Win the Debate, Don’t Shut It Down

UC Berkeley’s successful attempt to shut down an appearance by Ann Coulter this week is just the latest example of college campuses – and liberals as a whole – attempting to stifle free speech by acting as society’s morality police.

As an antiwar activist, I am typically lumped-in with other so-called leftists, so when progressives act in an oppressive, hateful, racist, fear-mongering, violent or unappealing manner, it reflects poorly on the cause in which I associate.

I have been privately challenging some of my colleagues to reflect on their apparently hypocritical behavior, but doing so publicly, in this forum, is risky.  And in trying to make sense of this ironic phenomenon, more questions than answers arise.

• Why is the so-called left trying to shut down debates instead of trying to win them? Is it because the left is basing its arguments on imagery and emotion rather than fact?
• Were the students at Berkeley aware that Ann Coulter was one of the few people speaking out against the Trump administration’s bombing of Syria in response to the alleged chemical gas attack? Did they know she said the photos shown to Trump that made him act were probably “faked”?  Were the students afraid Coulter would talk about this in public?
• How can liberals claim to celebrate diversity when they don’t allow diversity of thought or speech?
• “Hate speech” is not free speech, according to those trying to prevent public appearances by various conservatives (the Supreme Court disagreed.) But even if the court ruled otherwise, who would get to determine what hate speech is?  Would any citizen who accuses someone else of hate speech have the right to prevent the accused from appearing in public?  If so, when students label people like Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, Richard Spencer and Ann Coulter as “racist,” “Nazi,” “fascist” or “white supremacist,” who would get to decide if the students themselves were engaging in hate speech?
• What are students and liberals so afraid of? If the people they are blocking from speaking are as bad as they claim, why not let them speak publicly and make fools of themselves?  Do students such as those at UC Berkeley not believe that their fellow students are wise enough to identify distorted views?  I’ve had public discussion with pro-war people who say things like, “bomb them all” or “turn the Middle East into a parking lot.”  Not that I’m happy to hear anybody utter such words, but I know it helps my cause, and not theirs.  Why don’t anti-conservative students feel the same way?
• In many cases, it appears as though college students (spurred on by their professors, administrators, anti-Trumpism, the Democratic Party and liberal media) believe they have the final say in who gets to speak. It makes you wonder how college students can get an education when they are unwilling to hear both sides (or multiple sides) of an argument?
• Why does intolerance permeate many liberal circles today? Why are so many colleges (and liberal institutions) so hostile towards white people, men, heterosexuals and conservatives?  Why have so many fallen into the trap of oversimplified identity politics?

Shelby Steele, Senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution offers one explanation:

“White guilt is not actual guilt. Surely most whites are not assailed in the night by feelings of responsibility for America’s historical mistreatment of minorities…White guilt is not angst over injustices suffered by others; it is the terror of being stigmatized with America’s old bigotries, racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. To be stigmatized as a fellow traveler with any of these bigotries is to be utterly stripped of moral authority and made into a pariah…White guilt is a mock guilt, a pretense of real guilt, a shallow etiquette of empathy, pity and regret…It is also the heart and soul of contemporary liberalism. This liberalism is the politics given to us by white guilt, and it shares white guilt’s central corruption. It is not real liberalism, in the classic sense. It is a mock liberalism. Freedom is not its raison d’être; moral authority is.”

Liberals/Hollywood/pop culture are creating an environment of hyper-political-correctness, where anybody who doesn’t share their worldview can be demonized and ostracized. Immigration, abortion, race relations – regardless of the topic, watch liberals who are asked questions about their views – the typical response is avoiding the question, shouting down the questioner, and ultimately calling the person a racist, xenophobe, homophobe, misogynist, etc.

Examples of today’s hyper-PC culture are offered below (this list is a follow-up to 30 Incidents of Out of Control Liberals.) These are instances of colleges and/or liberals in the US – and around the world – who apparently believe that their own interpretation of what is right or wrong is the only acceptable option:

