Five years ago, I was an aspiring journalist living in Paris when 12 editorial staff members of the provocative satirical publication Charlie Hebdo were murdered by radical Islamist terrorists just a few miles down the Seine from my apartment. The attack instigated a slew of aftershocks, including an anti-Semitic hostage operation resulting in the murder of four Jews in a Kosher supermarket. The debate around the attacks would come to define not just my own experience as an expat but also the existential purpose of my career.

Namely, even as world leaders coalesced around the paper and publicly declared #JeSuisCharlie, the cracks in liberal support for its right to free speech emerged among my own peers. These students advanced an argument somewhat akin to “slut shaming” — i.e., that somehow the journalists had it coming for being needlessly provocative. Such thoughts that were once the province of liberal college students have gone mainstream.