"America is a Safe Space!"--Ben Shapiro
Five days out from my last Snowflake Reading List (cleverly hidden within "If fascism comes to America..."), it's time to add another. For those looking for a bit of history, I suggest Bruce Thornton's "Therapeutic universities and soft despotism...", but if you're looking for a chuckle, you might want to start with Mike Adams:
Based upon that one phone call, I would say that the university owes me a big pay raise. UNC-Wilmington was about to get yet another student who is so emotionally fragile that he cannot tolerate even a single opinion column that advances a view different from his own. Now, thanks to me, he is going to be someone else’s problem.
You can probably imagine how delighted I was when I received that voice mail. But imagine how much more delighted I was when I received a second one about an hour later. Once again, it was the father of the same prospective student. He left me a message in which he started off talking but ended up screaming. I have tried to reproduce it word-for-word below...
“Shout them down” starts with interrupting a conservative when he or she is trying to respond to a question with a logical response. This is to deny the listener the opportunity to hear an uninterrupted response, because the listener might agree with it. So talking over a conservative creates a distraction, and sometimes the conservative responder has to push back and maybe lose their train of thought.
"We are witnessing the emergence of a dangerous new norm for responding to speakers who challenge campus orthodoxy. Anyone offended by the speaker can put out a call on Facebook to bring together students and locals, including 'antifa' (antifascist) and black-bloc activists who explicitly endorse the use of violence against racists and fascists. Because of flagrant 'concept creep,' however, almost anyone who is politically right of center can be labeled a racist or a fascist, and the promiscuous use of such labels is now part of the standard operating procedure."
Oh boy the snowflakes are not going to be happy. They don’t like to be confused, it makes them think. College used to be about learning to think and ask questions, but sadly today it’s about learning to conform with progressive politics. On the front line of exposing the truth about today’s colleges is Campus Reform…and they just did it again did it again.
"Whatever legacy Savio has for the cause of free speech is dead, but this mindset lives on. The rioters and goons -- along with their pusillanimous enablers in the administration -- are carrying on this tradition. It is a tradition that says this is our sacred place and anyone not loyal to our faith must be resisted, rejected and renounced. All the talk of "hate speech" is clever marketing -- like the label the "Free Speech Movement" itself."
Democrats won’t speak out forcefully against their violent fringe because they’re convinced they need them and are busy trying to co-opt and appease them. Republicans won’t for reasons I simply can’t explain.Maybe Republicans think the American people see what’s happening and they need only to stay out of the way of the Democrats’ circular firing squad. But it’s more likely they’re afraid. To call out these monsters is to invite attacks, to ensure they’ll show up at town halls and cause scenes.
While my fearless friend Ann Coulter was braving fascist left wing violence at U.C. Berkeley, I was getting heckled at Oberlin. (You can watch my speech above). Frankly, I was shocked that anyone would heckle a wonderful guy like myself. I felt like the young Russian soldier in War and Peace who sees the French army coming over the hill and thinks, "They want to kill me? Me, whom everyone loves?"
"The totalitarian left is emboldened by its selective suppression of speech. Just as scary is the deluded thought process that inspires its Stalinism.
Recognizing its inability to compete in the marketplace of ideas, the left has been chipping away for years at the concept of free speech. You have to give leftists points for cleverness, not to mention persistence, because they don't openly advocate censoring conservative speech as such. They pretend to be protecting some greater good or preventing imminent harm to certain groups."
The mainstream media of the day who arrogantly tell the unwashed masses who pay their salaries , what to think, what they can say and for whom to vote, now try to dictate to them what is funny.
The handling of the situation by the school has demonstrated the extreme bias against free speech and diversity of thought for conservative views on campus, saying that the espousing of such views was offensive and dangerous. The administration has also tried to claim that we have been committing harassment and discrimination simply by expressing such views on paper. Our members have personally received violent threats from members of the Hood Community and have been regularly targeted online, with many on and off campus citing us as a hate group.
The most telling, memorable phrase from his whole talk? “America is a safe space.” Indeed. Safety defined as the right and opportunity to speak one’s mind and pursue happiness free from arbitrary sanctions or suppression. Liberty is not a magic word to justify invidious discrimination, but a state of being absent the opposing confines of government force and fiat. If you don’t like what you hear, you are free not to listen. You are not entitled, however, to shut down someone else’s exercise of liberty, whether in speech, the press, individual conscience, etc. America is indeed a safe space, you liberal pussy-hat wearing snowflakes. In third-world, communist countries, you are forced to listen to the party line’s dogma and dreck—or you go to gulag.
Hence the sorry state of higher education in America. Legal adults who can join the military and vote, who drink and fornicate, who drive cars watch porn, are treated like preschoolers who need hand-holding and constant guidance from bureaucratic nannies. Standards of admission are lowered and grade inflation runs rampant so that privileged victim-groups aren’t slighted and their self-esteem damaged by hidden racism and sexism. The administrative bureaucracy waxes ever fatter, even as the number of full-time professors diminishes and tuition costs soar. And the tax-payer is on the hook for much of the bill, as the federal government now backstops the over $1 trillion in student debt, billions of it unlikely ever to be repaid.
Bruce Bawer writes a searing appraisal of the hypocrisy of three Center faculty members -- Joel Gordon, Ted Swedenburg and Mohja Kahf -- who "slammed" Chesler. These three found Chesler's alleged anti-Muslim bigotry, hate speech and lack of a diversity of views so abhorrent that she needed to be shut down. The fact that Chesler has "spent her career decrying the systematic misogyny in Islamic cultures" while highlighting the refusal of many of her former feminist allies to address this issue was just too much for these intellectual weaklings.
Thus, Phyllis Chesler joins the ranks of other worthy and courageous individuals such as Milo Yiannopoulous, Ann Coulter, Charles Murray, Heather McDonald, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Brigitte Gabriel, and David Horowitz, whose voices are being silenced in institutions of higher learning.
Related articles:
April 13,2016: Snowflakes Are Useful Idiots -- And Doomed
Aptil 14, 2016: OOHRAH! 'Communism for Kids' Fails to Make Amazon.com Top 100 Rankings
April 15, 2016: Snowflakes Are Useful Idiots: Recommended Reading List #1
April 16, 2016: Army Ranger Has a Message for the Snowflakes at Duquesne University
April 18, 2016: Chairman Mao Would Be Right At Home At Wellesley College!
April 20, 2016: Snowflakes Are Useful Idiots: Recommended Reading List #2
April 23, 2016: Snowflakes Are Useful Idiots: Recommended Reading List #3
April 25, 2016: Cultural Marxism and Euphemisms
April 28, 2016: "If fascism comes to America, it will be through our college and university system." --Roger Simon, PJ Media
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