Here is the first example of which I am aware of right wingers shouting people down on campus.
And for the record, I think it is exactly as stupid when knuckleheads on the right do this as when lefty knuckleheads do it.
If this becomes the new normal, I have no idea how it ends, but it won’t be good.
Yes, it is sad that we are moving away from the concept of college as a place for the exchange of ideas and for engaging in spirited debate with the ideas of others.
The best response to offensive speech* is to listen to it and then counter the argument with better speech!
(*threats and incitement to imminent violence excepted, of course. But the First Amendment has always been interpreted as not giving license to those.)
It is not just college, since recent surveys indicate that many people (not just college students) do not really support freedom of speech, or support it only selectively (i.e. only when someone of their own side of the political spectrum is speaking). Even if such people are in the minority (and it is not clear that they are), it does not take too many of them to disrupt an event or incite a riot.
That so much political speech these days is in the form of <140 character messages hating someone else probably helps devalue the concept of free speech in the minds of many. A sad trend.
I am so extremely sick of those people, whom Ohiodad51 aptly describes as “knuckleheads.”
It’s appalling when Americans are so overly sensitive and intolerant that they cannot stand to listen to ideas that oppose their own without acting like adolescents. I don’t care who is doing it. Stop it. Grow up. College campuses are the best place for the exchange of ideas, but it should be and is acceptable everywhere among adults.
A house divided against itself cannot stand - by good ole Abe Lincoln. I feel we are full of such divisiveness and hate for people who don’t agree with us we are the precipice of civil war.
I listened to a recent “hidden brain” podcast about free speech and hiding behind free speech. It was interesting and also sad. Sad because when people are given permission to act out some bad impulses, they generally do.
Once colleges decided to allow student protesters the ability to disrupt speakers they disagreed with and the students suffered no penalties, this result was inevitable.
^ unfortunately, I believe that is true. The question is whether colleges will tolerate this behavior from rightys.
In thinking about this, I’m not sure exactly where the line should be drawn. People should not be allowed to drown out a speaker, so that no one who wanted to hear the speaker can. On the other hand, I don’t think all heckling should be disallowed, and I certainly think we should allow peaceful protest outside a venue where a controversial speaker is speaking.
Whittier didn’t go far enough in stopping disruptors, nor did various colleges that failed to stop leftists preventing speakers from speaking. OTOH Wisconsin wants to go too far.
The Federalist has an article on this:
http://thefederalist.com/2017/10/13/america-campuses-madhouses-paying/
It is a lot harder than it sounds for the college to play defense against an organized group that is trying to disrupt an event (especially if it involves a speaker who is an inflammatory provocateur). Yes, they could overprovision the police presence, but that is expensive*, it diverts police from paying attention to other crimes (robbery, rape, etc.), and the implied connotation of an authoritarian police state is typically not what the college wants. In addition, it is not always easy to make the judgment call of when a group of counter-protesters is within its own right of free speech versus preventing others from exercising their right of free speech – the line is not always clear and bright, nor does a rapidly changing situation allow for easy determination of who is on which side of the line.
Imagine a college saying that your student fees went up to pay for the police presence needed to deal with problems because someone invited an off-campus inflammatory provocateur* speaker and some local off-campus counter-protesters showed up with the intent to disrupt the event.
**Of course, the growing extremism in politics means that even those who ordinarily would not be considered inflammatory provocateurs may seem so to a growing number of people who consider anyone who does not agree with them to be inflammatory.
Ucbalumnus, Using loaded language does not change the principles involved here.
There is no difference between the right to speak of an “inflammatory provocateur” and the right of any other person who has been invited. I’m quite sure that many of us would identify various speakers with widely disparate ideas as “inflammatory provocateurs”. That is irrelevant.
If you don’t want to hear it, don’t go. You have no right to stop others from wanting to hear it, whatever kind of crazy ideas (or not) that the speaker may have. Words are protected. If no one is stirring up action, but merely stating ideas with which you (general you here, not you specifically) don’t like, then leave.
But you don’t have the right to shut up the other person and disallow others to hear speakers they want to hear because you don’t like those ideas. That’s where these groups are missing it.
No, they are not missing it. The groups (both left and right) trying to shut down others’ speeches believe that freedom of speech is only for those who agree with them. Indeed, the the article linked in post #0 notes that the (right wing in this case) disruptor in question condemned other (left wing) disruptors who were against those aligned with him.
And if recent polls on the subject of free speech are to be believed, very large percentages of people on both the left and right have a similar selective or situational view of freedom of speech.
However there is an enormous difference in how a university has to respond. Inflammatory provocateurs bring, in their wake, violent protestors who want to have fights and break things, like neo-Nazis on the right and (in my area) the Black Bloc on the left. A university has the duty to protect everyone else from these bombthrowers.
Governor Rick Scott has declared a state of emergency for Alachua county ahead of a speech by Richard Spencer at UF this Thursday.
I find this a strange and disturbing situation we are in. Sure you can have free speech, sure you can have peaceful protest, sure both sides can be loud, but have we ever had white supremacists before on college campuses claiming their free speech rights? I can’t think of anything that compares in my lifetime. Even when the neo-Nazis planned a march in Skokie Illinois - they ended up cancelling it.
It’s even stranger to call a student body “unhinged” in the face of this. What did we have back in the day? I remember protests to divest, and protests against General Dynamics and Monsanto but they weren’t really on campus. No speakers were invited to call for investing in South Africa during apartheid or to call for making more chemical weapons or whatever. The biggest controversy were the Jews for Jesus being allowed to hand out their leaflets.
I’m starting to feel a bit unhinged.
In Charlottesville, we had a tiki torch mob beating people up, and a guy murdering someone and sending dozens to the hospital by driving into a crowd. The Charlottesville police bungled the situation.
Inflammatory provocateurs can cause riots, injury and death. The police have to deal with this. We can’t pretend that having a white supremacist show up on your campus is the same as having a cancer researcher giving a talk about new treatments for lymphoma.
Not exactly a college campus, but the German American Bund did get 20,000 people in Madison Square Square Garden in 1938 for a Nazi rally. The video and photos, which look like they were taken from the set of “The Man in the High Castle,” are chilling.
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/542499/marshall-curry-nazi-rally-madison-square-garden-1939/
The 1930s were a very different time in terms of political views regarding various minorities in the US, and Nazi Germany was not yet a wartime enemy.
The “suit-and-tie Nazis”, the National Policy Institute (NPI) at their conference last November in Washington featured Richard Spencer, quoting Nazi propaganda in the original German, and many people standing and giving the Nazi salute while chanting “heil”.
He said, “let’s party like it’s 1933. No, let’s party like it’s 2016”. Maybe this is the first time since Zinhead’s reference that such a gathering has happened in public.
This is his party - fomenting hatred and racism and stirring up violence in opponents. Why shouldn’t universities be allowed to forbid him?