First of all, these were pro-Hamas demonstrations, not "pro-Palestinian," despite the lazy and biased framing of the media. Find one sign or one student in any of these protests denouncing Hamas. You can't, because they don't exist. And if you ask them, they all say the genocidal October 7 terrorist attack on civilians, including women, children and infants, was justifed or, at least, "understandable."
Second, the "I had a sniper rifle pointed at me" statement is unsubstantiated, highly suspect, and probably a lie, given the long pattern of behavior of the "Palestine" protestors in the West. The Herald-Times article does not substantiate that rifles were pointed at anyone. It indicates there were snipers on a rooftop, a decision of the Indiana State Police. Given they felt there was a possibility or threat of violence (my guess is "Globalize the Intifada" signs were present at the IU encampment), and that pro-Hamas protestors routinely engage in violence, an armed response is at least arguably justified and appears to be a law enforcement, not university, decision.
I wouldn't want to dispute that by failing to denounce Hamas's attack protesters became apologists for it, Kip, some actively. But your guesses about the fact of the Indiana University administration are mistaken. Recorded messaging between police and police headquarters revealed that the sniper guns were pointed, and were pointed at specific individuals based on their prominence among the protesters, as only the university would be able to specify (there were many, many more news stories on these events than the single Herald-Times report linked here). The decision to include snipers was approved by the university, which claimed it was business as usual.
The fact that the protesters failed to condemn Hamas, as (I believe) they should have, and the fact that they used (to my personal dismay) what had become a generic slogan that can be interpreted as echoing calls for violence ("Globalize the Intifada") does not alter the free speech status of the protest. The First Amendment importantly protects unpopular speech, and the university administration's decision to change the rules of the game in secret just hours before the protest (based on demonstrated and egregious ignorance of the actual policies it thought it was invoking) -- and then confronting demonstrators as they gathered to proceed in full compliance with actual policies (which they knew well and were carrying copies of with them), surrounding the demonstrators with ranks of ostentatiously armed State Police and stationing snipers on the tower above the demonstration as the police moved in and began to arrest people, was a clear provocation to create a response that could be used as a pretext to dissolve the demonstration by force. In sum, while claiming its actions were driven by concern of imminent violence, administrators seem to have decided to provoke violence that could justify broader restrictions on speech inconvenient to the university.
In the event, public reaction forced the university to back down after two waves of arrests that the local district attorney declined to recognize as justified, and the protesters occupied the grounds for two months without violence of any sort. When the administration persuaded the trustee board to alter the governing policy and gave notice of the change, the protesters departed without incident. (However, further protests were mounted because the new policies were clear violations of the First Amendments, as the university eventually conceded when, in the midst of an ACLU lawsuit that initial rulings indicated it would lose, it modified its new policy.)
There is much more to say, but the gist is that a public university, bound under the First Amendment, that had a particularly well known profile for protecting free speech has in a very short time been transformed just as FIRE has assessed it. Excuse-making that has accompanied its retaliation against the student newspaper -- always professing to cherish free speech -- has served only to underscore the way free speech has grown ever more burdened at the university.
Yes they are, if they fall short of actual incitement to actual violence, which the general uselessness of these useful idiots suggest is usually the case.
“Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech.”
So I love Noam Chomsky, and Generative Grammar was life changing. That quote is from Manufacturing Consent, which I made all my friends watch the film of when it was released in, I’m going to say 1989, without checking Google.
A clever quote from Noam Chomsky doesn’t carry cognitive weight, though; it’s just an argument from authority.
There are really two legitimate analyses here: consequentialist and deontological. You can pick either one.
From the Consequentialist side, permitting pro-Hamas protests leads to violent Islamism in your country. There is a direct consequentialist line, and Liberalism is too spent of a force to defend itself, the valiant efforts of Helen Pluckrose notwithstanding. The defence falls on consequentialist grounds.
Deontologically, the speech is permitted. They may write to the paper the same as anyone else, and stand on a fruit box on Speaker’s Corner in the village square, during sociable hours, and say their piece.
