by Sean Hannity
When U.S. education secretary Betsy DeVos reversed Obama’s unconstitutional policy, Texas attorney Rob Ranco said he’d “be okay” if DeVos were sexually assaulted. Charming. That’s the thanks conservatives get from progressives for, to quote Turley again, “restoring minimal rules of due process for the investigation of sexual misconduct.”22 Turley notes that liberals are imposing a false choice between due process for students accused of sexual harassment and full protection for their alleged victims.
Leftist professors have infected their students, including journalism students, with an alarming tolerance for censorship. When violent leftist protesters at Middlebury College in Vermont silenced visiting speaker Charles Murray, a conservative thinker, and pulled the hair and injured the neck of the professor trying to shield him, the school’s paper, the Middlebury Campus, refused to denounce the protestors, and most of the opinions solicited and printed by the paper defended them. When another violent mob at the University of California, Berkeley blocked Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking, the Daily Californian’s student journalists defended the mob, claiming that the university had “invited chaos” by giving a platform to “someone who never belonged here.”23 Twelve of the university’s professors had sent a letter asking the administration to cancel the speaking event before it occurred, with nearly ninety more professors later signing on. In an email to the paper, one of the letter’s authors, David Landreth, argued the professors “wholeheartedly” support free speech but Yiannopoulos engages in “personal harassment,” so he should be silenced.24
Progressives frequently justify their censorship by labeling certain opinions “hate speech.” “Free speech is no longer sacred among young journalists who have absorbed the campus lessons about ‘hate speech’—defined more broadly—and they’re breaking long-standing taboos as they bring ‘cancel culture’ into professional newsrooms,” writes New York journalist John Tierney. They are “terrified of seeming insufficiently ‘woke.’ Most professional journalists, young and old, still pay lip service to the First Amendment, and they certainly believe it protects their own work, but they’re increasingly eager for others to be ‘de-platformed’ or ‘no-platformed,’ as today’s censors like to put it—effectively silenced.”25
Tierney is right about these “younger progressive journalists” who try to get their conservative counterparts fired and banned from social media platforms, lobby Amazon to ban conservative books, and organize advertising boycotts against conservatives, which we Fox prime-time hosts are routinely subjected to. Tierney makes a point I often make: “They equate conservatives’ speech with violence and rationalize leftists’ actual violence as… speech.”26 These virtue-signaling liberals are ever more dangerous to free expression in this country, blissfully unaware that eviscerating free speech for conservatives will inevitably, someday, boomerang back against the left.
GENERATION SNOWFLAKE
Discrimination against campus conservative groups is another leftist ploy to suppress speech. Trinity University’s student government denied funding to bring conservative author Heather Mac Donald to campus because she has been an outspoken critic of universities’ diversity mania. One student senator commented that if Mac Donald was “going to come to our campus and tell us that, like campus rape culture isn’t a thing, I think that would make a lot of people on this campus feel unsafe.” Another said that inviting her would be “the equivalent of inviting a climate change denier.”27 You got that? It endangers students if someone denies leftists’ claims that rape is a common and socially acceptable occurrence on campuses, and allowing that kind of speech is just as bad as allowing someone to deny that we’re all going to die from global warming.
Often led by extremely high-salaried bureaucrats, university “diversity” programs are a colossal waste of resources that drive up tuition rates. But hearing that is simply unbearable on many campuses. There is only one acceptable opinion. This is the type of leftist intolerance that courses through the Democratic Party and threatens our First Amendment freedoms.
It’s no wonder campus thought police resent Mac Donald, a leading critic of campus censorship. In City Journal, she cited numerous outrageous examples. At Claremont McKenna College, in October 2015, a Hispanic student complained in an op-ed about the school’s “western, white, cisheteronormative upper to upper-middle class values” that make minority students feel out of place. In response, the dean of students attempted to accommodate the student, asking her to meet with administrators to assist them to “better serve students, especially those that don’t fit our CMC mold.” Boy, did that backfire—though minority students had themselves used the phrase “not fitting the mold,” they launched protests, hunger strikes, and marches demanding that the dean resign for supposedly insulting them. Unable to appease them despite an hour’s worth of apologizing, the dean quit.28 Mission accomplished! Leftist hate vindicated!
I’ve covered a few examples of this kind of student tyranny on my show, including Mac Donald’s own experience with Claremont McKenna, where agitators cut short her speech using what she called “brute totalitarian force.” I also told you about a student group protesting a proposed Chick-fil-A restaurant at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania, claiming it could jeopardize the school’s “safe spaces.” There are endless other examples.
