Here's the relevant paragraph: https://twitter.com/alexbkane/status/1352623125062688768

In NYC, the level of pandering to the most conservative common denominator on Israel is second to none.

A Jewish pick to become a deputy borough president of Queens was recently pushed out for affirming that AIPAC's spending is a factor in its power: https://queenseagle.com/all/queens-deputy-borough-president-pick-withdraws-after-controversial-israel-tweets-emerge

For better or worse -- and in my opinion, it's worse -- this is a rational calculation for many politicians.

There are hundreds of thousands of voters -- in Brooklyn and Queens in particular -- who are very, very hawkish on Israel ...

... They tend to be more vocal and better organized than the broader population of people with more moderate or even left-wing views on this issue.

While I'm on this topic, it's important to remember that in recent decades, cancel culture has first and foremost been used to try to silence Palestinian activists ...

... See this new report in the Times documenting the ways that some pro-Israel groups make life hard for college campus pro-Palestine and pro-BDS activists and professors, and how quick Zoom is to de-platform some of these people: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/nyregion/college-anti-semitism-bds.html

Notice the language here used by a right-leaning pro-Israel NYU student: She was "triggered" by a pro-Palestinian demo that featured the burning of an Israeli flag.

Free speech skeptics on the left use similar language. It's what @glukianoff and @JonHaidt call "safetyism."

I have plenty of tactical -- and some philosophical -- critiques of how the pro-Palestine movement conducts itself ...

... When trying to shift a political paradigm as entrenched as the pro-Israel consensus, the difficult work of persuasion would be more effective than flag burning and elevating ex-Palestinian militants. It often looks more like wearing a "Che" shirt than real political activism.

I also know that people on the left will tell me that their criticisms of platforming certain figures on the right -- some of whom I would agree are dangerous -- are not "content agnostic," that the noble dissenters can be separated from the malign ...

... But those distinctions are invariably far too subjective, changing from place to place, moment to moment.

As @ggreenwald writes, which speech is considered dangerous enough to censor tends to reflect an establishment consensus at a given moment: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-new-domestic-war-on-terror-is

So I prefer adopting as maximal a definition of free speech as possible.

It will be a more effective way of protecting everyone by enabling us to call for consistent enforcement of these norms and laws, rather than rely on the sympathies of the gatekeepers at a given moment.