Teen Vogue article limits free speech to antisemitic speech
November 10, 2023
In a new article, Teen Vogue radically redefines free speech protections as applying only to the limited window of discourse that the left deems acceptable. As a result, the outlet’s young audience is indoctrinated into a gross misunderstanding of free speech that ironically justifies censorship of pro-Israel speech and other mainstream right-wing stances by associating them with the “hate speech” readers abhor.
The piece, written by Teen Vogue politics editor Lex McMenamin, is about a letter the ACLU sent to “the heads of more than 650 American colleges and universities to defend the free speech rights of students protesting over Israel-Palestine.”
Without parents or other authority figures reading this magazine’s content, its young audience is duped into succumbing to peer pressure and participating in the open, hateful support of antisemitic terrorism locally or on campus at many of the country’s most esteemed colleges.
While most of the article covers the ACLU letter, it supports the ACLU’s recommendations by talking to the founder of Palestine Legal, who has long represented Students for Justice in Palestine or “SJP-associated organizers” and illustrating the issue by reporting on the actions of “pro-Palestinian student groups,” which Teen Vogue says are “furthering the association being pushed.”
The outlet buries a single paragraph saying that the ACLU mentioned an increase in “antisemitic and Islamophobic speech and attacks,” but does not itself explore what has happened on those campuses.
The State University System of Florida chancellor, in consultation with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, recently called for the deactivation of all chapters of SJP at the state’s public universities. The order came in the wake of the national SJP body sympathizing with Hamas.
The Anti-Defamation League and the Brandeis Center also recently issued a letter to university presidents requesting them to investigate their campuses’ SJP chapters. In response to that letter and DeSantis’, the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to the presidents of over 650 U.S. colleges and universities that implores them “to reject calls to investigate, disband, or penalize student groups on the basis of their exercise of free speech rights.”
Ostensibly, the ACLU and its left-wing allies have done a remarkable about-face. Pay no attention to their tradition of censoring mainstream conservative voices on college campuses nationwide. They would have you believe that they – not the right – are the noble defenders of First Amendment rights and critical inquiry while under attack from a favored bogeyman in DeSantis.
The ACLU says they defend free speech against the “unwarranted, wrong and dangerous” investigation into SJP chapters. This Islamophobic, hateful profiling “echoes America’s mistakes during the McCarthy era,” the official says.
“ … [T]he experience of our country’s universities during the McCarthy era demonstrates that ideologically motivated efforts to police speech on campus destroy the foundation on which academic communities are built,” the article notes, quoting the ACLU’s letter. The irony is that the left is guilty of these very same “ideologically motivated efforts” that it claims to reject.
Not only do leftists censor conservatives at will, but they now also are mainstreaming support for radical Islamic terrorism. Teen Vogue seemingly endorses the national SJP body’s pro-Hamas sympathies, citing the ACLU letter that dubs them “not material support for terrorism, but political advocacy fully protected by the First Amendment.”
This is the same “political advocacy” the article is designed to propagandize young women and girls into engaging in censorship of the right and the normalization of antisemitic terrorism.