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mccarthyism
In the Attack on Pro-Palestinian Campus Speech, More Than Jobs Are at Stake
Students and professors across the country are being witch-hunted for their position on Palestine, in a serious threat to democracy, dissent, and the ability of ordinary people to resist authoritarianism.
Jan 30, 2025
For months before U.S. President Donald Trump took office, nearly daily reports rolled in of students and professors on trial for their activism for Palestinian life.
New York University suspended 11 students who were part of a peaceful flyer distribution and sit-in, including students who simply sat in the library lobby in solidarity. Eleven students at Swarthmore College faced expulsion on assault charges for using a bullhorn. Emerson College laid off 10 staff members, blaming protests for Palestine as a cause for low enrollment, and then using layoffs to target pro-Palestine employees. Emerson also put four students on probation for leafleting on a public sidewalk. Thirteen students at Princeton are being criminalized for “trespassing” on their own campus after they participated in a sit-in. Seven students and faculty at Duke have been called before a University Judicial Board, and without notice or due process are facing termination for participating in nonviolent protest. Tenured professors at Emory are facing similar trials. MIT demoted a tenured professor after he proposed a course entitled Decolonization & Liberation Struggles in Haiti, Palestine, & Israel. Professors at Muhlenberg College, Columbia, John Jay College, City University of New York, NYU, and more, have been fired or forced out for advocating for Palestinian rights.
I have spoken with a university librarian fired after teaching a workshop in which they discussed “scholasticide” in Gaza, a K-12 teacher fired for a social media post critical of Israel and the U.S., and scores of K-12 teachers who have been suspended or otherwise disciplined for speaking about the suffering of Palestinians. An avalanche of Title VI Civil Rights Act complaints are being weaponized against educators, many of them filed by individuals or organizations with absolutely no connection to the school in question.
To truly humanize Palestinians is to defy racist empire, which is—in part—why the backlash against the movement for Palestinian life and freedom is so severe.
I am personally facing a Title VI investigation at Gonzaga University, where I was hired as an “activist scholar” to be the lead instructor in a Solidarity and Social Justice program. The allegations against me are over attending a peaceful student “walkout for Palestine,” and forwarding to our faculty listserve an open student letter (signed by hundreds of our students) against Gonzaga’s anti-protest policy. A range of outcomes are possible, including termination. Because I went on a pre-approved medical leave the day after my first interrogation, I have been denied the right to submit further statements or participate in any way until May. In essence, I will be on trial for five months with no representation or ability to advocate for myself.
The number of the similar cases is impossible to know, due in part to near media omission. Many people who have faced or are currently facing investigations are instructed that they must remain silent (and isolated) as to not “compromise” the investigation. Some are quiet because their jobs, prospects for future employment, and safety are at stake. What is clear is that the trials are wide-reaching, extraordinarily punitive, largely coordinated, and were coming down rapidly across the country at educational institutions of all types even before Trump was sworn in.
The witch-hunting of educators and students is combined with related measures, including a nationwide rollout of campus anti-protest policies that appears at least influenced by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, advisers to Project 2025. At the start of the school year around 100 campuses issued broad policy changes that essentially ban meaningful protest. Some universities have gone as far as to fortress entire campuses with checkpoints and surveillance drones, block common gathering areas with fences, and station security guards outside of classrooms.
These are political attacks, designed to crush a movement that is standing with and for people at the brutal bottom of violent systems of oppression. They have a chilling effect, not just upon those they are wielded against, but upon the entirety of public thought and discourse. Some experts have warned that we are witnessing a new McCarthyism, and one that may well exceed the repression of the 1950s.
The new McCarthyism began before Trump and has been partly initiated by “liberal” higher-ed institutions, but Trump’s tyrannical regime will strive to take the trend to harrowing new extremes. Less than two weeks in office, Trump has already issued an executive order—pulled directly from Project Esther—to deport pro-Palestine students that are not citizens and take “forceful and unprecedented steps to marshal all federal resources” against what he described as campuses “infested with radicalism” and “pro-jihadist protests.”
