A hardline anti-Islamic Republic group went after a tenured professor for comments about Iran. When that didn’t work, they cited tweets about Israel and Gaza. The post Antisemitism Law Helped Get a Professor Fired for Free Speech, Lawsuit Says appeared first on The Intercept .
Page B1From§Eachthe supper edition — 6 October 2026
Free speech shields deported students in court, fires a tenured professor, and stays banned at the White House.
As it ran on the front
Free speech, the clause that protects you right up until it doesn't, was pronounced unevenly alive this week, present in one courtroom, absent from one campus personnel file, and turned away at one gate.
Born into a country that built courts, campuses and a press pool specifically to test it, the clause spent August defending international students. On August 29, Judge Noël Wise ruled that the government could not deport or revoke the visas of students who had spoken up for Palestinian rights and criticized Israel's conduct in Gaza; the administration's own actions, Wise wrote, violated both the First Amendment and the Fifth. Score one for the clause, three weeks before anyone asked it to show up again.…
…(cont) It did not get three weeks of rest. On September 19, guards at the White House confiscated the press badges of reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico, who were simply attempting to enter. No court had weighed in yet, because the badge does not come with a hearing; it comes with a guard. The clause that had just been read into a federal order in California did not reach the gate in Washington.
Two and a half weeks after that, on October 6, a tenured professor filed suit over the same clause doing something else again. A hardline group had first gone after the professor for comments about Iran. That didn't work. So they cited the professor's tweets about Israel and Gaza instead, and an antisemitism law did the rest. The lawsuit asks a court to decide whether the words that freed a student in August can also keep a professor employed in October.
The clause is survived by that lawsuit, now pending. Whippersnappers in three different buildings are, this week, learning the same clause three different ways: shield, silence, and gate code, depending entirely on which door you're standing at. That gap between the ruling and the gate is the job itself, performed exactly as designed.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that readers request, in writing, the actual speech policy their own employer or university keeps on file, before they need to read it under different circumstances.
“Same amendment, three different outcomes depending on whether you're a visa holder, a professor, or a reporter at the White House gate — that's not inconsistency, that's a sorting system. The clause isn't broken, it's being used exactly like a tool that protects whoever the people running the building want protected that week. Your kid's professor just found out the hard way that free speech is a courtroom word, not a paycheck word.”
“Look, the badge policy is just basic security protocol, outlets get re-credentialed all the time, nothing new — okay, "all the time" might be doing some work there. And the university didn't fire anyone for "tweets," they enforced an antisemitism policy that happens to also, in this one case, involve tweets about Gaza, which — hm, yeah, that's still tweets. The court thing in August was about visas, totally different situation, unrelated, I don't see the connection anyone's drawing here, forget I brought it up.”
The receipts
· Judge Rules the Trump Admin Can't Deport International Students for Free Speech from the morgue, 29 Aug 2026
· No free speech at the White House from the morgue, 23 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.