Campus Mob Shuts Down #BlackLivesMatter Critic, 4/22/17
(Heather Mac Donald,
InsideSources) All who cherish free expression, especially on campuses,
must combat the growing zeal for censorship.
Where are the faculty? American college
students are increasingly resorting to brute force, and sometimes criminal
violence, to shut down ideas that they don’t like. Yet when such travesties
occur, the faculty are, with few exceptions, missing in action, though they
have themselves been given the extraordinary privilege of tenure to protect
their own liberty of thought and speech. It is time for them to take their
heads out of the sand.
I was the target of such silencing
tactics two days in a row earlier this month, the more serious incident at
Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, and a less virulent one at
UCLA.
Claremont McKenna had invited me to
meet with students and to give a talk about my book, “The War on Cops,” on
April 6. Several calls went out on Facebook to “shut down” this “notorious
white supremacist fascist Heather Mac Donald.” A Facebook post from “we,
students of color at the Claremont Colleges” announced grandiosely that “as a
community, we CANNOT and WILL NOT allow fascism to have a platform. We stand against
all forms of oppression and we refuse to have Mac Donald speak.”
A Facebook event titled “Shut Down
Anti-Black Fascist Heather Mac Donald” and hosted by “Shut Down Anti-Black
Fascists” encouraged students to protest the event because “Mac Donald condemns
(the) Black Lives Matter movement,” “supports racist police officers” and
“supports increasing fascist ‘law and order.’”
When I arrived on campus, I was
shuttled to what was in effect a safe house: a guest suite for campus visitors,
with blinds drawn. I could hear the growing crowds chanting and drumming, but I
could not see the auditorium that the protesters were surrounding. One female
voice rose above the chants with particularly shrill hysteria. From the
balcony, I saw a petite blonde walk by, her face covered by a Palestinian head
scarf and carrying an amplifier on her back for her bullhorn.
Just before 6 p.m., I was fetched by
an administrator and a few police officers to take an out-of-the-way elevator
into CMC’s Athenaeum. The massive hall, where I was supposed to meet with
students for dinner before my talk, was empty — the mob, by then numbering
close to 300, had succeeded in preventing anyone from entering. The large
plate-glass windows were covered with translucent blinds, so that from the inside
one could only see a mass of indistinct bodies pounding on the windows.
The administration had decided that
I would live-stream my speech in the vacant room in order to preserve some
semblance of the original plan. The podium was moved away from a window so
that, as night fell and the lights inside came on, I would not be visible to
the agitators outside.
I completed my speech to the
accompaniment of chants and banging on the windows. I was able to take two
questions from students via live-streaming. But by then, the administrators and
police officers in the room, who had spent my talk nervously staring at the
windows, decided that things were growing too unruly outside to continue. I was
given the cue that the presentation was over. Walkie-talkies were used to
coordinate my exit from the Athenaeum’s kitchen to the exact moment that a
black, unmarked Claremont Police Department van rolled up. We passed startled
students sitting on the stoop outside the kitchen. Before I entered the van,
one student came up and thanked me for coming to Claremont. We sped off to the
police station.
Last week’s events should be the
final wakeup call to the professoriate, coming on the heels of the more
dangerous attacks on Charles Murray at Middleburg College and the riots in
Berkeley, California, against Milo Yiannapoulos.
When speakers need police escort on
and off college campuses, an alarm bell should be going off that something has
gone seriously awry. Of course, an ever-growing part of the faculty is the
reason that police protection is needed in the first place. Professors in all
but the hardest of hard sciences increasingly indoctrinate students in the
belief that to be a non-Asian minority or a female in America today is to be
the target of nonstop oppression, even, uproariously, if you are among the
privileged few to attend a fantastically well-endowed, resource-rich American
college.
Those professors also maintain that
to challenge that claim of ubiquitous bigotry is to engage in “hate speech,”
and that such speech is tantamount to a physical assault on minorities and
females. As such, it can rightly be suppressed and punished. To those faculty,
I am indeed a fascist, and a white supremacist, with the attendant loss of
communication rights.
We are thus cultivating students who
lack all understanding of the principles of the American Founding. The mark of
any civilization is its commitment to reason and discourse. The great
accomplishment of the European enlightenment was to require all forms of
authority to justify themselves through rational argument, rather than through
coercion or an unadorned appeal to tradition. The resort to brute force in the
face of disagreement is particularly disturbing in a university, which should
provide a model of civil discourse. But the students currently stewing
in delusional resentments and self-pity will eventually graduate, and some will
seize levers of power more far-reaching than those they currently wield over
toadying campus bureaucrats and spineless faculty. Unless the campus zest for
censorship is combated now, what we have always regarded as a precious
inheritance could be eroded beyond recognition, and a soft totalitarianism
could become the new American norm.
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