“Gays for Hamas” and Other Imaginary Signs of the Culture Wars

Len Gutkin and Evan Goldstein of The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed Yale Sterling Professor Nicholas Christakis about the campus culture wars, and one particular comment he made caught my eye.

Christakis said, “When you have students saying, ‘Gays for Hamas,’ who is responsible for that piece of unreason? The faculty. Why have a faculty if it has not educated students to think more clearly? It’s an abrogation of the capacity for rational thought. We need to ask ourselves why students are making statements so devoid of any logical or intellectual foundation. The faculty needs to both take responsibility for preserving a culture of free expression and take responsibility for educating students so that they are liberal in the humanistic sense.”

Then Gutkin, to his credit, asked an important question: “Was there a Gays for Hamas group at Yale?”

Christakis responded, “I’m not sure if there was a formal group per se. But I am pretty sure there were such signs. And there were controversies about this.”

You’re not sure, Professor Christakis? I’m very sure there was never a formal “Gays for Hamas” student group at Yale University. And I’m certain from a quick internet search that there was never a serious “Gays for Hamas” sign at Yale or anywhere else, because it would have been shown over and over again on right-wing media. The only mention of “Gays for Hamas” I could find online (aside from the usual Google AI hallucination based on one Reddit comment) is when former New York City mayor Eric Adams falsely claimed in 2025 to have met this imaginary group.

Even if one idiot had held up a “Gays for Hamas” sign, I cannot imagine how that could justify Christakis’s indictment of all professors for failing to “take responsibility” for someone else’s sign. If one of Christakis’s students or allies supported Trump’s attacks on academic freedom, would he condemn himself and “take responsibility for preserving a culture of free expression”?

There have been protest signs that said, “Gays for Gaza.” But if you think “Gays for Gaza” and “Gays for Hamas” are the same, then I would ask, “Why have a faculty if it has not educated professors to think more clearly?”

“Gays for Gaza” strikes me as an entirely reasonable—and even admirable—position. Supporting people who are victims of mass killings—even when people like you are denied human rights by their government—can be a strong moral stand, not an evil idea that must be purged for being “devoid of any logical or intellectual foundation.”

When distinguished professors hallucinate smears against their ideological enemies and then blame all the “professors” for failing to indoctrinate them against these nonexistent evil thoughts, perhaps it shows how corrupt the whole campaign for a “reckoning” in higher education has become. I would argue that Christakis’s apparent belief that until last year virtually all of the censorship in higher education was coming from the left is a delusion similar to his “Gays for Hamas” sign. Christakis suggests we should have a “truth-and-reconciliation process” about campus free speech over the past 15 years, but perhaps the truth about free expression is quite different from the assumptions of the guy who hallucinates “Gays for Hamas” signs.

This piece of unreason, when a very intelligent professor imagines that he has seen a sign that does not exist, reflects a wider culture where statements are routinely distorted by ideologues and the truth doesn’t matter. Rep. Elise Stefanik brought down multiple college presidents with the lie that protesters saying, “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” were automatically calling for genocide against Jews. So thinking that “Gays for Gaza” is really “Gays for Hamas” seems like a modest mistake by comparison, and not an intentional misrepresentation.

I have a lot of admiration for Nicholas Christakis. I admire much of his work outside of the culture-wars madness. And I think it was admirable in 2015 when he was willing to talk to Yale students who strongly disagreed with him and keep his cool in the face of angry rhetoric. He was right, and the students were clearly wrong to call for the dismissal of him and Erika Christakis from an administrative post as house masters for their views.

Christakis has been a consistent defender of free expression for decades, even when he disagrees with the speaker, and I appreciate his willingness to reject today’s conventional wisdom that calls for banning encampments. While I think he may sometimes have a blind spot toward censorship of leftists (for example, he appears not to have commented on Yale firing a professor for criticizing Donald Trump), I don’t doubt the sincerity of his views.

The “Gays for Hamas” delusion is not an indictment of Christakis as a terrible thinker, but a reminder that even the smartest people are vulnerable to dumb ideas whenever we start dividing the world into us and them and dismissing our enemies as awful people. We need to think charitably of people we disagree with, or else we can crawl down a conspiratorial rabbit hole where the existence of a “Gays for Hamas” student organization becomes a reasonable possibility in our deluded minds rather than a red flag that should make us immediately question our own flawed memories.

I hope that Christakis—and anyone who read his interview and actually believed that “Gays for Hamas” signs filled campuses—would question how they can misread reality so badly when it suits their prejudices.