Minutes into his lecture, the physicist’s voice disappeared beneath a wall of chants, shouts, and obscenities. Though he repeatedly invited the protestors to stay, listen, and engage with him afterward, they refused. They had not come to listen. They had not even come for the lecture itself. It was February 2024, and they were there for one thing and one thing only: to prevent an Israeli from being heard. When campus police said they could not remove the disruptors, university officials removed the lecturer instead. The lecture ended. The protestors’ goal had been achieved.

The irony was almost too perfect to be true. The visiting professor had traveled to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to discuss black holes—regions of space so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational pull. Instead, the lecture was swallowed by an ideology that, like the phenomenon he had come to explain, consumed every possibility of dialogue. No light—not even the faintest glimmer of understanding—was allowed to escape.

What happened in Las Vegas was not an isolated incident. Instead, it was the clearest expression of a tactic that had been spreading across North American campuses for years. Long before protestors turned a lecture on physics into a referendum on the Jewish homeland, students had learned that they did not need to defeat ideas they opposed. They needed only to ensure those ideas were never heard.

In 2018, protestors at the City University of New York School of Law disrupted a constitutional-law professor delivering a lecture on free speech. In 2019, protestors at the University of Pennsylvania shut down a panel featuring a former acting ICE director. In 2020, Harvard Law School students disrupted a recruiting event hosted by a law firm that represented ExxonMobil. In 2021, protestors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pressured the university to cancel a distinguished geophysicist’s lecture because of his unrelated views on academic hiring. In 2022, protestors at Yale Law School drowned out a bipartisan discussion on civil liberties with shouting, pounding, and personal insults. With dialogue giving way to disruption, students learned that winning arguments no longer mattered. The loudest voices no longer won because they were right. They won because no one else could be heard.

Nowhere, however, did this........

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