetting the topic, however emotionally fraught the debate, the answer isn’t censorship. It’s engagement. Respond. Challenge. Publish a counterargument. Organize a forum. There’s no shortage of tools in the democratic toolkit. But do not pull someone else’s voice off the wall because it leaves you disconcerted.
Sooner or later, that discord found its way into my own department, XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement. It started with one or two professors encouraging students to join a hunger strike in solidarity with Gaza. Then came the Stasi-like reporting.
On December 1, 2023, one international student from XE was summoned by the Office of Student Conduct and the Bias Response Line after anonymous reports accused her of “aggressively questioning another student about their views on Palestine and Hamas based on their perceived ethnicity, and repeatedly hitting them on the arm.”
The reality, though, was murkier—and more mundane. The alleged incident took place off-campus, at a dinner between the international student and her accuser nearly a month earlier, on November 2. The topic of Israel and Palestine came up, and the two engaged in what, by all accounts, was an intellectual conversation about the conflict and its historical context. Sometime afterward, their friendship soured. And with it came the weaponization of bureaucracy.
The accusation didn’t appear to be about bigotry or bias—it was about revenge. A personal grudge, couched in the rhetoric of institutional concern. In the end, it wasn’t the content of the conversation that triggered the investigation—it was the optics. The discomfort. The narrative possibility. Disagreement can be reframed as harassment, and a dinner table debate can be retrofitted into a conduct violation. The mechanisms designed to protect vulnerable students from genuine harm have been repurposed to punish thought crimes. And the line between safeguarding and surveillance is thinner than we like to admit.
Then there was Caustic Frolic, NYU’s interdisciplinary journal of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art—run by students, funded by the XE department, and supposedly editorially independent, though apparently not immune to virtue grandstanding.
On November 6, 2023, the journal’s editor-in-chief received an email from a contributor demanding that Caustic Frolic release an official statement on the Israel-Palestine conflict. If not, the contributor warned, they would withdraw their piece, stating they didn’t wish to be published alongside a journal that wasn’t explicitly in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
The editor-in-chief brought the matter to the full editorial team, outlining three possible courses of action:
Uphold apolitical neutrality and permit the creator to quietly withdraw their work.
Uphold apolitical neutrality, allow the creator to retract their work, and offer the option to leave the pulled page blank — accompanied by an explanation for the omission to preserve the historical context.
Agree to issue a written statement.
In the email thread that followed, the editors rallied behind Option 3 with the zeal of people who seemed to believe they were auditioning for a self-righteous chorus. “To remain apolitical in general, but today in particular, is to be complicit to what is going on in the world,” one wrote—unironically, as if a literary journal declining to issue geopolitical manifestos was tantamount to aiding and abetting war crimes. Another added, “Because we have a platform, we have a responsibility to use our voice to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.”
After a collective vote within the editorial board, 77% favored Option 3, while only 23% supported Options 1 and 2 combined.
What makes this decision so emblematic isn’t just the result—it’s the sheer abandonment of the journal’s own stated mission. Nowhere in Caustic Frolic’s mandate is there any suggestion that the publication intends to issue political statements on behalf of its staff. Quite the opposite. The journal claims it exists to “elevate the work of creators and thinkers” and to “incite conversations about social change by providing space for [their] contributors.” In other words, it’s supposed to host the critics, not become one.
Like the Kalven Principle of institutional neutrality, this model works precisely because it leaves room for complexity—because it trusts contributors to speak for themselves, rather than conscripting the entire publication into ideological service. But that distinction—between a platform and a pulpit—was lost in the fog of performative urgency.
Even though I was part of the XE department, I had never been involved with Caustic Frolic. My editorial home was elsewhere—The Journal of Political Inquiry (JPI), NYU’s graduate-run publication affiliated with the Department of International Relations. Unlike Caustic Frolic, which leaned into the avant-garde and poetic, JPI operated more like a hybrid between Boston Review and Dissent Magazine—a space where we published online opinion pieces, cultural criticism, and political analysis throughout the semester while releasing a more formal, peer-reviewed journal twice a year. It was meant to be serious. Nuanced. Grounded.
The editorial structure captured that dual identity. Leadership was split three ways: the editor-in-chief of the academic journal, the editor-in-chief of the online magazine, and me—the deputy editor-in-chief for online content.
When one of the editors from Caustic Frolic shared the internal email thread with me—hoping I’d write something about their editorial pivot—I did. I wrote an article titled “Grasping the Departure from Institutional Neutrality.” The piece argued for the importance of institutional neutrality—not just in universities, but in student-run publications as well. I used Caustic Frolic as a case study to examine why institutions often stray from neutrality, proposing that the root causes are twofold: ideological capture and a deficit of courage among those in charge.
