When 'Guru', Legendary Paul Graham got attacked inside Silicon Valley

San Francisco 8.21am

Not a Muslim. Not a Jewish Leftist. Not a Jewish progressive. Not an Arab. But Brit, Weymouth native Paul Graham, SV legend, very respected. If Paul Graham got ‘muted’ systematically, imagine muslim or arab.

One of stunning his ‘anger’, but with soft tone, when he just posted data that only 31 Israeli children, according to United Nation data, killed by Hamas, compared with 1,400 Palestinian children in Gaza, as of November 3rd, 2023.

33 Days later, around December 5th, 2023, according to EUROMEDICAL, 8,697 Gazans Children killed by Israel, not counting 25 children in West Bank also killed by Israel. Total Gazans killed at least 21,731 and not counting West Bank, minimum 262 killed, since war started.

According to HAARETZ Israel media, zero baby killed by HAMAS.

Plestia Alaqad in Gaza. Anne Frank in Germany

Plestia Alaqad

This is all concerning enough. But politicians, seizing on some evidence of antisemitic displays at pro-Palestinian protests to link Muslims and migrants with antisemitism, have taken the opportunity to advance an anti-migrant agenda.

In America, 82% of all U.S.-based respondents, incl. almost all assistant professors (98 %), said they self-censor when they speak professionally about the Israeli-Palestinian issue. 81 % of those said they primarily held back their criticism of Israel vs 11% of Palestinians. Can't possibly imagine why 98% of assistant Profs feel the need to do this.

There are some employment law aspects to the university speech panic that haven't been fully explicated. I think there are two pieces. First, universities are themselves of course employers: of faculty who have protections due to academic freedom and/or tenure, but also of staff.

Josh Sternberg is Jewish American, pro Palestine

From my American colleagues, I've been hearing *many* reports from colleagues of college and university staff who have recently faced retaliation due to political speech. And there are some high-profile cases of faculty facing the same. The more interesting question is raised by the second legal connection.

Namely: Why does anyone think universities should discipline employees for their off-duty speech? More generally, why does anyone think that about employers generally?

One reason is employment at will. In the US, employees can be terminated for any or no reason, as long as it isn't otherwise unlawful. And in the majority of states, employee political speech is not "protected" in legal parlance.

This helps create a situation in which it makes legal and political sense to call on an employer to fire their employee for political speech. There are surely deeper conjunctural forces at work here as well.

For a whole set of reasons we now see firms as moral actors here in the dual sense that they have agency and that they should exercise it responsibly. Weird and insane. Companies exist to make things and accumulate capital. We expect churches and social orgs to act morally in that sense, but that's because they're set up for moral action.

Employment at will plus a sense that employers need to be moral actors has created this situation where it is both possible and acceptable to demand that an employer fire an employee for their political speech. I'll have more to say about this later, I think. For now, just note that if employee political speech was protected, that view would not necessarily be commonsensical. Rather we'd think more "oh, that employee said that in their private life, NBD."