Disrupting a campus is not permitted. We have a _duty_ to protect other people’s rights, including the untrammelled access to education. A protest both impinges on shared civic space and is laced with latent coercive potential, especially pro-Hamas, Antifa or BLM protests.
So you can quote one line of Chomsky or a line of Orwell, and all it shows is that you haven’t done the work. Google or ChatGPT will give you those lines.
There is no defensible condition under which those protests are permitted in a country with the rule of law.
Pretending that there is makes you either a collaborator or a fool.
In Chomsky’s case, he was a fool and a genocide denier. Many more people died on the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge than needed to, and his deliberate distortions and genocide denial cost people their lives. He could still repent and apologise, but I doubt he will.
Of course. (Oddly, I’m getting attacked at the moment for saying just that on Ars Technica about UCLA.) But as a consequentialist with some influence by some but not all of the Mills, I stand by the claim that pro-Hamas rallies are “free speech,” if they fall short of actual incitement to actual violence.
If we don’t understand the civil liberties afforded to us by the Constitution, the easier they’ll evaporate.
You find the campus protestors views repugnant. I also find their views repugnant.
But if you don’t support lawful speech (and the bar is actually very high there in terms of what’s legal), you’re against free speech.
And that’s not an illegitimate position. Plenty of smart people hold it—but it is binary. You’re either for it or against Free Speech. You can’t really be kind of for it.
They may express their repugnant views in letters to the editor, on Reddit from their mother’s basement, or standing on a fruit crate in Speaker’s Corner in the village square without retribution.
Occupying shared civic space to the exclusion of others is criminal and we have a duty to protect untrammelled access to that shared civic space.
The Constitution protects freedom of the press, not freedom to disrupt. Pro-Hamas rallies did not meet the test of peaceable assembly, nor does Antifa, nor BLM.
We have a civic duty to apprehend and incarcerate people who engage in unpeaceful protest, and pro-Hamas rallies are laced with coercive force and intimidation.
The rights to peaceable assembly and a free press are predicated on these being instruments of rational persuasion.
Pro-Hamas protests are means of coercive intimidation and therefore fall outside of the protections afforded by the Constitution.
Hello, Mr. Dornbrook. Sorry to be late to this after-party: I did not initially see your reply to my comment weeks ago.
You and Mr. Sheridan certainly move on to a very interesting discussion of the consequentialist and deontological dimensions of what should qualify as protected speech. However, In the US the term "free speech" in these contexts -- including the context at IU -- is not arguable on the basis of philosophical analysis. The only relevant frameworks are legal -- the First Amendment and current precedents of court interpretation -- and policy, concerning existing IU policies at the time of the incidents that are in compliance with the First Amendment.
There is absolutely no question that pro-Hamas speech can be protected under the First Amendment unless it consists of *imminent* incitement to illegal violence. And IU policies as of the time of these events unambiguously protected the demonstrators as well. (It is an irony of the events that the demonstrators showed far better awareness of IU policies than the administration.)
IU policies have since been altered (and those alterations were changed again when it became obvious that they would be struck down in court), but pro-Hamas demonstrations remain as legal as any others on the Bloomington campus because all are protected under the First Amendment, regardless of consequentialist arguments that they should not be.
The answer within the legal framework is pretty clear, and you are just wrong.
All campuses may restrict based on time, place and manner so long as the restrictions are content neutral.
Private Universities, which IU is not, may further restrict speech according to their whim.
In short, nothing about the pro-Hamas protest was protected legally other than the protester’s right to make statements elsewhere. So long as some other forum exists in which they may do so, such as writing to a local newspaper or assembling at nearby Leonard Springs Park, then IU was within its rights to restrict protests - provided, as you point out, that they are treated as “any other protest”. As long as IU prevents all protests, their rules would be content neutral and pass muster.
I argue that they SHOULD restrict them, which is a different matter; it is definitely within their gift to do so, even in the US under First Amendment protections, even as a State School.
The hysteria and distortion are evident to anyone with half a brain. IU has seen completely nonviolent, peaceful demonstrations against the massacre and starvation of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians. With which, you seem to have no problem. Who is morally bankrupt here?
