Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Liberty Unyielding on November 1, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. It has been edited to fit Minding the Campus’s style guidelines.
Kamala Harris will make campus censorship worse through her judicial appointments as president. Progressive judges appointed by Joe Biden have upheld punishment and investigation of moderate, conservative, and libertarian faculty and students. Harris is politically more extreme than Joe Biden, supports restrictions on hate speech, has attacked the free-speech rights of conservative non-profits, and wants to restrict speech that she and other progressives view as inaccurate. In the U.S. Senate, nobody was to the left of Kamala Harris, according to Newsweek—not even Bernie Sanders. Kamala Harris is also hostile to religious freedom.
Democratic Senators have voted in unison to confirm left-wing, pro-censorship judges like Judge John Chun. Judge Chun ruled that it was OK for college officials to retaliate against a professor because he criticized politically correct “land acknowledgments.” Judge Chun was appointed by Joe Biden and confirmed over Republican objections in a 49-to-47 vote. Land acknowledgments are often very inaccurate. They commonly imply that the land on which an institution sits was stolen from a Native American tribe that held the land for time immemorial. But most land in the U.S. has been occupied by many different peoples before European settlers arrived, and a substantial amount of land was purchased, not stolen, from Native Americans. That reality offends some progressives: A progressive Massachusetts town covered up a plaque revealing that its land was bought, not stolen, from Indians.
Obama and Biden appointees on a federal appeals court voted to uphold a ban on a “There Are Only Two Genders” T-shirt, even though 65 percent of Americans say there are only two genders. Progressive judges like such censorship. The ban on the “two genders” T-shirt was upheld by a progressive federal appeals court in L.M. v. Town of Middleborough (2024), even though the Supreme Court has ruled that students have the right to express even divisive viewpoints on their clothing. The Supreme Court ruled that an armband expressing opposition to America’s involvement in the Vietnam War was protected by the First Amendment—even though it caused outrage in a school—in Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1969).
A lot of censorship approved by progressive judges seems like simple bullying. A Democratic judge in California upheld the punishment of an innocent child for writing that “any life” matters—which school officials construed as being in tension with the “Black Lives Matter” movement, even though the child also wrote “Black Lives Mat[t]er.” Judge David O. Carter ruled that a first-grader’s “Black Lives Mat[t]er” + “Any Life” drawing was “not protected by the First Amendment” and could treated as “impermissible harassment” of black people, when it was perceived as diluting the message that Black Lives Matter by suggesting that “any life” matters. Judge Carter so ruled, even though he admitted that the student, B.B., intended no such suggestion: “B.B.’s intentions were innocent. B.B. testified that she gifted the Drawing to M.C. to make her feel comfortable after her class learned about Martin Luther King Jr.” The school principal and teachers punished the first-grader by calling her racist, forcing her to apologize twice, and kept her from playing at recess for two weeks. Judge Carter dismissed the student’s lawsuit against the school system, declaring that “deference to schoolteachers is especially appropriate today, where, increasingly, what is harmful or innocent speech is in the eye of the beholder.”
If Democrats retain control of the Senate after this election, Kamala Harris will find it easier to appoint judges who support this sort of censorship because Democrats will rubber-stamp all of her picks, no matter how extreme—the two “moderate” Democrats in the Senate are both retiring this year (Senators Manchin and Sinema) and no Democrat running for a Senate seat is a moderate. If the Democrats lose control of the Senate, she may have to pick relatively moderate judges to get them confirmed. All but three Republican senators now consistently vote against staunchly left-wing judicial nominees, with the remaining three sometimes voting to confirm them. A Republican Senate Majority Leader might not even allow a vote on a left-wing judicial nominee who is hellbent on censoring politically incorrect people, or hellbent on taking away their rights. If Harris nominated moderate judges, she could get them confirmed even by a Republican senate.
The Biden-Harris administration told colleges to restrict constitutionally protected speech in its Title VI and Title IX investigations of colleges, such as Drexel University.
Harris’s support for banning speech that she thinks reflects “hate”—a position she made clear in a speech to the NAACP—may not sound bad, but it would actually be bad, because woke progressives consider many beliefs held by normal people to be hateful—like believing that there are two genders, or saying that “any life” matters, or objecting to woke land acknowledgments.
Progressive “organizations now define hate speech broadly, and counterintuitively, to include ‘offensive words, about or directed towards historically victimized groups,’ even if the words were not uttered out of hate. Among leftists, the concept of hate speech has expanded to include commonplace views about racial or sexual subjects. That includes criticizing feminism, affirmative action, homosexuality, or gay marriage, or opinions about how to address sexual harassment or allegations of racism in the criminal justice system.”
These broad definitions of hate speech aren’t based on the First Amendment. In the past, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, which protects speech that offends minority groups. But foreign countries are banning hate speech on social media, and many progressive legal scholars and civil rights activists are now calling for America to follow their example and ban hate speech by limiting the First Amendment.
Under schools’ “hostile learning environment” harassment codes aimed at punishing hateful or offensive speech, “students and campus newspapers have been charged with racial or sexual harassment for expressing commonplace views about racial or sexual subjects, such as criticizing feminism, affirmative action, sexual harassment regulations, homosexuality, gay marriage, or transgender rights, or discussing the alleged racism of the criminal justice system. (See, e.g., Neil Hamilton, Zealotry and Academic Freedom: A Legal and Historical Perspective (1995); Brief of Amici Curiae Students for Individual Liberty and Student Association for Freedom of Expression, in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, No. 97-843 (filed Dec. 8, 1998); Ed Godfrey, Professor’s Letter Draws Ire, Daily Oklahoman, Feb. 26, 2000; David G. Savage, Forbidden Words on Campus, L.A. Times, Feb. 12, 1991, at A1; Eugene Volokh, Re: Proposed changes to the University’s sexual harassment policy and procedures, UCLA, March 31, 2003; David E. Bernstein, You Can’t Say That (2003); Robert L. Shibley, Twisting Title IX (2016)).”
Image of Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris speaking at a campaign rally at Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona by Gage Skidmore — Wikimedia Commons
