Alex Gourevitch mounts a welcome, vigorous defense of the right to protest. But while he correctly traces how the preoccupation with safety in the United States led to narrowing the scope for legitimate protest, he largely misses the role that opportunistic appeals to “free speech” have themselves played in that process. The latest deployments of “safety” arguments are part of a longer-term pattern of anti-left repression that exploit liberal ideals of freedom and safety for political, indeed partisan, ends.

George W. Bush’s remarks after September 11—“they hate our freedoms”—were a watershed moment in this regard. Barbarian hordes inimical to freedom were unworthy of its protections, the president implied. In similar fashion, as Gourevitch pinpoints, the “garrison university” now claims it must defend students against, and itself be defended from, an ever-shifting cast of threats, from student protests and reactionary shock-jocks to “cultural Marxism,” “critical race theory,” and “wokeness.” With Donald Trump pledging to restore free speech by threatening legal action against the mere mention of “diversity” and “inclusion,” the contradictions inherent in this post-9/11 story of freedom as an embattled garrison are rendered in stark relief.

In past rounds of moral panics on campus, when “cancel culture” and “trigger warnings” were still the threats du jour, pundits and social media outrage peddlers converged to frame campus protests at large as threats to “free speech.” Responding to the steady churn of outrage-bait framing protesting students as “snowflakes” and “crybullies,” state legislatures across the country passed a flurry of “campus free speech” bills drafted by right-wing think tanks, which expanded the range of anti-protest measures available to college administrators. To be sure, boycotts and deplatforming protests were useful props in these efforts. Still, what made it possible to inflate deplatforming incidents into threats that required expansion of repressive state power was the failure to question a securitized vision of liberty that, since Bush’s “they hate our freedoms” speech, has become increasingly dominant.

Even now, repression of Gaza protests on campuses is still being justified on the account that they threaten “free speech” as well as “safety.” Wresting “free speech” away from its entanglement with “safety”—so that people no longer desire the absence of incivility, disruptive protests, and unsettling emotions to feel that they are free to express themselves—may prove impossible unless the alibis for branding people as enemies of freedom do not receive greater scrutiny. Unless this notion of freedom as an embattled garrison is challenged frontally, an ever-growing range of people, causes, and protests will face repression.