At Emory University, in March 2016, minority students demanded that the university’s president protect them from “Trump 2016” slogans written in chalk on sidewalks, which made them “afraid.” Groveling university president James Wagner said, “I learn from every conversation like the one that took place yesterday and know that further conversations are necessary.” Wagner announced a plan to “honor” the students’ complaints, to include reviewing the sidewalk Trump slogans. Like a good leftist, he invoked the language of inclusion to announce exclusionary measures. “As an academic community, we must value… the expression of ideas… [But] at the same time, our commitment to respect, civility, and inclusion calls us to provide a safe environment that inspires and supports courageous inquiry.” “ ‘Safety,’ ” Mac Donald comments, “is a code word for suppression.”29
Do schools even question the merits of such complaints anymore? Think about the supposed offense here—advocating the election of someone who was promising to improve living conditions for minorities (and the president has kept that promise). That anyone, let alone the administration of an institution of higher learning, would treat this as threatening is appalling and alarming. Since we’re talking about safety, who is attending to the safety of Trump-supporting students? Wouldn’t they have more reason to feel unsafe on campus, being surrounded by intolerant leftist students, professors, and administrators?
At Evergreen State College, in May 2017, students screamed obscenities at biology professor Bret Weinstein for refusing to comply with an order from the school’s director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services that all white professors must cancel their courses for a day and not enter the campus. The students shouted, “F--- you, you piece of s---.” “Get the f--- out of here.” “F--- what you have to say.” “This is not a discussion.” Weinstein, notes Mac Donald, is a lifelong progressive.
The radical students also cursed out the university’s president, who then praised the students’ misbehavior. “Let me reiterate my gratitude for the passion and courage you have shown me and others,” said President George Bridges. “I want every one of you to feel safe on this campus and be able to learn in a supportive environment free from discrimination or intimidation…. For a long time, we’ve been working on the concerns you’ve raised and acknowledge that our results have fallen short…. This week, you are inviting us into the struggle you have taken up.” Mac Donald informs us that “Weinstein and his biologist wife, Heather Heying, were eventually hounded out of Evergreen.” This, my friends, is leftism at work. This is the future if we don’t fight and win. Our universities are molding a generation of Stalinist leftists and enabling their fanatical behavior
.30
Abortion is another hot-button issue for campus leftists. Colorado State University denied a “diversity grant” for its Students for Life chapter “to educate students on the differing perspectives surrounding the abortion argument and encourage students to take a stand on the issue.” But as you well know, “diversity” doesn’t mean diversity of ideas. Campus Activities Program coordinator Tyrell Allen informed the group that the Diversity Grant Committee denied the request because the “speaker’s content doesn’t appear entirely unbiased as it addresses the topic of abortion,” and the “committee worries that folks from varying sides of the issue won’t necessarily feel affirmed in attending the event.”31
So a university denied a voice to a conservative group because the mere expression of a contrary view might make leftist students feel uncomfortable, unsafe, or unaffirmed. Welcome to our world! Conservative students feel unaffirmed and uncomfortable every day at their close-minded leftist universities. Take for instance a Purdue University employee who denounced Purdue Students for Life as “vile, racist idiots” on Facebook for distributing pro-life brochures on campus with the slogan “Hands up, don’t abort”—a takeoff on a Black Lives Matter slogan. How’s that for unaffirming? The students said they found the comments disturbing and were concerned for their safety on campus.32 For once, it seems students had legitimate safety concerns as opposed to using such concerns as a smoke screen for silencing opposing viewpoints.
“ECHO CHAMBERS OF ORTHODOX CREEDS”
Progressive students are dutifully learning the ways of their leftist mentors. For example, the University of Scranton student government refused to recognize a chapter of Turning Point USA, a conservative group. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) asked the university’s president to recognize the group in accordance with its commitment to free expression or to provide a viewpoint-neutral reason for its refusal. According to FIRE, the university sent an unsatisfactory response and has not provided clarification despite further requests.33
The student government president seemed hell-bent on denying recognition to the group. He insisted the student government has the right to consider a prospective group and say, “Yikes, nope, denied.” He added that “in the slim chance” the student senate does approve the group, he has the power to veto that decision.34 I can honestly say that conservatives don’t think like this. While we strongly disagree with leftists—obviously—we wouldn’t deny their right to form a student group even if we had the power to do it. But many leftists who doubtlessly consider themselves progressive, enlightened, and tolerant have no qualms denying conservatives a voice, even if those rights are guaranteed by the university to the students.
While liberals downplay this disturbing trend, there were more than fifty attempts to disinvite speakers from college campuses in 2018 and 2019.35 Possibly even more egregious, more than 120 colleges and universities have campus speech codes that restrict what students may say,36 even though courts have consistently held these to be unconstitutional.37 Some of the examples are almost too bizarre to believe. At Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, Michigan, three students were arrested and jailed for distributing pocket copies of the United States Constitution in the process of forming a campus chapter of Young Americans for Liberty. It seems that the conservative students had ventured outside the university’s “speech zone” and were violating the school’s Speech Permit Policy by “engaging [students] in conversation on their way to education places” without a permit.38
Can you believe they pay adults to spend their time harassing students like this? At this school, officials have total discretion to deny students permission to speak on campus if the content of their speech doesn’t “support the mission of the school or the mission of a recognized college entity or activity,” said Travis Barham, an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, the law firm that represented the aggrieved students after they sued the university. Barham said the school’s policy is so restrictive that it prohibits spontaneous conversations anywhere on campus.39 The lawsuit was eventually settled, with the college agreeing to change the policies that led to the students’ arrest—after a federal judge indicated he believed the school’s policies were unconstitutional.