Since you clearly support Hamas and willingly spew bullshit blood libels against Jews, when you say "half a brain," you're obviously projecting. Fuck off, Jewhating cunt.
Kip, it may be that I just don't hang out in the right Substack circles, but I have to say that this is perhaps the single most vile comment I have encountered on the platform. Congratulations!
[I'm not sure this will post properly. I no longer have access to any element of the string that involves comments by Kip -- I presume they have been removed and Kip banned.]
To answer your point Mr. Dornbrook, you're correct that a public university can use time, place, and manner policies to restrict speech. And, as you note, it cannot discriminate according to content. That is why the county prosecutor declined to pursue indictments against any demonstrators arrested by police on the day of the demonstration. The demonstrators were protesting in accordance with IU policies. (IU had attempted to change those policies the night before in order to restrict the pro-Palestinian demonstrators because of the substance of its speech, but it failed because it arbitrarily amended a document that was not a policy and was unaware of what document was the actual policy. You can read the sad details here: https://iubaaup.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/dunn_meadow_statement.pdf)
IU has seen completely nonviolent demonstrations against the massacre and starvation of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians. The IU Administration arranged a violent response in which snipers were trained on peaceful students/faculty/citizens exercising their First Amendment rights, who were then assaulted by riot cops. Unconstitutional and indefensible, and those responsible must go.
First of all, these were pro-Hamas demonstrations, not "pro-Palestinian," despite the lazy and biased framing of the media. Find one sign or one student in any of these protests denouncing Hamas. You can't, because they don't exist. And if you ask them, they all say the genocidal October 7 terrorist attack on civilians, including women, children and infants, was justifed or, at least, "understandable."
Second, the "I had a sniper rifle pointed at me" statement is unsubstantiated, highly suspect, and probably a lie, given the long pattern of behavior of the "Palestine" protestors in the West. The Herald-Times article does not substantiate that rifles were pointed at anyone. It indicates there were snipers on a rooftop, a decision of the Indiana State Police. Given they felt there was a possibility or threat of violence (my guess is "Globalize the Intifada" signs were present at the IU encampment), and that pro-Hamas protestors routinely engage in violence, an armed response is at least arguably justified and appears to be a law enforcement, not university, decision.
I wouldn't want to dispute that by failing to denounce Hamas's attack protesters became apologists for it, Kip, some actively. But your guesses about the fact of the Indiana University administration are mistaken. Recorded messaging between police and police headquarters revealed that the sniper guns were pointed, and were pointed at specific individuals based on their prominence among the protesters, as only the university would be able to specify (there were many, many more news stories on these events than the single Herald-Times report linked here). The decision to include snipers was approved by the university, which claimed it was business as usual.
The fact that the protesters failed to condemn Hamas, as (I believe) they should have, and the fact that they used (to my personal dismay) what had become a generic slogan that can be interpreted as echoing calls for violence ("Globalize the Intifada") does not alter the free speech status of the protest. The First Amendment importantly protects unpopular speech, and the university administration's decision to change the rules of the game in secret just hours before the protest (based on demonstrated and egregious ignorance of the actual policies it thought it was invoking) -- and then confronting demonstrators as they gathered to proceed in full compliance with actual policies (which they knew well and were carrying copies of with them), surrounding the demonstrators with ranks of ostentatiously armed State Police and stationing snipers on the tower above the demonstration as the police moved in and began to arrest people, was a clear provocation to create a response that could be used as a pretext to dissolve the demonstration by force. In sum, while claiming its actions were driven by concern of imminent violence, administrators seem to have decided to provoke violence that could justify broader restrictions on speech inconvenient to the university.
In the event, public reaction forced the university to back down after two waves of arrests that the local district attorney declined to recognize as justified, and the protesters occupied the grounds for two months without violence of any sort. When the administration persuaded the trustee board to alter the governing policy and gave notice of the change, the protesters departed without incident. (However, further protests were mounted because the new policies were clear violations of the First Amendments, as the university eventually conceded when, in the midst of an ACLU lawsuit that initial rulings indicated it would lose, it modified its new policy.)
