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/492/ The Armed Wing of the Deplatforming Movement ft. Alex Gourevitch (Patreon)

Published:
2025-06-10 07:00:06
Imported:
2025-06
Tags:

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  • 492-protest-gourevitch.mp3

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Content

On the right to protest.

[Patreon Exclusive]

Contributing editor Alex Gourevitch talks to Alex H and George about restrictions on speech and protest at US universities and beyond – particularly with regard to Palestine solidarity demonstrations.

How have uni administrators not just undermined by seemingly attacked the right to protest?

Why is Trump going after the universities this way?

How have progressives undermined the right of protest by talking up the role of 'harm'?

How have pro-Israel groups been complicit in treating political speech as an attack on identities?

Why have so many authorities chosen the defence of Israel as their hill to die on?

Links:

The Right to Be Hostile, Alex Gourevitch, Boston Review

/409/ Palestine, Protest, Repression: The Wider Context

Files

Comments

Davka Smolah Collective

Disappointing episode that, IMHO, failed to get at the real political question: why have both the broad Left (both radical Left in the protest movement and the woke liberals in the uni administrations) and the broad Right (from the centrist-to-conservative uni admins to the radical Right) politicized this issue of campus "protest" in terms of speech, harm, victimhood, and other psychic, purely symbolic, matters -- rather than the more obvious material manifestations? There were months of protests in which plenty of strictly physical crimes occurred: property damage, building occupations, restrictions on individuals' freedom of movement, assault, and even manslaughter/murder in a couple of cases. You can see where the campuses and the protestors want to brush those under the rug, but why do the anti-antisemitism orgs (more on their contradictory political valence below) and the Trump Administration participate so enthusiastically in that? What does it say about our regime of "civil rights" that a right to insulation from psychic damage and ideological contestation is now acted upon over and above a right to not be held captive in your workplace (thinking of that janitor at Columbia) by its "customers" (the students who occupied "Hind's Hall" and held the janitor inside it) or a right not to be brained with a flagpole unto death (the manslaughter case at UCLA)? Now for asking a question, I'll answer a question for you: the authorities choose Israel/Palestine because Israel/Palestine is where the internal contradictions of wokeness - and yes, of the 1960s - come out and express themselves. It was always going to be impossible to cater to wokes on campus - among students, faculty, and administrators - without taking a side on Israel/Palestine. Wokeness/"radical liberalism" itself simply demands that those more oppressed have a right to authority over those less oppressed, and - this is an important bit! - the fight over which of Israel and Palestine take that role was never actually settled in the 60s and 70s. We all just memory-holed the pro-Zionist identity politics of Sartre, Memmi, and actually most of the pre-1967 socialist Left (after all, pre-67 there were no occupied territories, just guns pointed at kibbutzniks) in favor of today's "Israel white colonizer, Palestine brown indigene" projection of American race relations onto the Middle East. Contradictory claims of authority from within the ideological system itself were *always* going to start fights. Nobody needed to accept the premises that led to those fights. I've been anti-woke this whole time because it was obvious where the whole thing led and was a bad idea root-and-branch. But, as I mentioned about the anti-antisemitism groups, adopting wokeness throughout the state ideological apparatus, especially given that the supermajority of American Jews vote Democratic and see themselves as part of the Civil Rights/post-1960s Coalition constituting that party's base, was always going to lead to a call coming from inside the house. You can't do Civil Rights politics *against* the Civil Rights Coalition that makes up your own party's base. What I think the more internationalized Left broadly gets wrong about all this is viewing it as coming from outside the house, with a neat Left vs Right division. No, this is woke Democrat on woke Democrat psychic violence.

Richard R

Worth mentioning that the California constitution guarantees California residents a university education, of which the UC is meant to be a guarantor.

Eamon

Great discussion, the distinction Alex G highlights between ‘being’ versus ‘feeling’ safe seems central to me as it points to the crisis of legitimacy today. To assert whether or not someone ‘is’ safe demands an agreed collective definition of safety, and democratic mechanisms of determining whether this definition has been met. Both of these seem genuinely impossible in contemporary politics, because legitimacy (and therefore authority) is decided through identitarian means (asserting a more authentic victimhood), which itself is entirely vibes based. Curious how the hosts think this can be resolved by the left without dissolving into apolitical or post-political gestures? The kind of which has been central to precisely this predicament.

Charles

I hope AI wasn’t used to generate that image - people give money to this podcast; apologies if my suspicions are completely unfounded.