Here’s one excerpt from an essay titled “Condemning Protesters Same as Condoning Hate Speech”:
If you condemn the actions that shut down Yiannopoulos’ literal hate speech, you condone his presence, his actions and his ideas; you care more about broken windows than broken bodies. I can’t impeach Trump, and I can’t stop the alt-right from recruiting nationwide. I can only fight tooth and nail for the right to exist in my hometown. So it’s time for those waiting in the center to pick a side.35
Taken at face value, the author seems to be engaging in a number of cognitive distortions. The most evident is catastrophizing: If Milo Yiannopoulos is allowed to speak, there will be “broken bodies” on our side. I might lose my “right to exist.” Therefore, violence is justified, because it is self-defense. The author also engages in dichotomous thinking: If you condemn my side’s violence, that means you condone Yiannopoulos’s ideas. You must “pick a side.” You’re either with us or against us. Life is a battle between good people and evil people, and if you disagree with us, you’re one of the evil people.
The other essays are similar in appearing to employ multiple cognitive distortions to justify physical violence as a reasonable way to prevent a speech. Some of the essays offer Orwellian inversions of common English words. For example, from another essay: “Asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act.”36
A bit of background is needed here. Weeks earlier, at another college, Yiannopoulos had displayed the name and photo of a trans woman in order to mock her.37 In advance of the Berkeley event, rumors had circulated that Yiannopoulos planned to identify Berkeley students who were undocumented immigrants. He denied the allegation, the protesters offered no evidence for it, and it’s not clear how shutting down his talk on campus would have stopped him from revealing those names if that had been his intention. (He could have easily disseminated the information on the internet.) Nonetheless, you can see why people might think that calls for peaceful dialogue with Yiannopoulos are misguided or counterproductive. It is not irrational, in our nasty political climate, to worry that some of the things he might say could lead to online harassment or even physical harm to innocent people.
But if asking for peaceful dialogue is violent, then it seems that the word “violence” is taking on new meanings for some students. This is another example of concept creep. In just the last few years, the word “violence” has expanded on campus and in some radical political communities beyond campus to cover a multitude of nonviolent actions, including speech that this political faction claims will have a negative impact on members of protected identity groups.
Outside of cultures of safetyism, the word “violence” refers to physical violence. The word is sometimes used metaphorically (as in “I violently disagree”), but few of us, including those who claim that speech is violence, have any difficulty understanding the statement “We should reduce incarceration for nonviolent offenses.” However, now that some students, professors, and activists are labeling their opponents’ words as violence, they give themselves permission to engage in ideologically motivated physical violence. The rationale, as an essay in the Berkeley op-ed series argued, is that physically violent actions, if used to shut down speech that is deemed hateful, are “not acts of violence” but, rather, “acts of self defense.”38
This is not an uncommon view on many campuses. Almost one in five students surveyed in a 2017 Brookings Institution study agreed that using violence to prevent a speaker from speaking was sometimes “acceptable.”39 While some critics challenged the sampling used in that study, findings in a second study by McLaughlin and Associates were similar; 30% of undergraduate students surveyed agreed with this statement: “If someone is using hate speech or making racially charged comments, physical violence can be justified to prevent this person from espousing their hateful views.”40
If that sounds reasonable to you, just think about what the statement implies after concept creep and emotional reasoning expand the meaning of “hate speech” and “racially charged.” In a call-out culture, almost anything that is interpreted by anyone as having a negative impact on vulnerable members of the community—regardless of intent—can be called hate speech. The Columbia University linguist John McWhorter describes how the term “white supremacist” is now used in an “utterly athletic, recreational” way, as a “battering ram” to attack anyone who departs from the party line.41 McWhorter himself (who is African American) has been called a white supremacist for questioning received wisdom on matters related to race.42 But if some students now think it’s OK to punch a fascist or white supremacist,43 and if anyone who disagrees with them can be labeled a fascist or white supremacist, well, you can see how this rhetorical move might make people hesitant to voice dissenting views on campus.44
Violence and Intimidation After Berkeley
It’s hard to know whether the events at Berkeley played a causal role in later instances of violence on campus, but the spring semester of 2017 saw an increase in politically motivated violence, vandalism, and intimidation, all of which was justified by moral arguments about violence and safety, with the goal of shutting down speakers on campus. One of the most widely covered events occurred on March 2 in Vermont, at Middlebury College. Charles Murray, a libertarian scholar affiliated with the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, was invited by a student group to speak about his 2012 book, Coming Apart. The college’s Political Science Department cosponsored the talk. The book is about one of the most important and widely discussed topics of 2017: the social and economic dysfunction of the white working class, which (according to many commentators) made voters in that group respond more enthusiastically to the anti-immigrant and protectionist messages of Donald Trump.45 But in a previous book, published in 1994 (The Bell Curve), Murray and his coauthor, Richard Herrnstein, proposed that differences in average IQ scores found across racial groups may not be caused entirely by environmental factors; genetic differences may play a role, too.46 Some Middlebury students and professors maintained that anyone who makes such a claim is a white supremacist, and they came together to demand that Murray’s talk about his later book be canceled.47