• Hundreds of campuses encourage students to turn in fellow students for offensive speech using “Bias Response Teams.”
• The city of Portland, OR canceled their tenth annual rose parade after ‘anti-fascists’ groups threatened GOP marchers. The groups said that 200 people would “rush into the parade” and “drag and push” those marching with the Republican Party. “We will not give one inch to groups who espouse hatred toward LGBT, immigrants, people of color or others.”
• A geology professor at Pomona College is pledging to use racial preferences to decide which students to accept into a class with a strict enrollment cap.
• Oxford University: Avoiding Eye Contact Is Racist.
• Comedian Samantha Bee mocked a young man for having “Nazi hair” after seeing a picture of him at a conservative conference. The young man chose his hair style because of chemotherapy and radiation he was getting for stage 4 brain cancer.
• Swedish Woman of the Year Runner-Up Advocates Banning Men from Television.
• Teen repeats #BlackLivesMatter 100 times on Stanford application, gets in.
• Illinois college defends ‘blacks-only’ course offerings.
• University of Wisconsin students selling hoodies reading, “ALL WHITE PEOPLE ARE RACIST”.
• College Removes Weight Scale From Gym After Students Call it ‘Triggering’.
• Feminist group says going to a national park is essentially ‘white privilege’.
• Emory University wants to establish people-of-color only social events.
• Harvard tells students gender can ‘change from day to day’.
• Pomona college progressives create whites-only club to fight racism – says white people are “all racist…we’re all microagressive…[W]e are all not only complicit in, but actively perpetuating white supremacy.”
• A transgender person at the University of California, Berkeley was recently filmed threatening members of the College Republicans who mistakenly referred to him as a man.
• Roughly 20,000 free educational videos provided by UC Berkeley are being taken off the internet because they do not have closed captioning.
• Liberal Intolerance Revives as Charles Murray Is Chased From Middlebury College.
• To ‘protest against racism’ UC-Berkeley students block white people from using campus entrance.
• A middle school teacher said “fascists” like Milo Yiannopoulos should be stopped from speaking, “by any means necessary.” The organizer, Yvette Felarca, has been caught on film physically assaulting Trump supporters.
• A Pew Research Center study shows that 40% of Millennials OK with limiting speech that is ‘offensive’ to minorities.
• A young, mentally disabled white man was kidnapped, beaten, threatened with a knife and taunted with profanities against white people and Donald Trump. The suspects, who are black, face charges including hate crime and aggravated battery. While holding their victim hostage, they cut his scalp, burned him with cigarettes and kicked him, all while shouting “f*ck Donald Trump! F*ck white people!”  The man was held at knife-point, forced to drink toilet water. In response, Democratic strategist Symone Sanders mocked the incident, saying, “Oh my goodness, poor white people! Please!”  Sanders had previously stated that the Democratic Party “does not need white people leading” the party right now.
• UC Berkeley’s student newspaper ran an editorial in favor of using violence to stop opposing views, such as those by Milo Yiannopoulos.
• Antiwar protesters met by hostility at Earth Day event. Ironically, just weeks earlier, the same antiwar group (which the author belongs) was treated with respect at a pro-Trump Make America Great Again rally.
• Black student beats up white student for posting her support of Donald Trump on Instagram.
• Students vote to give black people free tuition at Western Kentucky University as a form of slavery reparations.
• Professor: Colleges have a right to reject “hateful speakers” like Anne Coulter.
• Maine Democrats caught on video laughing at rising white suicide rates.
• The student government at the University of Wisconsin passed legislation to give free tuition to all black people, including “undocumented and current or formerly incarcerated people.” It also demands the creation of a task force to consider “test-optional admissions and geographically weighted admissions” that would give preference to students in cities.
• University of Michigan students call for a “permanent designated space on central campus for Black students and students of color to organize, and do social justice work.”
• Fresno State professor tweets, “To save American democracy, Trump must hang. The sooner and the higher, the better.  #TheResistance #DeathToFascism”.
• A teacher asked kids ‘how comfortable’ they are around black men, Muslims. She was fired.
• Penn State professors told: ‘Avoid assuming the gender of any student’.
• NY Times Editor: We Avoid Term ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ Because it’s ‘Culturally Loaded’.
• School forces white student to remove dreadlocks, lets black students keep them.
  Black campus employee assaults white student for “cultural appropriation” because of his dreadlocks.
• A black man is facing an attempted murder charge after he allegedly shouted, “I hate white people,” and tried to push a white person onto a set of train tracks in New York.
• BuzzFeed faces backlash over article covering classroom presentations stating that “White People are a Plague to the Planet.”
• A professor called Trump’s win ‘an act of terrorism.’ The student who filmed her got suspended.
• Students wear white pins to remind them of their white privilege.
• University students say philosophers including Plato and Descartes should be largely dropped from university syllabus because they were white.

The antiwar group which I co-founded in 2003 has repeatedly struggled for the right to publicly speak out against US foreign policy, and many of us have been thrown in jail for doing so.  Time after time we have had to fight for our right to publicly demonstrate, and on three particular occasions the city of St. Petersburg, FL tried to criminalize our protests outside of a shopping mall.  The city’s rationale for trying to chill our 1^st Amendment rights was that our peaceful demonstrations created a “public safety hazard.”

Maybe that’s one reason it is so appalling to watch liberals today try to prevent people from speaking in public.  I’m assuming the Berkeley crowd would not try to shut our antiwar protests down because they would agree with the message.  But this just points out the disingenuousness of many of today’s college campuses whose message seems to be, “it’s OK for you to speak if I agree with you, otherwise, I have the right to use any means necessary to prevent you from expressing your views.”

Obviously, many of today’s liberals and college students really don’t want equality. They want a world in which a person’s race, gender, sexual preference, citizenship status and political beliefs determine whether or not that person has the right to speak.

Why can’t they just be honest and say something like, “people of color, women and gay people have been on the short end of the stick for so long (I generally agree with this, though I know many black people who have had it easier than many white people I know, and many women who’ve had it better than many men I know), so now historically oppressed people get to decide the rights of everyone else.  And even though we don’t like police, we are going to be the world’s morality police.”

If this were the message of those at places like UC Berkeley, I would respect their honesty, even though I disagree with them.  But they won’t say that out loud because it would expose them as being two-faced and most of society would reject their views.

History will most certainly leave these people in the dust, but in the meantime my hope is that the antiwar movement’s message does not get disregarded due to the reactionary, hypocritical and repressive behavior of so many of my cohorts today.