When the editor-in-chief of JPI online magazine read my draft, her reaction was... peculiar. She forwarded the piece to the editor-in-chief of the academic journal—a role that typically had no editorial authority over the online magazine. What followed was a message from that editor in our shared WhatsApp group that read less like collegial input and more like a preemptive damage-control memo:
I just want to say that I’ve already done conflict resolution for one student group this year due to the Israeli-Palestine conflict. I really don’t want to do another one in JPI. And the fallout of the consequences if we were to call out another student magazine. The entire environment at NYU right now has made me reflect on how important it is that students take a moment to reflect on how we're treating each other and valuing each other in their own communities. It [is] OUR intellectual environment that we're building. And we want to make sure it’s safe, respectful, and conducive for education. This is our community that’s being impacted by an international conflict. While students are actively discouraging and harming each other through hate speech and other forms of mistreatment, we as leaders need to do better by reflecting on ourselves, how we’re behaving towards each other, and leading our organizations.
Shortly after, I received a joint email from both editors. The article hadn’t even finished the editing process, much less been scheduled for publication—there was no deadline, no rollout plan. Yet their message was clear: drop it. What made the situation even stranger was that the three of us were already in regular contact through WhatsApp. We could’ve had a straightforward editorial conversation. Instead, the tone of the email was stilted and corporate—like it had been drafted by HR rather than fellow students. The email read, in part:
Given your affiliation with the department, the case example of NYU’s Caustic Frolic and criticism of its internal decision (publicly unavailable) raises conflict of interest issues. If done ethically and legally under the whistleblower doctrine, we apologize that the JPI is not the right platform for this article. […] Your article’s detailed criticism of Caustic Frolic’s internal leadership decision with multiple hypotheses comes across as trivial and personal. Further, the criticism from a leadership position in the JPI risks organizational harmony during sensitive times.
So there it was—an unsolicited ethics ruling, cloaked in bureaucratic language, effectively urging me to self-censor for the sake of “organizational harmony.” Never mind that the piece was grounded in a clear-eyed critique, not personal grievance. Never mind that no one had been named, doxxed, or misrepresented. What mattered, evidently, was that the article had touched a nerve—and nerves, it seemed, now counted as editorial boundaries.
Even more absurd was the claim that referencing an internal decision from another student-run publication was somehow an ethical breach—simply because the information wasn’t “publicly available.” That’s not how journalism works. The standard isn’t whether something is already public; it’s whether the outlet obtained the material lawfully. If someone voluntarily shares internal communications, and no crime is committed in acquiring them, that’s fair game. This isn’t a secret tribunal—it’s a university. And these editors were acting like I was leaking nuclear codes, not quoting from an internal email thread about a student journal’s editorial vote.
Have they never heard of New York Times Co. v. United States, 1971? The Pentagon Papers case? The Supreme Court ruled that media outlets could publish classified government documents—classified—so long as they had been obtained lawfully. And here we were, wringing our hands over the ethics of printing a student’s email about a literary journal’s editorial decision. The cognitive dissonance would’ve been funny if it weren’t so bleak. Because if even student journals cannot hold space for principled dissent, how do we expect democracy to?
I eventually learned that the editor-in-chief of the academic journal was also the president of NYU’s Graduate Student Council (GSC), and the “conflict resolution” she referenced had taken place there. That context made her tone in the joint email all the more revealing. “Given your affiliation with the department,” she wrote, “the case example of NYU’s Caustic Frolic and criticism of its internal decision (publicly unavailable) raises conflict of interest issues.” It was hypocritical on its face—and unmistakably self-serving. Apparently, the mere fact that I belonged to the XE department made it a “conflict of interest” for me to comment on a student-run publication in the same department—even though I had no axe to grind, no vendetta, no personal issue with Caustic Frolic or its editor-in-chief. We knew each other, sure, but we weren’t adversaries. We were cordial. Friendly, even.
The real issue, it seemed, wasn’t the ethics of the piece—it was the editor’s fear of having to mediate another student dispute. She didn’t want to go through a second round of conflict resolution after what she’d already dealt with in GSC. And so, instead of assessing the article on its merits, she treated it like a ticking bomb of interpersonal drama and tried to defuse it preemptively—with administrative angst and a flurry of procedural dithering.