The crackdown on students and educators—being swiftly and terrifyingly exploited and extended by Trump—is a major assault on free speech and academic freedom. It is a grim threat to democracy, dissent, and the ability of ordinary people to resist all of the assaults of authoritarianism and oligarchy that we are up against. It is an alarming slippery slope, that began in large part as a bipartisan attack on a movement that is challenging U.S.-led racist empire.
Activism for Palestinian freedom and equality necessarily confronts American and Western capitalist and imperial interests. It upends supremacist, dehumanizing ideologies—in the case of Palestine, Anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia—that rationalize and sustain a remarkably violent and hierarchical global order. To truly humanize Palestinians is to defy racist empire, which is—in part—why the backlash against the movement for Palestinian life and freedom is so severe, garnering broad support from the far-right and liberals alike.
The witch hunt across educational institutions plays on longstanding Anti-Palestinian racism to vilify all forms of protest for Palestine as terroristic and antisemitic, issuing sweeping charges of antisemitism against any expression of concern for Palestinian life. In this, there is a largely intentional conflation of criticism of Israeli government apartheid and genocide with antisemitism. This misconstruing is also dangerous and oppressive to Jews. According to History and Jewish Studies Professor Annelise Orleck, it seeks to enforce a right-wing Pro-Israel political stance to which all Jews must adhere, and attempts to eviscerate Jewish identities rooted in a long tradition of standing for the rights of the oppressed, democratic pluralism, and social justice. Both Jews and Palestinians have been disproportionately targeted in the campus crackdowns.
While protection of Jewish life has become the pretext for persecuting those who express concern for Palestinian life, a haunting rise in antisemitism on the far-right and at the top is being ignored; at times even defended by groups whose stated mission is to “combat antisemitism.” British-Israeli author Rachel Shabi recently wrote in the The Guardian, “If antisemitism is so blatantly wielded as a political weapon, it creates the impression of a fundamental unseriousness about the subject.” It also undermines the very humanistic movements that are our hope for a world beyond both antisemitism and Anti-Arab racism. To restate words I spoke to students at the protest for which I am being accused of “discrimination” under the Civil Rights Act:
In a moment of such intensive propaganda and power, the world needs your moral clarity. Your moral clarity that all of our lives are inherently interconnected. That the movement for Palestinian liberation is a movement for human liberation. That liberation for Palestinians forces a reckoning with all interlocking systems of oppression, which is core to—not in competition with—Jewish, Black, Brown, Indigenous, White, Collective liberation. Your moral clarity that human solidarity, mutual safety, and freedom is possible. That love, rather than domination, could be the guiding force of our lives together on this one beautiful planet.
We are going to need to hold firm to the principle and aim of collective liberation in the times ahead, and stand with linked arms against attempts to distort our common humanity. I find tremendous hope in the students and educators who have been brave enough to do so, in spite of intense repression and retaliation. It is the courageous acts of ordinary people that will stop the cruel trajectories we are on.
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In the New Dylan Biopic, Context Is the ‘Complete Unknown’
The film would have benefited from showing what was happening, both in Greenwich Village and around the country, that led Bob Dylan to write startling songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” that became overnight anthems.
Jan 05, 2025
Along with many of my generation (that ridiculous word “boomers”) I both looked forward to and thoroughly enjoyed James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown. The writing was crisp, the scenery was great, the acting was tremendous, and with a couple of exceptions (I’ll get into that) the scenes were all right on target. He even threw in several Easter Eggs for those of us with a bit too much obsessive knowledge of Bob Dylan’s history–like seeing Al Kooper, who had never played keyboards, sit down at the organ in the studio and pick out what became an iconic riff in “Like a Rolling Stone.” A pleasing, exciting romp through an incredible, unequaled moment when, as Dylan so succinctly put it, the times were most definitely changing.
