Main Building of University of Texas at Austin. Photo: Daderot/Wikimedia Commons

Walk through the University of Texas at Austin this September, and you could almost believe the crisis has passed. The South Mall, where state troopers arrested more than 100 anti-America demonstrators in the spring of 2024, is just a lawn again. No tents. No barricades. No bullhorns. Administrators across the country are eager to call this progress.

It isn’t. It’s just quieter and has moved inside.

A Columbia student put it best in Jewish Insider last month: Assuming campus is better simply because there are no encampments sets an absurdly low bar. The campus is not better, just different. The antisemitism that fueled the encampments didn’t disappear with the tents; it just changed clothes.

At UT Austin, it now wears Hasan Piker’s face.

On Sept. 30, the University Democrats are scheduled to host Piker, a Twitch streamer with millions of followers, for a campus talk. More than 2,400 people have signed up.

This is a man who declared in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11,” a line he has walked back in wording but not much else. This year, he proudly stated that Hamas, the terrorist organization that murdered 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023, is a thousand times better than Israel, the Jewish State. Just last month, he had the audacity to claim that Jewish Americans who support Israel are themselves making antisemitism worse, a claim so toxic that prominent Democrats, including his own political allies, rushed to distance themselves.

The University of Washington canceled his appearance in its official speaker series last month. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat, called the UT event “deeply concerning” and said Jewish students should not be made to feel targeted on their own campus. He’s right. This event is not a left-versus-right story. It’s a decency-versus-demagoguery story.

Piker’s long history of anti-American hate cannot be ignored. What does it say when the University Democrats platform someone who hates America and who spews hate against Jews?

Piker has a First Amendment right to speak, and a student organization has the right to invite him. But free speech is a two-way street. If Piker’s defenders get to invoke it when they hand him a microphone, then Jewish students get to invoke it when we tell the truth about the hate he amplifies — and the hate that the University Democrats have decided to platform. Naming antisemitism is not censorship.

In the spring of 2024, I was asked, “How many shekels did you pay the police?” and was told to “Go back to Germany” during the violent campus protests. I was assured these people were simply outliers, that the people making these disgusting statements were not speaking for the rest of the rioters. I refused to accept the excuses.

The University Democrats hosting Piker on campus proved just how right I was.

This school year is not a fresh start for Jewish Longhorns. It’s the same fight with a new face. Antisemitic graffiti in the Callaway dorm earlier this month welcomed us back to this reality. But Jewish students aren’t afraid, and we aren’t going anywhere.

Jewish students at UT will be visible this fall. We proudly wear our Magen Davids and our kippot. We will show up at Hillel, Chabad, and Olami, celebrate the holidays, host our own speakers, and do it with pride for everyone to see. We will keep telling administrators, donors, and lawmakers exactly what is happening on this campus. When someone like Piker comes to our campus, we will meet him not with tents or masks but with facts, pride, and numbers.

Two years ago, antisemites tried to make Jewish students hide. Instead, they built the most engaged, most organized generation of Jewish student leaders this country has produced in decades. If Hasan Piker’s fans think a quieter campus means a weaker Jewish community, they are truly mistaken. Just as we have in the past, we will make our voices heard.

Levi Fox is a senior at UT Austin studying public relations and strategic & risk communication.