If you're curious about the controversy in the Graduate Student Council that drew coverage from both NYU Review and Fox News, here’s the gist: Justin Feldman, a Jewish student who served in the GSC’s Justice Department, was ousted from his position after introducing a resolution titled “Condemning the Endorsement, Promotion, or Excusing of Civilian-Murder (Terrorism) in Academia.” He submitted it to the Student Government Assembly—the broader body that encompasses the GSC—and the fallout became national news.
Full disclosure: Justin is a friend of mine. However, I will not be weighing in publicly on what happened, as I haven’t done a deep dive into the situation. I’ve read the articles, and Justin has shared his side with me, but I don’t consider a friend’s personal account sufficient for citation in an essay like this.
Afterward, I decided to resign from JPI just before Thanksgiving in 2023. I was proud of what I’d accomplished during my time there—from designing the new website and logo the summer I stepped into the role of deputy editor-in-chief, to working closely with columnists and commissioning pieces from students across campus to ensure JPI showcased a range of voices—not just from the usual activist cliques with the loudest hashtags. But I couldn’t keep lending my time to a publication where writing about institutional neutrality was seen as a threat to harmony. When journalism begins to mistake discomfort for danger, it has already lost the plot.
By spring 2024, the storm hadn’t passed. Protests over the Israel-Palestine conflict were still roiling campuses across the country, and New York City had become the epicenter of the unrest. Columbia University, in particular, emerged as ground zero for large-scale pro-Palestinian demonstrations that upended campus life. On April 17, students set up the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on university grounds, demanding Columbia divest from entities tied to Israel. Organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD)—a coalition of over 100 student groups—the encampment swelled to around fifty tents.
Tensions reached a boiling point on April 29, when protesters occupied Hamilton Hall, one of Columbia’s most prominent academic buildings. The occupation and ongoing demonstrations forced the university to switch to hybrid learning for the rest of the semester, and eventually led to the cancellation of the main commencement ceremony scheduled for May 15.
Not to be outdone, across town in lower Manhattan, NYU launched its own encampment at Gould Plaza on April 22. Protestors echoed the call for divestment from companies supporting Israel. But when negotiations between the students and administration failed, NYU called in the NYPD to clear the encampment. In the aftermath, the Student Government Assembly (SGA) released a public statement condemning the university’s decision to involve law enforcement.
Four days later, on April 26, the editor-in-chief of JPI online magazine emailed the editorial board, asking members to vote on whether the publication should co-sign the SGA’s statement. A two-thirds majority would be needed to move forward. Given the editorial panic attack my defense of neutrality had triggered about five months earlier, I wasn’t exactly surprised. Of course, the next logical step would be to try and turn a student-run political journal into a megaphone for institutional condemnation. It was activism by consensus, journalism by peer pressure.
My relationship with both editors-in-chief at JPI remained cordial after I stepped down. I didn’t harbor any resentment. We simply had different visions for what JPI should be. But over time, something shifted.
On April 27, I posted a screenshot from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), arguably the most prominent free speech organization in the U.S. The post explained the distinction between free speech and civil disobedience—specifically that much of what we’ve seen on college campuses lately isn’t protected speech under the First Amendment. It’s civil disobedience.
I added my own caption:
I politically disagree with some of the antisemitic rhetoric that emerged from the pro-Palestine camp. However, on the principle of free speech, I support their right to protest. That being said, much of what we've witnessed on college campuses constitutes civil disobedience. Civil disobedience draws its expressive power from participants' willingness to accept the consequences of breaking the rules, illustrating their intensity of feeling. If you engage in civil disobedience, such as a sit-in or encampment, solely because you believe you can do so without consequences, it amounts to virtue signaling and performative activism at best.
That was too much for one of my former colleagues—the editor-in-chief of JPI academic journal and president of NYU’s Graduate Student Council. She slid into my DMs to set me straight:
You should really examine your own internal biases before spreading misinformation that can hurt students. Zionists don’t recognize any of the atrocities in Palestine, or the different Jewish voices coming out of Israel and the US. Why can’t we all agree that violence needs to end?
And then, for the mic drop:
You’re okay with Palestinian kids dying and I’m not.
Yes. This, from the same person who told me I couldn’t publish my article on institutional neutrality at JPI because of a supposed “conflict of interest.” It would’ve been laughable if it weren’t so ludicrous—because of the three of us on JPI leadership, I probably had the least conflict of interest. I’ve never been pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. I’ve never joined a protest since October 7. The most “controversial” thing I’ve done is publish a piece in Quillette exposing the intellectual bankruptcy of decolonization rhetoric when it’s taken to its logical—and sometimes lethal—conclusion. (It’s called “The Deadly Logic of Decolonization.”)
