By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--August 24, 2017
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Here’s the dilemma college presidents face in the fall: Either uphold free speech on campus and risk violent counterprotests, or ban conservative provocateurs and confirm the “freedom of speech” crisis on campuses. Either way their institution’s legitimacy is undermined. This impossible dilemma is no accident. It has been part of a strategy, deployed first by conservatives and perfected by the alt-right. The alt-right is a nebulous, still-developing political movement, but we know at least two things about it. One, its most prominent popularizers — Stephen K. Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer — have all articulated that they seek to destroy liberal cultural hegemony, which they associate with a bipartisan, globalizing, multicultural, corporate elite, and which, they think, is perpetrated in the United States by the mainstream media and on college campuses. The second thing we know about the alt-right is that its provocateurs seek to bait liberal institutions by weaponizing the concept of free speech, which is an issue that divides the liberal left. It is true that higher education has brought much of this on itself through the extreme policing of speech and tolerance of student protesters who shut down speakers with whom they disagree. But that doesn’t diminish the extent to which the alt-right and conservatives are using “free speech” to attack and destroy colleges and universities, which have long promoted different variations of the internationalist, secular, cosmopolitan, multicultural liberalism that marks the thinking of educated elites in both parties.
As college presidents try to figure out whether the First Amendment protects conservatives’ right to create political spectacle and instigate violence, it might be useful to recall another time when American liberals were forced to sidestep First Amendment absolutism to combat a political foe: the 1940s, when New Deal liberals purged U.S. communists from American political life.Got that? The problem with banning conservative speakers from campus is not that this is anathema to the whole idea of free speech, but rather that it gives conservatives who complain about campus free speech restrictions an aura of credibility - and we can't have that. (In other words, it would prove their complaint is legitimate.) But if you let them speak, they're going to "instigate violence." How? Because they're engaging in "political spectacle" (whatever that means) and they're going to draw the ire of violent counterprotesters. In other words, the left can't stand it when the right speaks, so the left will follow the lead of Antifa and use violence to try to shut conservatives up. Since conservatives should know liberals will do this, it's conservatives' fault for showing up and expecting to be able to speak. The three specific people she mentions as examples are Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer - and isn't that a clever way of trying to connect a former Trump White House staffer to a vile racist? But I guess you could claim she's only talking about the most extreme haters by citing the examples she uses. Except that there are two problems with that. In the third paragraph cited above, she cites both "the alt-right and conservatives" as the problem, which clearly means she isn't limiting her disdain for free speech to just the alt-right. All conservatives are apparently unworthy of free speech here. And once you start deciding that certain people are "too extreme" to be allowed to speak, then the judgment of whoever defines mainstream has become a substitute for the First Amendment.
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