There is much more to say, but the gist is that a public university, bound under the First Amendment, that had a particularly well known profile for protecting free speech has in a very short time been transformed just as FIRE has assessed it. Excuse-making that has accompanied its retaliation against the student newspaper -- always professing to cherish free speech -- has served only to underscore the way free speech has grown ever more burdened at the university.
FFS, you're a Peter Beinart subscriber? That explains it.
Fuck off, you Hamas-supporting scumbag. Guess we'll see you in the next mob screaming outside of a synagogue.
I was with this article right up until the “And then the university had the temerity to attempt to contain violent, anti-American terrorists.”
Cool, cool. Pro-Hamas rallies are not “free speech.”
> Pro-Hamas rallies are not “free speech.”
Yes they are, if they fall short of actual incitement to actual violence, which the general uselessness of these useful idiots suggest is usually the case.
“Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of free speech.”
— Noam Chomsky
So I love Noam Chomsky, and Generative Grammar was life changing. That quote is from Manufacturing Consent, which I made all my friends watch the film of when it was released in, I’m going to say 1989, without checking Google.
A clever quote from Noam Chomsky doesn’t carry cognitive weight, though; it’s just an argument from authority.
There are really two legitimate analyses here: consequentialist and deontological. You can pick either one.
From the Consequentialist side, permitting pro-Hamas protests leads to violent Islamism in your country. There is a direct consequentialist line, and Liberalism is too spent of a force to defend itself, the valiant efforts of Helen Pluckrose notwithstanding. The defence falls on consequentialist grounds.
Deontologically, the speech is permitted. They may write to the paper the same as anyone else, and stand on a fruit box on Speaker’s Corner in the village square, during sociable hours, and say their piece.
Disrupting a campus is not permitted. We have a _duty_ to protect other people’s rights, including the untrammelled access to education. A protest both impinges on shared civic space and is laced with latent coercive potential, especially pro-Hamas, Antifa or BLM protests.
So you can quote one line of Chomsky or a line of Orwell, and all it shows is that you haven’t done the work. Google or ChatGPT will give you those lines.
There is no defensible condition under which those protests are permitted in a country with the rule of law.
Pretending that there is makes you either a collaborator or a fool.
In Chomsky’s case, he was a fool and a genocide denier. Many more people died on the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge than needed to, and his deliberate distortions and genocide denial cost people their lives. He could still repent and apologise, but I doubt he will.
> Disrupting a campus is not permitted.
Of course. (Oddly, I’m getting attacked at the moment for saying just that on Ars Technica about UCLA.) But as a consequentialist with some influence by some but not all of the Mills, I stand by the claim that pro-Hamas rallies are “free speech,” if they fall short of actual incitement to actual violence.
I disagree - but probably because we disagree on the scope and timescale of the consequences you’ll be including in your Consequentialism.
I don’t think so: “free speech” is on the Is side of Hume’s Is/Ought distinction. (Whether free speech is good is a separate question.)
If we don’t understand the civil liberties afforded to us by the Constitution, the easier they’ll evaporate.
You find the campus protestors views repugnant. I also find their views repugnant.
But if you don’t support lawful speech (and the bar is actually very high there in terms of what’s legal), you’re against free speech.
And that’s not an illegitimate position. Plenty of smart people hold it—but it is binary. You’re either for it or against Free Speech. You can’t really be kind of for it.
Or see my comments above:
They may express their repugnant views in letters to the editor, on Reddit from their mother’s basement, or standing on a fruit crate in Speaker’s Corner in the village square without retribution.
Occupying shared civic space to the exclusion of others is criminal and we have a duty to protect untrammelled access to that shared civic space.
The Constitution protects freedom of the press, not freedom to disrupt. Pro-Hamas rallies did not meet the test of peaceable assembly, nor does Antifa, nor BLM.
We have a civic duty to apprehend and incarcerate people who engage in unpeaceful protest, and pro-Hamas rallies are laced with coercive force and intimidation.
