When speech no longer seems sufficient

Jan. 30, 2026 – Minneapolis protesters oppose ICE, via Fibonnaci Blue/CC BY 4.0

I walked into my politics classroom at Sarah Lawrence last week, ready to teach a lesson about civic protest. The prompt was Minneapolis, where ICE’s Operation Metro Surge has sparked mass protests, a general strike, and violent confrontations between demonstrators and federal agents.

I planned to cover basics: citizens can record police activity, protests must remain nonviolent, participants should comply with lawful orders. My students had other ideas.

“What are we supposed to do?” one asked. “Hold up signs and chant while people are being shot in the street?”

Another jumped in: “You’re asking us to play by rules that only we follow.”

They cited the Black Panthers. They invoked Stonewall. They argued that throughout American history, violence (or the credible threat of it) has driven social change. Several insisted that armed citizens confronting ICE would accomplish what peaceful protest could not.

These weren’t fringe voices. This was classroom consensus.

I study campus culture and have watched these attitudes develop for years in the data. But data is abstract. Percentages don’t argue back. What shook me was hearing my own students, students I know and have taught for months, articulate these views with moral certainty. The numbers had names now.

The numbers

According to FIRE’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings, 34% of students believe using violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable to some degree. That’s up from 20% in 2022, a 70% increase. Gallup’s Democracy for All survey finds that 30% of adults aged 18 to 29 say political violence is “sometimes OK.” Compare that with 4% of those 60 and older. And the Citizen Data 2024 report finds, “Consistently over multiple months of polling, Gen Z showed the highest levels of acceptance for violence against elected officials (56%).”

This is new. When Gallup asked similar questions in 1970 and 1995, young adults showed no elevated tolerance for political violence.

The justifications vary. FIRE’s post-Kirk assassination survey found that 91% of undergraduates agree, to varying degrees, that “words can be violence.” This is a framework that makes physical response to speech seem proportionate. As FIRE’s Sean Stevens puts it, “When people start thinking that words can be violence, violence becomes an acceptable response to words.”

But my students weren’t invoking that logic. They were making a different argument: that the system has failed, that ordinary politics moves too slowly in the face of what they see as a humanitarian emergency, that direct action is the only language power understands. These are distinct rationales — one about the nature of speech, the other about the efficacy of institutions — but they converge on the same conclusion. Today’s cohort increasingly accepts violence as an alternative to speech. My students are not outliers. They are exemplars.

The partisan surprise

We might assume openness to political violence is a pathology of the left. The data says otherwise. According to FIRE’s 2026 survey, Republican students now exceed Democrats in support for violence to stop speakers: 35% versus 30%. Support for shouting down speakers has crossed 50% for the first time among strong Republicans. And strong Republicans, and Republicans who accept violence to stop a speaker, have more than tripled in four years.

As one analyst noted, this “spoil[s] what could have been an otherwise very useful tool for Republicans or Democrats who would like to pretend that the problem of political violence is one-sided.”

This is not a left or right problem. It is a generational problem.

The historical debate

My students were not wrong that confrontation and resistance have accompanied American social change. The Black Panthers exercised their lawful right to bear arms. Stonewall was a riot. The civil rights movement unfolded alongside urban uprisings.

I did not try to tell them those moments didn’t matter. They did. But I asked them to consider what followed. The Panthers’ armed patrols commanded attention; their survival programs — free breakfasts, health clinics, legal aid — built a legacy. Stonewall was a catalyst; the gay rights movement’s lasting victories came through decades of organizing, litigation, and shifting public opinion. The confrontational moments opened doors. What walked through them were movements built on persuasion and institution-building.

And I asked a harder question: What happens when both sides abandon speech for force?

The civil rights movement’s moral power came from asymmetry — nonviolent demonstrators versus the clubs and hoses turned against them. That clarity made the injustice undeniable to persuadable observers. But that strategy depended on a shared assumption: that bearing witness, that appealing to conscience, that speaking, even in the face of brutality, could eventually prevail.

My students no longer share that assumption. And I understand why. They look at Minneapolis and see federal agents firing on crowds. They see a system that, in their view, responds to speech with silence and to silence with violence. Their question is reasonable: Why should only one side play by the rules?

Here is my answer, inadequate as it may be: Because once both sides abandon speech, there are no rules. Politics becomes a contest of force. And in that contest, the state almost always wins.

The logic that justifies armed confrontation with ICE equally justifies armed confrontation with protestors.

We end up not with justice but with power — and the powerful have more of it.

They listened. I don’t know if it landed.

What this means

For years, FIRE has done essential work documenting these trends-tracking the decline in viewpoint tolerance, defending controversial speakers, opposing heckler’s vetoes, insisting that universities remain marketplaces of ideas. That work matters more than ever. Without organizations willing to measure and publicize these shifts, we would not know how serious the problem has become.

But the data now reveals a deeper challenge. FIRE’s surveys show a meaningful portion of students support using force to silence speakers. Combined with Gallup’s and Citizen Data’s findings on broader political violence, a troubling picture emerges: young Americans increasingly accept violence as a substitute for speech and nonviolent political advocacy.

If 91% of undergraduates believe words can be violence, defending “free speech” sounds like defending assault. If a third accepts force as a political tool, debates about particular speaker disinvitations miss the point for many. The disagreement is no longer just about which speakers should be heard, but about whether deliberation itself is a failed concept.

That argument is wrong. But it will not be refuted by citing the First Amendment. It will only be refuted by demonstrating, in the spirit of Justice Brandeis, that speech and the exchange of ideas can accomplish what my students believe it cannot.

What comes next

I did not convince my students last week. That failure stays with me. I have spent my career believing that argument and evidence can change many minds, that the classroom is where democratic habits form and are refined. But I walked out of that room having changed no one’s view — at least not yet. Persuasion takes time. Still, if the arguments for nonviolence cannot gain traction even in a classroom devoted to reasoned debate, what chance does the broader culture have?

The data confirms their views are widespread and growing: across party lines, across campuses, across the country. A generation is losing faith in the premise underlying liberal democracy: that we can govern ourselves through words rather than force.

If that faith dies, what replaces it is not hard to imagine. We are already seeing it in Minneapolis with armed standoffs, tear gas, flash grenades, and bodies in the street. Much of that force has been deployed against people engaged in nonviolent protest or simply recording law enforcement. That is what politics looks like when faith in speech as the historical successor to violence erodes on all sides.

But my students were not advocating violence out of cruelty. They were advocating it out of despair.

I will be back in that classroom next week. I don’t yet know what I’ll say differently. But I know I have to try again, and I will figure this out because if those of us who still believe in persuasion give up, we will have conceded their premise. That persuasion is futile. I won’t let that happen. The numbers suggest we are running out of time.