So why, as the credits rolled to a blast of “Like a Rolling Stone” that I swore was Dylan’s version—Timothée Chalamet really was that good–was I not fulfilled? Why did it feel akin to eating a pastrami sandwich on white bread? And my wife Maryann, who at a decade younger than me didn’t experience those years as I had, left with the same feeling. What was missing?
And then it hit. Context.
As the dawn of a new fascism looms, one that will potentially render the repression of the 1950s the good old days, the need to break free of the stifling “way things are” and create a new, liberating path full of both promise and danger is more urgent than ever.
Where did those early songs come from? Did they just pop into Dylan’s head from nowhere? What was happening, both in Greenwich Village and more significantly around the country, that led him to write startling songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” that became overnight anthems? When, as depicted in the film, Dylan sang “The Times They Are A-Changin’” for the very first time, his young audience instantly latched on to it and went nuts, loudly and joyously singing along. Why? Was he telling them something they didn’t already know? Or was he giving voice to their lives as they were living them at that moment?
Okay, this may seem obvious. After all, everyone “knows” that the 60s were a time of youthful rebellion and upheaval. So what else is new? Does a film about Dylan really need to spell that out? And as far as the politics so many of his songs were infused with, isn’t it enough that the film depicted him singing at the 1963 March on Washington?
I would contend that it’s not nearly enough, because it doesn’t get close to what drove Dylan to write songs like “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” and “The Death of Emmet Till,” to name just a few. No, I’m not arguing that the film should have been a history lesson about the 60s, but I believe it would have better served both Dylan and the audience had it set the stage more clearly with what was explosively emerging in the dawn of that decade, because in fact this is not so obvious, especially to younger audiences.
To get that sense, I went back to Suze Rotolo’s wonderful memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time. Rotolo, was Dylan’s girlfriend from shortly after he arrived in New York. In the film she is given the name Sylvie Russo (interestingly at Dylan’s insistence, to protect her privacy. She died in 2011). Their relationship, which lasted four years, is beautifully depicted in the film, including the fact that, despite his growing relationship with Joan Baez, he never stopped loving her. And the film does briefly allude to her political influence on his writing. But there are two key points in her memoir that are sorely missing in the film, I think to its detriment.
The first is the nature of the Greenwich Village that Dylan walked into in that winter of 1961. Rotolo goes into vivid detail about the cultural and political cauldron bubbling up there. Here is her description of a typical Sunday in Washington Square Park:
The atmosphere… was lively. Groups of musicians would play and sing anything from old folk songs to bluegrass. Old Italian men from the neighborhood played their folk music on mandolins. Everyone played around the fountain, and people would wander from group to group, listening and maybe singing along. There were poets reading their poems and political types handing out fliers for Trotskyist, Communist, or anarchist meetings and hawking their newspapers… Everything overlapped nicely.
Just a 30 second walk in the park through Dylan’s eyes would have added an element that was missing.
And that was just the start. Along with the folk clubs that were depicted in the film, there was the burgeoning avant garde theater and film scenes. Clubs featured jazz and the beat poets. Musicians, not just folk, were drawn there from all across the country. Every night, folks would gather in various apartments to share songs and debate philosophy and politics. All of this, Rotolo makes clear, Dylan dove into and hungrily absorbed everything around him. He was not alone. He was being influenced by others, and he in turn influenced them. As he himself wrote, revolution was in the air.
A vivid example of this is one of his most political songs, “When the Ship Comes In.” He wrote it after attending a particularly striking and powerful version of the song “Pirate Jenny” from Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. In that song, the maid Jenny sings about her fantasy of leading a pirate ship into harbor to wreak revenge on the bourgeoise “gentlemen” who treat her like a piece of dirt. Dylan turned that concept into a truly uplifting depiction of revolution:
Oh, the foes will rise with the sleep still in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it’s for real
The hour that the ship comes in.
Then they’ll raise their hands,
Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands
But we’ll shout from the bow your days are numbered
And like Pharoah’s tribe they’ll be drownded in the tide
And like Goliath they’ll be conquered.
