Author Salmon Rushdie was brutally stabbed today, 8/12/2022, prior to a lecture in New York state in front of a crowd of horrified onlookers. The motive for the attack is, thus far, unclear. Rushdie spent nine years in hiding after Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a 1989 fatwa authorizing his murder over his authorship of his novel, The Satanic Verses-which the Ayatollah considered blasphemous.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          In the largest campus survey of free expression, only 76 percent of students said it's never acceptable to use violence to stop a campus speech. That is almost one in four students reporting some level of acceptance for violence to stop a speech they disagree with-even if they think it's only rarely acceptable. This is alarming given that such efforts would be legal zero percent of the time. At some higher education institutions, such as Wellesley and Barnard, the percentage of students who say violence is never acceptable to stop a campus speech dropped to as low as 56 percent.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           It's a great sign of comparative peace and progress that younger Americans can convince themselves of a rough moral equivalence between peaceful argument and violence as a means for resolving disputes. But if violence and hurtful speech are actually equivalent, it's not only logical to answer speech with violence, it's impossible to cogently argue that you shouldn't. A downward spiral towards violence is guaranteed.  The vast majority of Americans who say that violent responses to speach are sometimes acceptable will nevertheless be appauled by the attack on Rushdie.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Free speech, and the peaceful version of conflict resolution it enables, is the only solution to this problem that does not require authoritarian repression. But beyond the hard-won lessons behind the speech/violence distinction, our thoughts are with Salman Rushdie and his family. For his sake, and for all of ours, we hope that this brave artist will not only survive but live live on to teach the world to never take a free and open society for granted.