You're a coward, Bill Ackman
The moral weakness of the 'wealthy heckler's veto'
Foreword: I haven’t been writing here much because I’ve been drafting a book, but just felt like putting this out there.
Over 20 to 1, according to the United Nations’ most recent data, is the ratio at which Palestinian civilians have been murdered compared to Israeli civilians in the conflict since 2008. Near 60 to 1, when you look at child fatalities alone. For every life that a Palestinian militant takes, the Israel Defense Forces have killed a neighborhood.
And extrajudicial deaths aside, Israel has forced a perpetual open-air prison onto Palestinians — marred by deprivation of food, water, and other basic necessities. For every day of pain that Israel has faced in the past week, since the Nakba of 1948, Palestine has faced a decade of it.
But you dare bring these facts up to your peers on a college campus like Harvard? Bill Ackman wants to intimidate, blackball, and cancel you.
In his post last Tuesday to his 600,000+ followers on X, the billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard alumnus asked our college to publicly release a list of students involved with the open letter released by its Palestine Solidarity Committee. The letter — a statement of support for Palestine that solely blamed Israel’s historic approach to the conflict for causing the recent violence — was initially signed by 34 different student groups. And Ackman’s rationale was that corporate power players like himself would utilize said list as a hiring blacklist.
But amidst a chaotic campus where pro-Palestine students that have spoken out are being doxxed, pro-Palestine vigils are being shut down because of credible safety threats, and mobile billboards are being deployed with pictures and identifying information shaming pro-Palestine advocates, Ackman’s call for a list can be reduced to one word.
Cowardice.
To be clear: the open letter has not a single word supporting Hamas’s recent actions in Israel, and the PSC has continuously condemned violence against innocents, irrespective of their national identities. And to be even clearer: the statement’s intent was to explain how apartheid repression breeds backlash, not even to absolve that backlash. Short of expecting perfect victimhood, the letter ought to be read as one contextualizing how a system of polarized violence from both sides came about.
Yet rather than engaging with any substantive arguments or facts put forth by the committee, like the aforementioned data or analysis, the Pershing Square Capital CEO and dozens of other supporting executives decided to engage in a top-down intimidation of students’ free expression.
Their response reflects moral cowardice — a ‘wealthy heckler’s veto’ of sorts. Because by coercing Harvard College students into silence and withdrawing their activism by virtue of threatening their material conditions and future — many of whom come from underserved and underrepresented backgrounds — they have chosen to forgo the marketplace of ideas, instead turning to bullying and censorship vis-a-vis privilege.
Now, does Ackman have the right to do so? Certainly, in the same way that Laura Ingraham has the legal right to tell Black activist-athletes to “shut up and dribble”. But instead, this time, he’s effectively telling Palestinian students and their community to ‘shut up and die’.
Consider the hypocrisy of his stance. Bully Bill’s advocacy has included defending David Sabatini and giving him $25 million to run an independent lab after his termination (Sabatini was fired from MIT after an outside investigation determined he had sexually harassed younger female grad students), which is tangibly worse than being a signatory on a political statement. But clearly, he understands that when you’re the billionaire son of Larry Ackman, you can get away with shit-reckless speech while leveraging your wealth to torment 18-year-olds for their beliefs.
The shame in it all is, these tactics have taken us so far from productive discourse. The reason I’m writing this column is because I personally know so many pro-Palestine students, and members of the PSC, who have been strong-armed into silence. And as a member of the Harvard community, and more broadly, as a young person and college student, I find it reprehensible that the Bill Ackmans of the world can create artificial silence in a necessarily-loud world.
A path forward, in the context of the West Bank’s conflict, involves spoken reasonability from both sides; especially from institutions like elite universities that serve as funnels of global power. Hamas and their recent actions are detestable, and innocent civilians should never be attacked. But paramilitary radicalization will only continue as Israeli apartheid does, given faith is strongest in an empty stomach. These types of conclusions and middle grounds are obscured when detached billionaires bully their way in, forcing campuses to pick between principles and pocketbooks.
You’re a coward for that, Bill Ackman.
— SJY, 10.17.23
I mean this "analysis" which is more of an emotional call out fails to investigate the premise that perhaps people should not use shell institutions to link themselves to wider causes. I think doxxing is bad. I don't really have an opinion on Bill's broader premise which is also, as you've noted, tainted by emotion. However, many of your fellow peers were also implicated in statements that they didn't necessarily embody. Individual signatories would have the added benefit of confirming true ideological parity; maybe that's good, maybe that's bad for the chilling effect related reasons etc. That's sort of the true debate. People do indeed hire on ideological grounds all the time across the service sector. I can understand why a Palestinian manager would not necessarily feel comfortable hiring a militant Zionist especially in smaller institutions. I don't have a stance here (still working it out) but I guess my point is to assert that the "moral weakness?" approach isn't entirely compelling.
Also, what in the world does the 2018 Ingraham thing have to do with anything else? If anything, they are kind of taking opposite approaches. Laura - incorrectly I should emphasize - asserted that athletes lack the competence to be activists. Bill doesn't think activists lack capacity; he wants to effectively black list people that he sees as competent from his firm. Different premises. Strange pile on that for the aforementioned reason I do not think makes sense.
this is so incredibly well-written while also acknowledge the nuance of both sides on the issue. i feel that a lot of articles (especially prevalent on social media) miss that these days.
i wonder how common it is for bigcorpa to blackball people based on their beliefs like this, double the abhorrence when the targets are young college students trying to create lives for themselves. how can we improve our country when the people in power focus on eliminating free discourse instead of improving it?
thank you for writing this! it was a real pleasure to read 👏 so excited for more.