Violent Words Breed Violent Actions A significant number of students and younger faculty erroneously equate violent expression with actual violence, leading to alarming trends in censorship and intolerance in academic environments. This perspective fuels demands to suppress literary works deemed offensive, such as sensitive subjects in classic literature. More critically, believing that harmful speech is equivalent to physical violence may justify using real violence in response to words, escalating the risk of conflict and undermining free expression. Transcript: Speaker 1 Others show that distressingly high percentages of students and even younger faculty members, consider that expression that is violent is completely indistinguishable from actual Violence. And this is very disturbing because not only does it lead to calls to censor. I mentioned, for example, rape scenes at Columbia University, which has a famous core curriculum studying classic works of Western literature. Students objected to reading the metamorphosis, you know, at Greek classic because of depictions of Drake. But even worse than the sensorial aspect of this false equation between expression and conduct in terms of violence is that if you believe that violent words are the same as violent Conduct, then you are justified in responding to violent words with actual physical violence. And again, these surveys that are now being regularly conducted (Time 0:13:37)