When the disinvitation effort failed, a large number of students attended Murray’s talk just to shut it down by chanting in unison and shouting over his attempts to speak. College administrators had anticipated this possibility, so Murray and Allison Stanger, a political science professor who had agreed to question Murray after his talk, were moved to a different room so he could deliver his talk via livestream, behind a locked door. But students soon discovered where they were and continued to try to stop Murray from speaking by pounding on the walls and pulling fire alarms in the building. When the livestream ended, as Murray and Professor Stanger left the building, they were swarmed by protesters. One shoved Stanger; another grabbed her hair and pulled with such force that she suffered a concussion and a whiplash injury.48 As Murray and Stanger attempted to flee campus by car, protesters, some of them masked, pounded on the car, rocked it back and forth, and jumped onto the hood.49 Someone threw a large traffic sign in front of their car to prevent them from leaving, but public safety officials cleared a path, and the car eventually drove off to a dinner with selected students and faculty.50 The protesters, however, somehow discovered where the group had gathered for dinner, so the Middlebury administrators quickly moved the group to yet another location, this time miles from campus.51
After dinner, Professor Stanger went to the hospital, where her injuries were diagnosed. She required physical therapy for the next six months.52 Stanger later described her experience in a New York Times essay. “What alarmed me most,” she wrote, “was what I saw in the eyes of the crowd. Those who wanted the event to take place made eye contact with me. Those intent on disrupting it steadfastly refused to do so. They couldn’t look at me directly, because if they had, they would have see
n another human being.”53
Just one month later, at Claremont McKenna College, near Los Angeles, about 250 students54 prevented fellow students from attending a speech by journalist, attorney, and social commentator Heather Mac Donald.55 In her 2016 book, The War on Cops, Mac Donald argued that Black Lives Matter protests made the police more hesitant to enter and actively engage in minority neighborhoods, thereby leaving the people in those neighborhoods less protected and more vulnerable to crime. Her theory had been the subject of lively national debate. As Neil Gross, a left-leaning sociologist, wrote in The New York Times: “There is now some evidence that when all eyes are on police misconduct, crime may edge up. Progressives should acknowledge that this idea isn’t far-fetched.”56 But for some students, allowing Mac Donald to present her thesis would be allowing “violence” on campus, so she had to be stopped. These students mobilized with a call on Facebook to “show up wearing black” and “bring your comrades, because we’re shutting this down.”57 Protesting students prevented anyone from entering the building to hear the talk, which Mac Donald gave via livestream as protesters pounded on the clear glass wall of the nearly empty ground-level lecture hall. Mac Donald was later evacuated from the building through a kitchen door and into a waiting police car.
After the event, the president of Pomona College58 (part of the Claremont consortium of five colleges) wrote a statement in defense of academic freedom and Mac Donald’s right to speak on campus. In response to his letter, three Pomona students wrote a letter, signed by twenty-four other students, explaining why Mac Donald should not be allowed to speak. As at Berkeley, the students asserted that the speech itself was a form of violence: “Engaging with her, a white supremacist fascist supporter of the police state, is a form of violence.”
The letter exemplified the dichotomous thinking of the Untruth of Us Versus Them:
Either you support students of marginalized identities, particularly Black students, or leave us to protect and organize for our communities without the impositions of your patronization, without your binary respectability politics, and without your monolithic perceptions of protest and organizing.59
The students continued: “If engaged, Heather Mac Donald would not be debating on mere difference of opinion, but the right of Black people to exist.” This sentence includes fortune-telling, as the students predict what Mac Donald would say. It also includes a rhetorical flourish that became common in 2017: the assertion that a speaker will “deny” people from certain identity groups “the right to exist.”60 This thinking is a form of catastrophizing, in that it inflates the horrors of a speaker’s words far beyond what the speaker might actually say. The students also called Mac Donald “a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, [and] a classist.” This is labeling running wild—a list of serious accusations made without supporting evidence.61
Where did college students learn to think this way? We don’t know what courses they took at Pomona, or whether they thought this way before they arrived on campus, but the letter overall shows the influence of the common-enemy identity politics we described in chapter 3, and it makes extensive use of the language of intersectionality. For example, the students end their letter with a demand that the president must send an email
to the entire student body, faculty, and staff by Thursday, April 20, 2017, apologizing for the previous patronizing statement [his defense of academic freedom], enforcing that Pomona College does not tolerate hate speech and speech that projects violence onto the bodies of its marginalized students and oppressed peoples, especially Black students who straddle the intersection of marginalized identities.
As we saw in chapter 3, this kind of identity politics amplifies the human proclivity for us-versus-them thinking. It prepares students for battle, not for learning.
Violence in Charlottesville
The events at Berkeley, Middlebury, and Claremont McKenna were, in a sense, shocks from the left, which angered and radicalized some conservatives on and off campus. But there was also a continuing series of shocks from the right, which angered and radicalized the left, giving us a year of rapidly escalating mutual outrage. The most shocking event of all occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia. On the night of August 11, 2017, members of the self-described alt-right, including many neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen, marched across the fabled grounds of the University of Virginia, carrying Tiki torches and chanting neo-Nazi and white supremacist slogans, including “Jews will not replace us.” If you are looking for examples of common-enemy identity politics, it doesn’t get any clearer than this.
