The principal reason I was invited is that I do a lot of student engagement with the students at Rutgers over the years.

And so I was invited in December of 25 about two weeks before.

So I'm supposed to give the speech tomorrow.

So about two weeks ago, I got a call from the dean saying I'm no longer invited because, and I want to get the words exactly right,

because a few students feel like that

my social media posts were opposed to their beliefs. So you can imagine both my surprise and shock

at the justification. This is a pretty consequential decision as it's proven to be. I think they

took it very lightly, but it turned out to be

pretty consequential. And so the sort of casual way he was talking about this really shocked me. I pushed back

in that initial conversation that was on a Thursday. He rethought it and sort of backtracked in that

conversation and said, no, no, no, I kind of like, I wasn't canceling you. I'm just telling you that there's this problem. I'm going to work on it. Then he called me back on the Saturday and said, the decision is final. You're not speaking. Okay. And at that point, was there any clarification about what these allegedly offensive social media posts were? He didn't even use the word offensive.

I want to be clear.

He didn't use any descriptor other than the posts opposed the beliefs of a few students.

And I actually said like a few because he had told me previously that there's a thousand students in this class, Brianna.

So a few sounds like

five out of a thousand. I said, are we talking about like five students? And he didn't go, no, get out of here. It's more than five. He was silent. So it leads me to believe that the number is in that low single digits. No, I asked, I'm like, listen, if you're going to make such a consequential decision, one, like, tell me more.

Like, what is it? Like, give me a chance to respond, to address it. No, I'm not going to get into it. I didn't review your posts. He said, I believe everyone should be allowed to say whatever they want to say. So I didn't review it. I'm just only reacting to this handful of students that said they're not going to attend graduation if you're the speaker. I asked about what about the other, let's say, 995 students. Like, what about them? I know a lot of them. I just actually, days earlier, I had hosted 60 students at my office from Rutgers, and many of those were graduating

seniors. And of course, Palestine came up in that conversation. And it also came up in a fireside

chat. I did on campus with this dean in March, only about a month or so before he canceled my speech.

So the idea that we're going to disenfranchise all of these other students and we don't care how they feel and their sense of identity and their sense of belonging to accommodate the feelings of a handful of students was just foreign to me. And I'm not even being dismissive of those kids' feelings. They can feel however they want to feel. I'm not telling them to feel differently. And they have every right that they don't like me. No one has to like me. They can complain. I don't have a problem with that either.

I have a problem with stifling free speech in this country to protect one category and one category only.

And that is that Palestine exception as it relates to Israel.

...