January 31 2025 - 1:00pm
In the flurry of executive orders issued by Donald Trump in the first few days of his second presidential term, one in particular stands out. Just recently, the President signed an order instructing various law enforcement agencies to urgently investigate antisemitism on US university campuses, and propose recommendations for how to solve this putative crisis. With customary bluster, Trump is promising very harsh punishments for the people in his sights: those who “sympathize” with Hamas will supposedly soon have their student visas revoked and face deportation from the United States.
In some ways, this represents a chilling step toward abrogating the rights of free speech — which in America are not just protected by law, but are also a part of the culture and self-identity of the nation. It used to be that Americans would lambast “nanny state Europe” for caring more about feelings than rights and trying to micromanage speech rules rather than err on the side of freedom. But those days are now mostly gone. As the political situation has worsened, as more and more Americans have lost faith in the political system, and as polarization has become more pronounced, the country’s political class has clearly retreated from its earlier, optimistic view of the power of free speech.
Trump’s executive order is more reflective of a broader attitude than a practical plan. For one thing, the very serious waves of student protests during 2024 over Israel’s war in Gaza were hardly driven by foreign nationals — the overwhelming majority of “problem students” are those who have American citizenship and who thus cannot be deported in the first place. The idea that people would pay very large sums of money to travel to America specifically in order to protest is not particularly realistic.
What’s more, the question of how to practically implement Trump’s desires here ought to prompt a great deal of head-scratching. If “Hamas sympathizers” are meant to be deported, how exactly is that “sympathy” meant to be detected? Is partaking in a political protest itself sufficient proof, or will the state perhaps hire other students to serve as informants and spies, writing reports on things said in dormitory hallways and over the internet? If it’s the former, one wonders whether conduct that is completely legal for Americans to partake in can actually serve as grounds for deportation without facing serious legal challenges.
In the end, though, the question of foreigners spreading “radicalism” is very much a red herring. America’s radicalism today is home-grown, and though both Democrats and Republicans have become increasingly eager to try and ban their way to political peace and quiet, it seems unlikely that either side will ever manage to succeed. In 2020, then-President Joe Biden signed similar measures hunting for “radicals” and “extremists” within the US Army and National Guard: the end result was a self-defeating, onerous bureaucratic witch hunt that pretty much everyone now regrets.
Americans are ultimately contentious, outspoken people who react badly to attempts at speech control — anyone who doubts that only has to look at Donald Trump himself.