The rights to peaceable assembly and a free press are predicated on these being instruments of rational persuasion.
Pro-Hamas protests are means of coercive intimidation and therefore fall outside of the protections afforded by the Constitution.
Hello, Mr. Dornbrook. Sorry to be late to this after-party: I did not initially see your reply to my comment weeks ago.
You and Mr. Sheridan certainly move on to a very interesting discussion of the consequentialist and deontological dimensions of what should qualify as protected speech. However, In the US the term "free speech" in these contexts -- including the context at IU -- is not arguable on the basis of philosophical analysis. The only relevant frameworks are legal -- the First Amendment and current precedents of court interpretation -- and policy, concerning existing IU policies at the time of the incidents that are in compliance with the First Amendment.
There is absolutely no question that pro-Hamas speech can be protected under the First Amendment unless it consists of *imminent* incitement to illegal violence. And IU policies as of the time of these events unambiguously protected the demonstrators as well. (It is an irony of the events that the demonstrators showed far better awareness of IU policies than the administration.)
IU policies have since been altered (and those alterations were changed again when it became obvious that they would be struck down in court), but pro-Hamas demonstrations remain as legal as any others on the Bloomington campus because all are protected under the First Amendment, regardless of consequentialist arguments that they should not be.
Thank you for coming back to this conversation.
The answer within the legal framework is pretty clear, and you are just wrong.
All campuses may restrict based on time, place and manner so long as the restrictions are content neutral.
Private Universities, which IU is not, may further restrict speech according to their whim.
In short, nothing about the pro-Hamas protest was protected legally other than the protester’s right to make statements elsewhere. So long as some other forum exists in which they may do so, such as writing to a local newspaper or assembling at nearby Leonard Springs Park, then IU was within its rights to restrict protests - provided, as you point out, that they are treated as “any other protest”. As long as IU prevents all protests, their rules would be content neutral and pass muster.
I argue that they SHOULD restrict them, which is a different matter; it is definitely within their gift to do so, even in the US under First Amendment protections, even as a State School.
The hysteria and distortion are evident to anyone with half a brain. IU has seen completely nonviolent, peaceful demonstrations against the massacre and starvation of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians. With which, you seem to have no problem. Who is morally bankrupt here?
Since you clearly support Hamas and willingly spew bullshit blood libels against Jews, when you say "half a brain," you're obviously projecting. Fuck off, Jewhating cunt.
Kip, it may be that I just don't hang out in the right Substack circles, but I have to say that this is perhaps the single most vile comment I have encountered on the platform. Congratulations!
She’s not salvageable.
Unfortunately, they appear numerous online.
Fortunately, they are not numerous in real life.
You, Cathy, are morally bankrupt.
A collaborator rather than a fool, because it is too easy to know that you are lying for you to not know.
It’s just speech, though, so I’ll defend your right to say it.
[I'm not sure this will post properly. I no longer have access to any element of the string that involves comments by Kip -- I presume they have been removed and Kip banned.]
To answer your point Mr. Dornbrook, you're correct that a public university can use time, place, and manner policies to restrict speech. And, as you note, it cannot discriminate according to content. That is why the county prosecutor declined to pursue indictments against any demonstrators arrested by police on the day of the demonstration. The demonstrators were protesting in accordance with IU policies. (IU had attempted to change those policies the night before in order to restrict the pro-Palestinian demonstrators because of the substance of its speech, but it failed because it arbitrarily amended a document that was not a policy and was unaware of what document was the actual policy. You can read the sad details here: https://iubaaup.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/dunn_meadow_statement.pdf)
MAGA U
IU has seen completely nonviolent demonstrations against the massacre and starvation of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians. The IU Administration arranged a violent response in which snipers were trained on peaceful students/faculty/citizens exercising their First Amendment rights, who were then assaulted by riot cops. Unconstitutional and indefensible, and those responsible must go.
If you said that 3 years ago they would have thought we’re nuts. (Or somehow you phone autocorrected from basketball somehow)