FIRE defines speech codes as “any university regulation or policy that prohibits expression that would be protected by the First Amendment in society at large. Any policy—such as a harassment policy—can be a speech code if it prohibits protected speech or expression.” FIRE points out—chillingly—that “if universities applied these rules to the letter, major voices of public criticism, satire, and commentary would be silenced on American campuses, and some of our greatest authors, artists, and filmmakers would be banned.” These codes harm some students through censorship, and they lead other students to believe they can go through life free of being offended, embarrassed, or made to feel uncomfortable. Our universities are desensitizing students to our liberties, and as FIRE notes, “A nation that does not educate in freedom will not survive in freedom, and will not even know when it has lost it.”40
It is particularly dangerous that universities, which are supposed to be bastions of academic inquiry and free expression, are leading the charge against free speech. In Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech, author Keith Whittington sounds the alarm. “The current crisis of free speech on college campuses,” writes Whittington, “is both symptom and cause of a larger threat to the maintenance of liberal democracy itself.” Free speech is intrinsically part of what universities are about. “Likewise, free speech is bred into the bones of a modern university, and any institution that sets those principles aside can no longer be meaningfully regarded as a proper institution of higher education.”
Unfortunately, Whittington argues, many universities have abandoned their responsibilities and become “mere facades that camouflage a campus culture that has rejected liberal tolerance and free inquiry in favor of dogma and indoctrination.” Universities, he notes, are essential to the communication of ideas in our society and so must honor free expression. “Sacrificing speech subverts the very rationale for having a university and hampers the ability of universities to achieve their most basic goals.”41 But to honor their mission, universities must “preserve the college campus as a sanctuary for serious debate of unorthodox ideas and avoid succumbing to the temptation to make” universities “echo chambers of orthodox creeds.”42
Thankfully, most speech codes that have been challenged in court have been struck down.43 But as I’ve told you, leftists never rest. Instead of tucking their tails between their legs, they double down. George Mason law professor Jon Gould observes that “hate speech policies not only persist, but they have actually increased in number following a series of court decisions that ostensibly found many to be unconstitutional.”44 Enterprising progressives simply began to craft their speech codes more narrowly. “Many of the provisions that used to be called speech codes are now being wrapped into anti-harassment policies,” according to University of Pennsylvania law professor Robert Richards.45
Campus speech codes arose during the 1980s and early 1990s supposedly to address discrimination and harassment, with more than 350 public colleges and universities adopting codes to regulate “hate speech” by 1995. In typical Orwellian fashion, far-left professors argued that these assaults on free speech were needed to protect free expression, particularly of minorities, who they said were made unsafe by exposure to hate speech.
Naturally, it didn’t take long for a wide range of conservative advocacy to be classified as hate speech, which it turns out is just another term leftists distort to muzzle conservatives. Simply expressing support for President Trump—as noted earlier—is now grounds for accusations of hate speech and threatening students’ safety.
The opposition to free speech has jumped from academic misfits to the Democratic Party. For example, in a Washington Post column former Obama official Richard Stengel advocated a federal ban on hate speech,
citing dismay among Arab diplomats that Americans are not arrested for burning the Koran. Stengel bemoans that American jurisprudence even protects hateful speech that can lead to violence, calling it a “design flaw” in the First Amendment. Law professor Jonathan Turley responded that this so-called design flaw is free speech itself. Noting that the Democratic Party has “abandoned its historic fealty to free speech,” Turley fears the willingness of leftist politicians like AOC to coerce social media companies into regulating speech—“to do what the government cannot do under our Constitution.” “It seems Democrats have fallen out of love with free speech and lost all tolerance for opposing views,” wrote Turley.46
In light of the left’s growing intolerance, it was predictable that leftists would begin a campaign to harass and intimidate conservatives in public. Kirstjen Nielsen, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Ted Cruz, among many other prominent conservatives, have been verbally abused and run out of restaurants. In years past Democrats would have denounced this thuggery, but after each of these incidents you hardly heard a peep of condemnation out of them.
All this fanaticism reaches its natural endpoint in Antifa. On my show I covered the despicable tactics of Antifa in Portland, where they blocked traffic, assaulted pedestrians, and threatened commuters. According to USA Today, Antifa’s “primary goal is to stop neo-Nazis and white supremacists from gaining a platform.”47 In plain English, this means Antifa aims to use violence to stop their political opponents—including conservatives and Trump supporters, all of whom Antifa labels as neo-Nazis—from speaking publicly. Once again, the Orwellian element is undeniable here—in the name of opposing fascism, Antifa acts exactly like fascists do, violently attacking their political opponents in the street in order to deny them any means of expressing their beliefs.