Speech is considered violence by some people. It has been this way since the late 80's but it was confined to certain subcultures that weren't taken too seriously. But they have taken over certain institutions, like the university (and increasingly big-tech), and own that platform and teach this as esteemed fact rather than an opinion.

And it's dangerous because when you equate speech with violence then how far are we from responding with a so called violent act with actual violence?

One thing they've gotten right is that discourses (how we talk about things) does in fact have a lot of power. So controlling discourses means you consolidate power. When you control how we talk about things then you can control what we talk about. When you control that, then you control how people think about things and you've now successfully won the culture and therefore seized actual, real power. Like being able to use a small minority of corporate activists to pressure a company into viewing certain content as violent or "problematic" and other content as orthodox and therefore appropriate to "platform".

This is how the church worked in the West for years, how it still does in certain places (Saudi Arabia) - by using dogma to determine what is right and wrong. To become the sole arbiter on what is knowledge and what is blasphemy and therefore the authority to discipline and punish.

This is where we are.