Beyond that, my only consistent position has been a rebuke of both sides when their protests crossed the line from protected expression to conduct outside the bounds of the First Amendment. I’ve called out suppression, wherever it came from. I’ve argued for institutional neutrality—not because I want to silence anyone, but because after everything we’ve been through, people still don’t seem to get it.
Supporting institutional neutrality is the only way to protect everyone’s speech—not just the most boisterous faction with the most activist energy, who have ideologically captured the institution. When institutions start issuing political declarations, they stop being forums for open inquiry and turn into ventriloquist dummies for groupthink. They declare allegiances and they do it on behalf of everyone under their roof, regardless of whether some of those people would rather not be conscripted into the cause of the week.
The line between liberal democracy and majoritarianism is not just a technicality—it is the difference between a constitutional republic and a numbers game. In a democracy, we do not get to vote away someone’s rights. Not even if we have a two-thirds supermajority on the editorial board. Liberal democracy protects the individual from the mob, not leaves them at its mercy. It is built on the idea that fundamental rights—like speech—are not up for a popularity contest. Because the moment we decide that principles can be suspended to suit the prevailing moral wind, we’ve stopped practicing democracy.
Neutrality, in this context, is not passive. It’s protective. It’s what keeps dissent from being sacrificed on the altar of consensus. It ensures that disagreement isn’t punished and that minority viewpoints don’t get bulldozed by the tyranny of the majority. Because when the crowd gets to decide which views are institutionally acceptable, we don’t get justice. We get a popularity cult in a mortarboard.
None of this is to say that protest doesn’t matter. It does. I’ll always defend every individual’s right to peaceful protest—especially in academic spaces, where dissent should be part of the fabric. But there’s a difference between protest and performance, between civil disobedience and institutional sabotage. What happened at Columbia and NYU wasn’t just protest—it was disruption for disruption’s sake. Blocking entrances, seizing buildings, derailing classes, threatening graduation ceremonies—these weren’t noble acts of civil disobedience, let alone expressions of free speech. They were tantrums cosplaying in the drag of activist jargon, strutting like it was haute couture. If your message only resonates when paired with a megaphone and a barricade, maybe it needs more substance.
As NYU President Linda Mills explained, “Social media was used to summon hundreds of people to our campus, including people who did not have permission to be at NYU and who we believed significantly threatened our community. Of the 133 individuals arrested on Gould Plaza, only 65 – i.e., fewer than half – were current NYU students, faculty, or staff.”
But the real irony? All of this—every placard, protest, performative policy statement—staging itself like a warm-up act before a much larger political shift.
By November 2024, America had done the unthinkable twice: Donald Trump was elected back in the White House, and this time, he didn’t just squeeze through the Electoral College. He won the popular vote. With that, he gained something more potent than political capital: cultural momentum.
Now, the campuses that once fancied themselves as the conscience of the nation started to look less like vanguards of social justice and more like out-of-touch archipelagos being swallowed by a rising red tide. Yet the battle for freedom of expression didn’t get any easier.
Because despite all the Right-wing chest-thumping about “cancel culture” and the sacredness of the First Amendment, the idea that conservatives are inherently more pro-free speech is, frankly, a fairy tale. A convenient one, sure—but still a fairy tale. For years, the Right struck an admirable pose: defenders of open discourse, champions of heterodoxy, stewards of the lonely American principle that we can say what we think and not lose our job over it. Nevertheless, that noble posture was forged in exile—when conservatives had no foothold in Hollywood writers’ rooms, publishing houses, Ivy League faculties, and HR departments. When one is locked out of the castle, freedom of speech is their last battering ram.
Even so, power changes people. And when the balance of power begins to tilt in the Right’s favor—as it clearly is now—what usually emerges isn’t some libertarian oasis of aspirational pluralism. It is a mirror image of the very authoritarian impulses the Right once spent years accusing the Left of harboring—it is just draped in Stars and Stripes.
Consider the lawsuits filed against the Des Moines Register and its pollster, J. Ann Selzer, over a flawed poll that wrongly predicted Trump’s loss in Iowa during the 2024 election—despite his eventual victory in the state. Or the White House barring the Associated Press from the press pool after the AP refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” Or the FCC and other agencies being used to investigate and sanction media outlets for negative coverage.
