Is Jonathan Haidt’s about-face from stern critic of “coddling” young people to Coddler in Chief about mental health, free speech... or political suppression?

Haidt’s concern for young people’s well-being is weirdly narrow: only the small fraction whose depression he blames on social media, and only those on campus he politically agrees with

[ Originally appeared in LA Progressive, 7 January 2025, as “Global Nanny Gets It All Wrong.” https://www.laprogressive.com/law-and-justice/global-nanny ]

Psychologist and TED-Talk star Jonathan Haidt, currently spearheading the intifada to ban or restrict teenagers from social media, has also won accolades as a harsh critic of campus “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces,” “binary (us-them) thinking,” and all things “coddling of the American mind” (his 2018 book title). Haidt dismisses liberal girls worried about climate change and social injustices as shallow dupes of social media messaging that “they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words.”

Who cares how today’s snively young “snowflakes” feel about hearing some disagreeable viewpoints? Haidt scolds. Buck up, brats!

Since then, Haidt has morphed into Global Nanny, the squishiest coddler, horrified that teenagers, especially delicate girls, might encounter an impure picture, a harmful idea, an offensive message online that would shatter their fragile little psyches. Never mind the lack of evidence; girls’ suicides must be driven by social media!

On campus, Haidt is now Arch-Protector of student “feelings” – but only ones he identifies with. He now advocates that universities regulate “books, speakers, and words” in some unspecified way to create safe spaces for student and faculty snowflakes ... but only ones who support Israel.

Amid his zeal for shielding selected young coddlees from virtual and campus offensiveness, Haidt remains indifferent to teens who in real life are raped, beaten, and abused face-to-face in tragedies shown to strongly affect mental health. The common thread in Haidt’s and his allies’ selective crusades to attack teens and social media under the guise of “mental health” and selective campus expressions under the guise of “free speech” is to coerce political and university leaders to suppress ideas they disagree with.

Rhetoric vs advocacy

Haidt has fashioned himself as a TED-Talk bridge-builder across America’s gaping political divide. On the volatile Palestine-Israel issue, here’s a recent example of Haidt seeming to do exactly that:

“There are two sides on this issue. I’m on one side, but I understand that there are good reasons for taking the other side. Opposing Israel or hating the Israeli government is not automatically anti-semitism… the Israeli military response has not been “surgical”; its bombing campaign has killed thousands of Palestinians who are not members of Hamas. Young people, most of whom are on TikTok, are probably more exposed than older people to videos of horrific suffering among Gazans. So again, I don’t criticize anyone for protesting Israel or the war, and I hope that universities respect pro-Palestinian students’ First Amendment rights to speak and protest.”

“Technically,” Haidt continues, even the most vitriolic anti-Semitic speech should be protected under the First Amendment unless intended to incite violence.

Unfortunately, Haidt quickly betrays his initial conciliatory tone by lapsing into a repressively one-sided discussion:

“What concerns me is that anti-Israel sentiment seems to be increasingly closely linked to hatred of Jews and physical attacks on Jews and Jewish sites. Such attacks may seem morally justified, even virtuous, to those who believe that Jews are “oppressors.” anti-Israel sentiment seems to be increasingly closely linked to hatred of Jews and physical attacks on Jews and Jewish sites.”

Haidt does not cite a single instance in which the tens of thousands of pro-Palestine demonstrators on hundreds of campuses physically attacked any “Jews and Jewish sites.” (Deadly and injurious pro-Israel and right-wing anti-Semitic violence have occurred, which Haidt curiously fails to condemn.) Even lengthy accounts in pro-Israeli press fail to document any injurious incidents. After extensive searches, I was able to find one off-campus case at a rally organized by students, by a perpetrator who remains unknown.

As for rhetorical campus anti-Semitism, Haidt, citing right-wing, pro-Zionist sources, references only scattered incidents such as “anti-Semitic” shouts, placards, and graffiti (expressions of the type Haidt originally defended as free speech). Of course, anyone on any side – anti-Semitic extremist, hate-speaker of any stripe, pro-Israel provocateur – can shout or plant slogans, placards, and graffiti saying anything designed to harass and discredit.

Reversing his free-speech stand, Haidt then insists university action is needed to show “solidarity” with any Jewish student who merely feels threatened, disturbed, or aggrieved by anything pro-Palestine demonstrators say or do. Free speech is sacrosanct … until a student Haidt agrees with feels in any way anxious or offended.

Throughout, Haidt presents himself as an informed advocate for balanced inquiry and academic fairness and rejection of “binary thinking.” So, one would think Haidt would be careful to make himself an example of those principles.

He does the opposite

Haidt teaches at 60,000-student New York University, where thousands of students and faculty – including hundreds of Jews – demonstrated in favor of Palestinian rights. Did Haidt, self-styled champion of dialogue and reason, talk to them before accusing protesters of “campus anti-Semitism”?

