Free Speech Means Not Retaliating Against Employees Over the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict | Opinion

Since the start of the latest Israel-Hamas war, a number of people have lost jobs or had events canceled because of their comments or stances on the conflict. Editors of publications, political staffers, a talent agent, and a sports reporter have all lost work for things they've said. After students at Harvard signed a statement holding Israel "entirely responsible for all unfolding violence," not only did some have job offers rescinded, but a billboard truck showing their names and faces drove around Cambridge. MarketWatch warned readers that under U.S. law, they have few job protections if an employer doesn't like their political speech, "so choose your words about Israel, Palestine, Trump, and Biden very carefully." (Perhaps sensing the somewhat Stalinist overtones of this warning, they later deleted it.)

Those who defend this kind of firing and public shaming argue that the underlying comments people made were odious. They say that blaming Israel "entirely" for the killing of its own citizens, and thereby absolving those who killed them, is morally repugnant. They argue that freedom of speech doesn't mean that all speech is free of social consequences, and that employers have a legal right to determine what kinds of values they want their employees to uphold.

But we should be wary of these kinds of arguments for private-sector punishments. It's true that employers are legally allowed to fire people for their social media posts. But freedom of speech doesn't just mean the government shouldn't throw you in jail for your speech. It should also mean that people can engage in a very broad range of political speech without having to fear for their jobs.

That means we should be wary of destroying people's livelihoods even for speech we are repelled by.

Let's recall the McCarthy era (or "second Red Scare") in American politics. It's generally looked back on today as a shameful period of political persecution, and its lessons should always be kept in mind. Notably, during the McCarthy years, it was not just government prosecutions that created such a stifling environment of paranoia and censorship. People suspected of being communists could and did lose their jobs. In fact, as Ellen Schrecker explains in The Age of McCarthyism, job loss was much more significant as a form of repression than outright state censorship. People didn't fear going to jail nearly as much as they feared getting fired.

Now, many anti-communists at the time might have made similar arguments to those defending political firings today. Communism is totalitarian, those who defend it are endorsing something dangerous and murderous, employers have no obligation to retain people in employment whose values they despise, case closed. But the result is that people could not speak their minds for fear of serious consequences if they were suspected of having the wrong sympathies.

Similar arguments about the "freedom of employers" can of course be made to justify firing people for speech that progressives dislike. Notably, while cases of punishment for pro-Palestinian speech have been most prominent, there is at least one case of someone losing work for pro-Israel comments. So-called "cancel culture" has come under heavy criticism for inflicting disproportionate social punishments on people for speech deemed bigoted or insensitive.

I tend to think critics of cancel culture exaggerate the scale of the problem, but they have a point in arguing that free speech is about more than just freedom from outright government censorship.

In fact, when people can get fired for controversial comments outside of work, the result is that only bosses have real freedom of speech. Mohamad Safa, the CEO of an NGO, recently posted on X/Twitter that someone tried to get him fired after he tweeted "F*ck Israel." As the CEO, he said, he thought long and hard and then decided "not to fire himself." This isn't just a witty joke. Safa has the freedom to say whatever he wants, because he's at the top of a workplace hierarchy. He's the one who decides what people get to say if they want to keep their jobs there.

When people get fired for political speech, what it means is that how much free speech you have depends on how much money and job security you have. That isn't good for democracy, regardless of what you think of the comments that have gotten people fired.

Freedom of speech can be uncomfortable to defend because it often requires sticking up for people who have said things we really don't like. For me, it means that not only do I defend the right to criticize Israel (which, incidentally, I once lost a job over myself), but I would be equally opposed to an employer firing someone for supporting Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu.

It's easy to justify punishing people for speech by pointing to how bad and immoral the speech is. But the principle of free expression requires us to ask a different question: If people start getting fired over political speech, what are the broader consequences?

The ultimate result is a kind of authoritarian society where everyone must constantly self-censor, lest their employer see their social media posts and take exception to them. We will all have to wonder at every moment what our employer's politics are, and whether we have crossed their line.

I find that disturbingly reminiscent of the dystopian surveillance regime of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. We need a robust culture of public discussion around controversial issues, even if that means being frustrated that people who say things we find loathsome get to stay in their jobs. There are limits, of course, and hard cases, but our starting point should be that firings are an extreme and almost-always excessive response to off-the-clock speech.

Nathan J. Robinson is the editor in chief of Current Affairs magazine and the author of Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.