Perhaps the most brazen overreach to date, though, is the Trump administration’s attempt to deport green card holder Mahmoud Khalil. Khalil came to the U.S. on a student visa, married an American citizen, got his green card, and is now sitting in a Louisiana detention center for... what, exactly? Nobody seems to know, least of all the White House, which has yet to offer a coherent legal justification beyond waving the words “national security” around like a magic wand.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed Khalil was being targeted under some broad legal authority that lets the secretary of state personally label people as adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States. She accused Khalil of siding with terrorists, organizing group protests that disrupted classes and harassed Jewish students, and spreading pro-Hamas propaganda. She also suggested DHS is hunting for other individuals at Columbia who have engaged in similar activity.
Indeed, there are students at Columbia whose rhetoric crosses into open Hamas support. I don’t endorse that position—but under the First Amendment, as long as they don’t venture into incitement, material support, or true threats, it is still legally protected speech. That is how free speech works in this country.
There’s a legitimate argument to be made about Khalil’s role in Columbia’s CUAD. Some outlets, like The Guardian, have described him as a “lead negotiator.” Others have said that he was a leader within the group behind property damage, building occupations, and the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Khalil, for his part, maintains that he served only as a spokesperson for the protesters and a mediator with the university.
If he did participate in the encampment, then yes—that qualifies as civil disobedience, which means he knowingly broke the law. He could be charged with criminal trespass. Even if Khalil didn’t personally camp out, his level of involvement still matters. If he helped coordinate logistics for an encampment on private property without permission, that could amount to criminal trespass conspiracy. If he encouraged, facilitated, or actively assisted an illegal protest—even without being physically present—that constitutes aiding and abetting, making him legally liable as an accomplice. These are real charges that could have been pursued. But none of them were.
Instead, the government skipped past due process and hurled him into a detention center with a shrug toward “adversarial to national security interests”—a phrase so vague it could mean anything from espionage to posting a mean tweet about U.S. foreign policy. It’s not a legal standard; it’s a vibes-based immigration policy.
The First Amendment doesn’t come with an asterisk that says: “U.S. citizens only.” It applies to everyone on U.S. soil—including visa holders and green-card-carrying spouses of Americans. If political opinion alone becomes grounds for deportation, America stops being a nation of laws and starts playing Calvinball with civil liberties. We’ll have officially built a regime where non-citizens are expected to self-censor or risk state retaliation.
And Khalil isn’t the only cautionary tale. As I write this, another case is unfolding: Rümeysa Öztürk, a 30-year-old Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, was detained on March 25, 2025, by masked DHS agents in Somerville, Massachusetts—yes, masked agents, because nothing says "democratic transparency" like a secret-police cosplay. She was cuffed and dragged into an unmarked vehicle while on her way to dinner.
The Department of Homeland Security claims Öztürk engaged in activities supporting Hamas, which led to the revocation of her student visa. So far, however, the only publicly known evidence behind this claim is that she co-authored an op-ed in The Tufts Daily urging the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel, citing humanitarian concerns over the situation in Gaza.
That’s it. That’s the smoking gun. An opinion piece.
We’ve gone from cancel culture to capture culture—from a world where dissent was punished by mobs and social shame to one where it’s preemptively silenced by the machinery of the state. The woke revolution may be over in 2025—but the MAGA revolution is just getting started. And the truth is, neither side owns the principle of free speech. They only borrow it when it flatters their agenda.
I say this not as a partisan, but as someone who has lived between worlds. I am a third-culture kid—shaped by Western education, raised in the East, fluent in contradiction. I’ve lived under a regime where speech is monitored, molded, and muzzled. I know what it feels like when silence isn’t a choice, but a survival tactic. I grew up with a profound regard for the Enlightenment, not as some distant intellectual artifact, but as the philosophical engine behind every liberty I dared to dream of. And I believe, with all the stubbornness of someone who has seen the alternative, that the right to speak freely—without exile, punishment, or erasure—is not a left-wing value or a right-wing value. It is a civilizational value—a fragile inheritance from the salons of 18th-century Europe and the founding gamble of the American experiment.
I didn’t come to America in search of a utopia. I came in search of the struggle—for meaning, for truth, for the freedom to dissent out loud. That struggle is still worth having. But it asks more of us than slogans and sanctuaries. It asks for courage. Not just the courage to speak, but the rarer courage to listen—to let others speak, too, even when their words rattle our certainties. Especially then. Because a free society isn’t built on agreement. It’s built on the willingness to disagree—openly, honestly, and without retribution.
I chose America because it promised that space—for the messy, unfinished work of freedom. Not because it always gets it right, but because it dares to try. I still believe in that promise. And I intend to hold it to its word.
So should you.