His post reveals no effort to get opposing views firsthand. “Don’t you wonder why none of the media quoted our speeches when misconstruing what our protest was about?” pro-Palestine leaders asked.

Instead, Haidt quotes secondhand right-wing, pro-Israel anecdotes criticizing protesters:

“The displays of support for Hamas began even before Israel had responded, and part of what was so shocking in the first week after the October 7 attack was the relatively muted and delayed expressions of concern by university leaders and campus organizations. Whatever has caused today’s campus anti-semitism, it was already baked in before Israel’s military response began… Even before Israel began its military response, the loudest voices on campus were not university leaders condemning the attacks and vowing solidarity with their Jewish and Israeli students. Instead, the world saw faculty members and student organizations celebrating the attacks.

Is Haidt joking? Obviously, campus sympathy for Palestine (which his essay increasingly conflates with anti-Semitism and support for Hamas) predates October 7, 2023, because Israel’s deadly incursions into Palestine and the West Bank began long before that day.

Charitably, perhaps Haidt patronizes only superficial mainstream and right-wing accounts that pretend everything began on 10/7/2023 and just doesn’t know the history protesting students who get much broader news from social media sources know. Haidt betrays no awareness of binary-challenging complications, such as Israeli leaders’ support for Hamas and refusal of any reasonable compromise to establish a Palestinian state beyond proposals Israeli leaders admitted were shams, alongside Israeli extremists’ assassinations and demotions of leaders who advocated compromise.

Haidt may not be aware of the hundreds of attacks Israel conducted, killing, injuring, and kidnaping thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank over decades before October 7, 2023. If Haidt read the Israeli press regularly featured in social media, he would know Israeli officials jocularly celebrated their pre-10/7/23 mass killings as “mowing the grass.” Nor does Haidt reveal awareness of 2023 negotiations between the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia that would impose solutions to the “Palestine problem” with no participation or input from Palestinians.

This is Haidt’s idea of objective “non-binary” thinking? It gets worse.

Alternatively, if Haidt is aware of the long history of weekly Israeli attacks that began long before October 7, 2023, killing thousands of Palestinians, he is simply dishonest and his concerns about academia are fraudulent at best and openly racist at worst. The point here is not to repeat standard talking points, but to present fundamental elements that would inform a truly non-binary discussion.

Haidt’s essay nowhere criticizes Islamophobia or demands that universities step in to show “concern” and “solidarity” when Muslim students feel threatened – despite repeated, real incidents in which Muslims have been injured by pro-Israel and White supremacists.

“On campus, affiliates have spat on Black and brown Muslim students, torn off Muslim women’s hijabs, labeled activists as ‘terrorists’ and ‘murderers,’ and advocated for peaceful protestors to ‘die,’ the Columbia Spectator reported. Haidt does not mention an incident in which pro-Zionist Columbia students attacked protesters with a foul-smelling spray that required medical treatment for several. The Princeton University alumni journal reported that a pro-Israel audience on campus “warmly received” and gave a “standing ovation” to an ex-Muslim author who “has made many derogatory posts about Muslims, including a video last year in which he said ‘if [he had] to choose between 1.6 billion Muslims and a cow, [he would] choose the cow;’” and “call it Palestine, call it [mythical] Wakanda, whatever you want to call it.”

Amid his concern for Jewish students’ anxieties, Haidt never mentioned the worst documented incident in which Jewish students were injured on campus: the vicious, days-long harassment and attacks by a bizarre alliance of pro-Israel and White supremacist thugs (the same haters who shout “Jews will not replace us!”) against a pro-Palestinian protest of Muslim, Jewish, and other students at UCLA – all while police stood by indifferently. Haidt also doesn’t mention, let alone condemn, real anti-Semitic right-wing “attacks on Jews and Jewish sites,” such as in Charlottesville and a Pittsburgh synagogue, to cite two of many examples. Again and again, Haidt’s opprobrium exempts the Right.

As for Haidt’s allegation of university insensitivity, since when has anti-coddler Haidt concerned himself with students’ “feelings”? Now, Haidt berates universities for not extending mass, official sympathy to aggrieved Jewish students after Hamas’s October 7 attack that killed 800 Israeli civilians, including 36 children. Yet, nowhere in Haidt’s essay does he demand that universities likewise publicly denounce Israel’s killings of 6,400 Palestinians (including 3,700 civilians, 1,400 of them children) – 18 times more than the number of Israelis killed by Palestinians – during the 1/2008-9/2023 period. Nor does Haidt demand that universities extend sympathy to Palestinian students for the 40,000-plus Israelis have killed since (most of whom, he acknowledges, “are not members of Hamas”).