This does bring up one particular objection I have to the film. In it, the only time we hear that song is when he is singing it under duress at a fundraising party. It’s clear that by now he hates having to perform it and all of his songs up to that point, and the scene marks his break with the past and headlong dive into the future. The scene itself is an accurate depiction of Dylan’s growing rebellion against both the rigid strictures of the folk music world and the political messages they now expected him to include in every song. But without a strong sense of why he wrote it in the first place, we’re left with an incomplete picture of what was driving him all along.
And that brings up the question of how well, or weakly, the film depicts the times he was in the midst of and responding to. Rotolo paints a vivid picture of the fear that dominated every aspect of American life in the 1950s—the ubiquitous shadows of an impending nuclear war, combined with the grinding repression of the “Red scare” witch hunts, were everywhere. Hundreds were persecuted and jailed, with Pete Seeger on the top of the list. That the film opens with Seeger’s sentencing is to its credit. The intensity and ubiquity of that repression was a huge part of what those who flocked to Greenwich Village were rebelling against, often at great cost. Dylan nailed the paranoia permeating society hilariously with his “Talkin’ World War III Blues” on the Freewheelin’ album.
But what was increasingly taking center stage in the early 1960s, and deeply influencing Dylan, was the civil rights movement. All too often, and unfortunately in this film as well, that movement is squashed down to the March on Washington and maybe one or two other big events. But none of that gives a sense of how dramatic, dangerous, and explosive events from 1960 to 1964 were in a South where lynchings were still commonplace.
Take a look at just a few of those events:
- February 1, 1960–Four African American college students sit down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and are viciously beaten while the cameras rolled;
- 1961–Black and white students, known as “Freedom Riders,” are brutally beaten and their busses burned as they attempt to ride integrated busses through the South;
- May 2, 1963–1,000 Black school children are attacked with fire hoses and police dogs as they attempt to march for school integration in Birmingham, Alabama;
- June 12, 1963–Civil rights leader Medgar Evers is gunned down outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi;
- September 15, 1963–A bomb kills four children and injures dozens at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham; and
- June 21, 1964–Three Civil Rights Movement workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—are kidnapped and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi.
Imagine how all of those things hit young people straining against the heavy 50s repression still hanging over their heads, and you get a sense of how wildly liberating Dylan’s songs were.
My point here is not that this film is in any way required to “educate” the audience about all this, but the problem is this—it’s one thing to know the facts, and it’s something altogether different to feel their impact at the time and in the historical context they happened. It’s that feeling that is crucial for really understanding (getting a feel for, so to speak) what was driving young people, and especially Dylan, to reach with all their hearts and souls for a new society.
That is why he wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and that is why it became an anthem. How much stronger A Complete Unknown would have been had the filmmakers found the ways to channel that feeling.
To get why this matters you only have to take a cursory look at our world today. As the dawn of a new fascism looms, one that will potentially render the repression of the 1950s the good old days, the need to break free of the stifling “way things are” and create a new, liberating path full of both promise and danger is more urgent than ever. There is and will only ever be one Bob Dylan, but to quote Joe Strummer, the future is unwritten.
The upshot? Go see A Complete Unknown, then take a deep dive into the decade that created Dylan. Lots to learn there.
PS: The film perpetuates the myth that Pete Seeger was furious at Dylan for insisting on doing his electrified set at the 1965 Newport Film Festival and looked for an axe to chop of the electrified sound. As Seeger himself has said multiple times, he had no problem with what Dylan was doing, and loved the songs he played, especially “Maggie’s Farm.” But the quality of the sound system he was using was so terrible that it created distortion and made it virtually impossible to hear the music, and that was what he was furious about. Quite a difference.
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By Rescinding Its Offer to Raz Segal, the University of Minnesota Has Scaled Mt. Irony
To protect a state conducting mass murder and starvation, pro-Israeli extremists essentially discriminated against an Israeli for his views.
