You’d think every conservative who’s drawn attention to “free speech on campus” as a way of platforming right-wing causes would, in the case of students being violently arrested and repressed this week, stick to their (proverbial this time!) guns. As the news this week showed us, quite the contrary. Zaid Jilani joins us to discuss the horrible violence waged by the American police state against college kids this week, and why both the liberal and conservative establishment in American politics have abandoned the principles of the First Amendment by abandoning these students. Watch below:

Perhaps you were listening in as WKCR, the Columbia student radio broadcasting team, fearlessly stayed and reported as NYPD attacked their classmates in a raid on campus. Violence against peacefully protesting students is now taking place at an unfathomable scale. Hundreds of protesters were also assaulted and rounded up at UCLA, across the country. And dozens of schools in between are mounting their own solidarity encampments, and facing massive repression from the alliances of universities and local police forces.

These alliances are not new. They characterized the university’s response to protests against apartheid in South Africa and against the Vietnam War. What’s especially disturbing is that from the local level to the federal level, our government is, on the whole, utterly failing to protect these young people peacefully exercising their right to protest a genocide. The failure of leadership from Biden in particular — a president who has and will again demand the youth vote as the anti-Trump — is galling. Students across America are being left at the mercy of cops’ batons as they lose their housing and face total uncertainty in their academic careers.

We talk with Zaid Jilani this week about this massive uprising that’s sweeping the country, the insidious response from universities and governments, and what any principled free speech advocate should be doing right now about it. You can listen to this podcast when it’s released tomorrow on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and more.