The article is dead serious but there is an air of baiting with this because what author puts their name in the headline?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opini...tist-impunity-glenn-reynolds-column/97521138/
Wow.
I have concerns about where some (and by some I mean the radical 3%) liberals will go but some people like this guy really try to subvert these issues into being bigger than they are and downplaying what is being resisted.
This comparison with Jim Crow Enforcers is gross and shows a total wilful disregard for the differences.
Conspiring to stifle free speech is a crime: Glenn Reynolds
They told me if Donald Trump were elected, voices of dissent would be shut down by fascist mobs. And they were right!
At the University of California, Berkeley campus, for example, gay conservative speaker Milo Yiannopoulos had to be evacuated, and his speech cancelled, because masked rioters beat people, smashed windows, and started fires. Protesters threw commercial fireworks at police.
One woman wearing a red Trump hat was pepper sprayed in the face while being interviewed by CNN affiliate KGO. . . . As police dispersed the crowd from campus, a remaining group of protesters moved into downtown Berkeley and smashed windows at several local banks. No arrests were made throughout the night.
According to CNN, the protests caused over $100,000 in damage.
Yiannopoulous wasnt the only victim of silencing efforts. At Marquette University, conservative speaker Ben Shapiro faced efforts by Marquette university employees to silence him.
The Young Americas Foundation obtained Facebook comments by Chrissy Nelson, a program assistant for Marquettes Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies, encouraging people at the behest of one of the directors of diversity to reserve all the seats for the hall and then not show up. The purpose of this was to take a seat away from someone who actually would go.
Likewise, when conservative Gavin MacInnes (a founder of Vice.com) appeared to speak at New York University, he was met by an angry mob that forced him to cut his talk short, while a woman who identified herself as an NYU professor urged police, whom she said were protecting the Nazis by keeping the crowd away from MacInnes and his entourage, to "kick their ass instead of protecting them.
This stuff all looks terrible so bad that Democrat operative Robert Reich was reduced to blaming outside agitators for the violence, a trope that, as law professor Ann Althouse noted, has unfortunate resonance with the Jim Crow era.
there has evolved on our campuses a culture of impunity: Misbehavior on the part of lefty activists will get winked at, even as other groups (sports teams with sexist appearance rankings, say) get raked over the coals for minor misbehavior. This double standard is of a piece with many campuses openly taking sides over the election, treating Trumps win like a terrorist attack, while investigating Trump supporters for racist allegations only to find no evidence that they had done anything except say Make America Great Again, as Babson College, a small school in Massachusetts, did.And as CNN's Marc Lamont Hill acknowledged, right-wing rioters are absent on college campuses.
I think its time for action to address this double standard. First, state and local law enforcement agencies need to target violent rioters who seek to silence speakers. It is a felony under federal civil rights law to conspire to deprive citizens of their constitutional rights, among which is free speech. In addition, many states have laws (generally called Klan laws) that punish people who engage in mob violence or intimidation while masked. These should be applied as well.
Second, perhaps its time to have a Title IX-style law banning discrimination according to political viewpoints on campus. Many states (including California) already have laws banning discrimination in hiring and firing based on political viewpoints. Perhaps we need a federal civil rights law providing that colleges that receive federal funds (which is pretty much all of them) can lose those funds if they discriminate against students because of their political views.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opini...tist-impunity-glenn-reynolds-column/97521138/
Wow.
I have concerns about where some (and by some I mean the radical 3%) liberals will go but some people like this guy really try to subvert these issues into being bigger than they are and downplaying what is being resisted.
This comparison with Jim Crow Enforcers is gross and shows a total wilful disregard for the differences.