Columbia was rocked by pro-Hamas, anti-Israel protests for months. Palestinian activist and former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil led disruptive protests at the Ivy League school, for which he was recently arrested by ICE agents. Predictably, Khalil and other antisemitic, pro-Palestinian leftists now cry that Khalil's right to "free speech" was violated after President Donald Trump's crackdown on antisemitic unrest on America's university campuses. 

Here's the salient point: 

Columbia officials all but turned a blind eye to Khalil and his Israel-hating pals prior to Trump administration threats to withhold $400 million from the university if the unrest continued.

ALSO READ: Columbia University Gives In to Trump Admin on Campus Antisemitism, Riots

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In stark contrast, a conservative student at Davidson College has been under investigation by school officials for distributing (fact-based) pro-Israel pamphlets on campus and making comments on Instagram about "trans-female" (male) athletes participating in female sporting events.

Go figure. 

Cynthia Huang, president of Davidson's chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, was recently told she likely violated the college's Code of Responsibility by distributing the material, sparking yet another debate on First Amendment rights.

Huang, who has allegedly received death threats in the past from classmates for criticizing abortion, received a letter on Feb. 28 from the Director of Rights & Responsibilities suggesting the conservative student group she leads had "harassed peers." The letter cites the distribution of the pamphlet last fall, titled “Five Myths About Israel Perpetrated by the Pro-Hamas Left," which also states, "Palestinians are not a distinct people and there has never been a Palestinian state."

Distributing political pamphlets is core protected speech, but at @DavidsonCollege the YAF chapter is facing charges for allegedly spreading “misinformation” and “promoting Islamophobia” for sharing the pamphlet pictured below. pic.twitter.com/Cu8CVtvAjB

— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) March 5, 2025

You can read the "threatening" pamphlet here. (Spoiler: it's neither threatening nor incorrect.)

In addition, the college's letter refers to an Instagram post about 2024 Olympic gold medal Algerian "female" boxer Imane Khelif, whose gender is both "questionable" and rightly controversial.

With respect to the letter and the circumstances of why she received it, Huang told The College Fix:

The idea of harassment I did not understand. It’s really free speech at the end of the day. Just because you disagree with something doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be expressed. Developing critical thinking skills requires seeing different viewpoints across the political spectrum.

Huang said she was confused as to why Davidson officials waited until February 28 to send the letter.

I knew people were not happy about it, but I thought it was interesting that they went to administration and called it harassment. At the end of the day, I want YAF and all conservative students and groups to be treated the same.

Huang said she has yet to hear from university officials about whether she will be punished.

So can the textbook definition of hypocrisy be clearer, between the goings-on at Columbia and the threats against a conservative student at Davidson? (It couldn't be.)

The Davidson story caught the attention of George Washington University Law School professor and political commentator Jonathan Turley, who wrote in a column published on Sunday:

[Huang's] account is all too familiar for many of us in higher education. ... administrators are often on a hair-trigger when it comes to conservative speech while turning a blind eye to inflammatory rhetoric. 

I have defended faculty who have made an array of disturbing comments on “detonating white people,” denouncing police, calling for Republicans to suffer, strangling police officers, celebrating the death of conservatives, calling for the killing of Trump supporters, supporting the murder of conservative protesters, and other outrageous statements.

Yet, liberal professors and students tend to enjoy the full protection of academic freedom and free speech. Indeed, at the University of California campus, professors actually rallied around a professor who physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display.

The support enjoyed by faculty on the far left is in sharp contrast to the treatment given faculty with moderate, conservative or libertarian views. Anyone who raises such dissenting views is immediately set upon by a mob demanding their investigation or termination.

The most disingenuous and disturbing part rests in one of two notions in the minds of the left: 

Either left-wingers (including Democrats and their lapdog media) are incapable of seeing their hypocrisy because in their minds, their beliefs are sacrosanct baseline truths, or they do see and embrace their hypocrisy as a right, due to their elitist, holier-than-thou mentality. 

Turley also weighed in on the question of whether Huang's material is protected speech.

I do not see anything in the Huang material that is not protected speech. The rationale that it is “misinformation” is revealing in that sense. Davidson is objecting to Huang’s views as simply wrong, enforcing a familiar orthodoxy in policing what administrators deem to be information or misinformation.

Precisely. 

Meanwhile, in the Second Age of Trump, the left's hypocrisy, including violence, continues at a fever pitch.