Haidt rightly deplores the 250 Israeli civilians kidnaped by Hamas, a war crime by findings of the International Court of Justice. Yet, Haidt fails to mention the 7,000 Palestinians, most charged with no crime, kidnapped and held in Israeli prisons under torturous conditions, including being raped to death.

Haidt ignores these complexities. Instead, he argues that “if these students get their wish and Hamas gains control of all the territory ‘from the river to the sea,’ it’s not clear where seven million Jews would go, other than into the sea.” Protest leaders – which, again, include many Jews – repeatedly have made it clear they don’t advocate destroying Israel, but a return to the United Nations-mandated solutions. Haidt doesn’t mention that Israel’s ruling Likud Party has adopted identical “river-to-sea” language demanding complete Israeli sovereignty over all of the former Palestine, and that Israeli leaders have systematically denied Palestinian statehood. Where is Haidt’s balanced, non-binary discussion of where 5.5 million Palestinians are supposed to go?

If Haidt is truly concerned about destructive binary thinking and suppression of free debate, we should see him equally criticize statements such as typical ones by the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League, whose official school curriculum declares:

“Debates about the legitimacy of Israel’s existence or demonization of Israelis create an unsafe climate for Jewish students and interrupt opportunities for critical thinking for all students… Public statements of opposition to Zionism, which are often antisemitic” can have “a negative impact on one or more Jewish individuals or identifiable, localized groups of Jews.”

That is, schools should forbid all discussion of Zionism and Israel (even by Jewish students and scholars themselves) that offend even one Jewish individual.

Haidt’s bizarre implication that Jews he disagrees with are “anti-Semitic”

Yet another glaring omission from Haidt’s essay deploring “anti-Semitism on campus” is his failure to acknowledge the participation, and often leadership, of thousands of Jewish students in Palestine-rights protests. If his academic-intellectual concerns were genuine, one would expect Haidt to laud the religiously-diverse campus protests (even if he disagrees with their politics) as exemplifying the broad-minded “non-binary thinking” of Jewish students and faculty, a powerful refutation to the false image of “Jews as oppressors” he correctly deplores. What better demolishes the lie that Jews as a people are Zionist oppressors than the campus, academic, and global diasporic Jews opposing the brutal genocide against Palestinians perpetrated by Israel in their name?

Haidt’s own words reveal his refusal to move past his own binary “like-me versus not-like-me” biases, even as social media in 2023 and 2024 showed huge numbers of Jews, Muslims, Christians, and non-religious students in campus protest camps cooperating in common cause and celebrating each other’s foods, traditions, and cultures. That’s an integrative miracle U.S. Republicans, Democrats, diplomats, and the Israelis Haidt lauds have proven unable to achieve in the Middle East – in fact, actively sabotage. Yet, in the entire campus protest movement, Haidt can only see scattered “anti-Semitic” and “pro-Hamas” expressions by a few extremists and/or provocateurs who don’t reflect movement thinking.

Is political suppression the real goal of Haidt’s campus and anti-social-media crusades?

Are Haidt’s crudely binary, anti-liberal, pro-Israel, and anti-youth politics the drivers of his zeal to ban and restrict teenagers’ access to social media and online information he disagrees with – as it is for many allied politicians implementing social media policy like the ban on the TikTok platform? Certainly, politically-tainted motivations underlie congressional Republicans’ and Democrats’ zeal to prevent young people from accessing TikTok, which many lawmakers and lobbies accuse of “anti-Israel bias.”

Is quashing liberal and pro-Palestinian speech the goal of Haidt’s phony campus “free speech” campaign, as it is explicitly for his political allies? It certainly appears so.

Haidt vigorously denies that liberal girls’ depression could possibly include their growing awareness of “record wealth inequality, social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world,” and other social crises established interests don’t want critically discussed. Couldn’t be those terrible trends, Haidt declares. No, the problem, says a self-admittedly troubled quipper’s unsupported speculations Haidt quotes, is all inside liberal girls’ heads: their “depression makes reality look terrible.” The world is perfectly fine, Haidt insists; girls’ depression is merely driven by the negative images created by their “phone-based childhood.”

Haidt has emerged as the academic favorite of extraordinarily dishonest pretenders to heterodoxy who promote themselves by championing establishment attacks against powerless groups and messages authorities and big funders dislike. Haidt dismisses the serious political views of groups he disagrees with – liberal teenaged girls and campus pro-Palestine protesters – as products of social-media-driven mental illness and anti-Semitic bigotry.

Haidt is not the egalitarian-loving, free-speech advocate imaged in worshipful TED Talks and PBS interviews. His suppressive tactics should give pause to self-destructive liberals and progressives who swallow grossly misleading misinformation on teens and social media and have backed Haidt’s censorious attacks. The high-level, bipartisan support for Haidt is not about mental health or anti-Semitism. It’s about authoritarianism.