The Worst Time for the Left to Give Up on Free Speech - by Michelle Goldberg

[DonViejo]

On Sept. 27, in an incident that has since ricocheted around conservative media, the Black Lives Matter chapter at the College of William and Mary shut down a talk by the director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia on “Students and the First Amendment.” It’s unfortunate for the students involved that their protest drew national notice; the internet makes it far too easy for undergraduates experimenting with radicalism to become instantly infamous. Yet the attention is unsurprising, because the event, live-streamed by the student activists themselves, seemed to epitomize campus trends that many outsiders abhor.

The confrontation began just as the A.C.L.U.’s Claire Gastañaga started talking about “knowing your rights during protests and demonstrations.” A multiracial group of around a dozen black-clad students marched to the front of the auditorium, arrayed themselves before the stage and began chanting things like “A.C.L.U.! You’d protect Hitler too!” They’d been moved to protest because the A.C.L.U. had defended the rights of white supremacists to rally in Charlottesville, Va. At one point they intoned “Shame! Shame! Shame!” in a cadence that recalled a disturbing scene of public humiliation from “Game of Thrones.” Gastañaga was not able to continue speaking.

It can be hard to know what to make of reports of a free speech crisis on college campuses. Some progressives claim that concerns about left-wing student authoritarianism are overblown, and occasionally I’m tempted to believe them. A recent survey that purported to show widespread student hostility to free speech became a minor media sensation, only to be debunked by a polling expert who declared its methodology “junk science.” Last month, the professional troll Milo Yiannopoulos tried to bait the left with plans for a so-called Free Speech Week at the University of California, Berkeley, to be packed with talks by figures anathema to the campus left. It seemed meant to make the school look censorious, but it failed. Berkeley bent over backward to accommodate Yiannopoulos, and the event’s organizers ended up canceling.

Still, if the average college campus is not quite the Maoist re-education camp of right-wing fantasy, there are enough embarrassing incidents like the one at William and Mary to suggest that parts of the left disdain the First Amendment.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/liberals-free-speech.html

[JayhawkSD]

1. NYT, as is its wont, lacks a certain amount of accuracy

"Last month, the professional troll Milo Yiannopoulos tried to bait the left with plans for a so-called Free Speech Week at the University of California, Berkeley, to be packed with talks by figures anathema to the campus left."

The week was not organized by Yiannopoulos, it was organized by a conservative student group in response to the liberal student groups having interfered with access to the campus by speakers that they, the liberal student groups, disagreed with. That the week was to be "packed with" speeches of people who were "anathema to the campus left" is hyperbole at its finest, but even if it was true, all the "campus left" had to do in order to avoid offense was not attend the speeches, something that the NYT fails to mention.

The NYT goes on to say that "Berkeley bent over backward to accommodate Yiannopoulos, and the event’s organizers ended up canceling."

Berkeley did everything, that is, except provide police or any other form of tangible protection to assure that the speakers would be allow to proceed unmolested, either while speaking or at any other time while they were on the campus.

And before you start calling me a right wing troll, I have an unblemished record of voting Democratic for more decades than most of you have been alive. I am a constitutionalist, and believe in free speech, even when I dislike what the speaker has to say.