Jun 25, 2024
The resurrection of McCarthyism in the U.S. has returned in full force since October 7. Careers have been truncated, protests have been muffled, and employment opportunities curtailed.
MSNBCcanceled “The Mehdi Hasan Show” in November. In June, Briahna Joy Gray was canned by The Hill, where she co-hosted the Rising web series. Almost 30% of students who demonstrated against the Israeli genocide and famine as a weapon of war had their jobs rescinded. University presidents have responded to pro-Palestinian encampments on campuses in true anti-First Amendment fashion (and hence anti-American) by calling in the police to clear them. While the police have used heavy-handed tactics against pro-Palestinian activists, when the same protesters were attacked by a pro-Israeli mob, the police stood idly by.
While these are just some instances of McCarthyism related to Palestinian rights not seen since the 1950s Red Scare, this month has shown us layer upon layer of irony, yielding Mt. Irony.
As Americans have been constitutionally granted the right to free speech, it would make sense that they not be punished with police crackdowns, university and corporate firings, and refusals to hire when they choose to exercise this fundamental right.
The University of Minnesota rescinded its offer to Israeli historian and leading genocide scholar Dr. Raz Segal to become director of its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS). Dr. Segal had been prescient in describing Israel’s onslaught on Gaza as a “textbook case of genocide” during the first week of the conflict, when Israel had already killed almost 1,900 and displaced more than 400,000 Palestinians.
The canceling of Dr. Segal’s directorship was fueled by two CHGS board members resigning in protest of his hiring and pressure from a local Jewish advocacy group. Interestingly, the advocacy group did not just have a problem with Segal’s genocide article. The group also voiced concern over Dr. Segal describing Israel as a “settler-colonial” state and his alleged dismissing of campus antisemitism. If the latter claim is true, it was likely dismissed by Dr. Segal as he surely understands that almost all the “antisemitism” on campus related to pro-Palestinian protests is not antisemitism at all. It is just discomfort with students decrying Israel’s genocide, constructed famine, and apartheid.
Here’s where the layers of irony come in.
One layer is that an Israeli scholar was barred from a university position by those who are pro-Israeli, in an extreme, fundamentalist sense. To protect a state conducting mass murder and starvation, pro-Israeli extremists essentially discriminated against an Israeli for his views. They sacrificed one person’s career for the greater good of genocide and starvation.
The ironies mount.
Second layer: Dr. Segal had the foresight and, frankly, courage to call out Israel on October 13, 2023, for perpetrating “another chapter in the Nakba,” in which a genocide was unfolding. In his article for Jewish Currents, Dr. Segal noted his status as a scholar of genocide. For his experience and expertise, he was selected to become the director of University of Minnesota’s CHGS—to guide the center’s role in studying genocide and the Holocaust. For utilizing his knowledge in calling out the ongoing genocide in Gaza, he was prevented from leading an organization that focuses on genocide. The university would apparently prefer to hire someone who cherry picks which genocides to actually consider genocide. If I were to guess, these would be genocides that the U.S. did not perpetrate (such as those committed against Native Americans or the Vietnamese) or act as an accomplice to (such as Bangladesh in 1971).
The last layer of Mt. Irony is the revival of full-fledged McCarthyism in the U of M’s trampling on the First Amendment. Because Dr. Segal exercised First Amendment rights within an American magazine, he was prevented from assuming CHGS directorship. Universities are supposed to be bastions of open discussion and debate, yet University of Minnesota and innumerable other U.S. higher learning institutions have embraced the antithesis.
Mt. Irony is deeply interwoven with troubling contradictions in the American public sphere. As Americans have been constitutionally granted the right to free speech, it would make sense that they not be punished with police crackdowns, university and corporate firings, and refusals to hire when they choose to exercise this fundamental right. If one speaks up against injustice, one’s career should not be curtailed. At least, so says the First Amendment.
The Clash’s “Know Your Rights” lyrics ring true, now more than ever:
You have the right to free speech
As long as you’re not
Dumb enough to try it
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