This is a perilous moment for our democracy and country. We are in the midst of an authoritarian assault on institutions central to free speech and self-governance, from universities to media to the bar–leading nearly 1000 law professors to name this a moment of constitutional crisis and one university president to compare our times to that of Joseph McCarthy.
We are profoundly concerned about the online targeting and harassment of the LPE Project’s Deputy Director, Helyeh Doutaghi. This is part of a broader environment of speech repression, particularly of anti-war and pro-Palestinian views, through both doxxing and official retaliation, including from the government itself. When government threatens to deport students and scholars because of their political protest we are hurtling toward autocracy. False and defamatory statements, often on social media, feed into coordinated harassment efforts that can then destroy careers and lead to deportation and other harms that are impossible to remedy.
Perhaps most chilling here is how the astonishing breadth of material support and sanctions laws structure institutional responses. As scholars have long warned, material support for terrorism laws can be interpreted to criminalize a very wide swath of speech that otherwise would clearly be First Amendment protected. One could say this is an example of the law being “weaponized,” but the PATRIOT Act was always a weapon. What’s more, Muslims, Arabs, individuals of Middle Eastern descent, non-citizens, and opponents of U.S. foreign policy are disproportionately targeted by those laws, and are far too often presumed guilty in public debates.
LPE scholars emphasize how law both enables and constrains democratic aspirations and liberation movements. But law’s repressive face dominates in times of authoritarian crisis. At those moments it falls to organizers, activists, lawyers, and community-members of all kinds to sustain law’s democratic potential. We are committed to ensuring that LPE continues to be a space that fosters those sorts of efforts and movements.