The next day, the racist mob marched through downtown Charlottesville, carrying swastika flags while making a pilgrimage to a statue of Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army in the American Civil War. During the march, six of the alt-right marchers beat a black man with metal pipes and poles, causing broken bones, lacerations, internal injuries, and a concussion.62 The marchers also violently clashed with Antifa counterprotesters.63 And a white supremacist who idolized Adolf Hitler64 stopped his car in front of a group of counterprotesters, backed up, and then sped forward, slamming into them, sending people into the air, badly injuring at least nineteen peaceful counterprotesters, and killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer, a paralegal described by friends as “a passionate advocate for the disenfranchised who was often moved to tears by the world’s injustices.”65 Her mother said that she began receiving threats in the aftermath of Heyer’s death, and as a result, her grave is in a secret location to protect it from being desecrated by neo-Nazis.66
The sight of Nazi flags and the murder of Heyer profoundly shook an already divided nation. It was a moment that brought together many Republicans and Democrats in leadership positions in a forceful denunciation of the white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Yet one voice was conspicuously absent from the conversation: President Trump’s. The president had by that time demonstrated a willingness to condemn many people harshly and promptly, yet he was restrained and slow in his criticism of the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville. On the day of Heyer’s death, when most Americans were looking to the president to clearly and unambiguously condemn neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, he condemned hatred, bigotry, and violence “on many sides.” Two days later, he read aloud a written statement that offered condemnation, but the very next day, in unscripted remarks, he said that there were “very fine people on both sides.”67 With those three words—“very fine people”68—the president showed that he was sympathetic to the men who staged the most highly publicized march for racism and antisemitism in the United States in many decades.
The Autumn of 2017
Charlottesville was a tragedy that presented an opportunity. With many Republicans, conservatives, and leaders from both business and the military distancing themselves from the president and his remarks,69 it would have been a good time to draw larger circles and change the landscape of American politics.70 On campus, however, where levels of fear and anger were understandably elevated in the wake of the events in Charlottesville, the more common response seemed to be an increase in us-versus-them thinking, including hostility aimed at people and groups (including many on the left) who otherwise could have become allies. The autumn of 2017 saw more episodes of students using the heckler’s veto to shut down classes and speeches than in any previous semester on record.71 For example, students at William & Mary shut down a speech by Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, the executive director of the Virginia affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), because the ACLU had defended the constitutional rights of the Charlottesville alt-right march organizers.72 The ACLU has consistently defended the rights of the poor, minority populations, LGBTQ individuals, and others whom progressives reliably defend. For example, it defended the right of a pregnant, undocumented teen to get an abortion,73 the rights of English translators of radical Islamic texts that call for jihad,74 and the rights of the Black Panthers.75 The ACLU defends rights,
not ideologies. But William & Mary students chanted, among other things, “The revolution will not uphold the Constitution!” and “Liberalism is white supremacy!”76
A few weeks later, the president of the University of Oregon’s “State of the University” speech was shut down by close to fifty students who seized the stage, chanting “Nothing about us without us.” A student with a megaphone insisted, “We will not be ignored” and “Expect resistance to anyone who opposes us.” A student protester complained about the oppression of minority students, tuition increases, and indigenous rights, and described “fascism and neo-Nazis” as the reason for the protest.77 (The president, Michael Schill, whose extended family members were murdered by actual fascists during World War II, responded with a New York Times op-ed piece titled “The Misguided Student Crusade Against ‘Fascism.’”78) The following week, at the question-and-answer session of an event at UCLA titled “What Is Civil Discourse? Challenging Hate Speech in a Free Society,” sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, protesters from a group called “Refuse Fascism” disrupted the event.79
And then there’s Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. For thirteen months, beginning in September of 2016, campus activists tried to shut down the freshman humanities course because it focused on the thinkers of ancient Greece and the eastern Mediterranean world (who would be considered white today).80 These tactics often work against the protesters’ own goals, as they alienate many people who might otherwise support them. For example, one of the lecturers in the course was Lucía Martínez Valdivia, who tried to teach the work of Sappho, an ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos and an icon of both feminism and lesbian liberation.81 Martínez Valdivia found it hard to lecture while students were waving signs with aggressive and vulgar statements right next to her at the front of the classroom. She shared with students the fact that she has PTSD and asked them, out of concern for her health, not to protest in her classroom. They complained in an open letter82 that her request “creates a hierarchy [of traumas] where your traumas matter more” and accused her of being “anti-black,” “ableist,” and engaging in “gaslighting,” that is, manipulating victims by making them question their perceptions or their sanity. She was shocked that the college allowed these intimidating in-class protests to go on, and decided she had to speak out. In October 2017, she wrote a powerful essay in The Washington Post titled “Professors Like Me Can’t Stay Silent About This Extremist Moment on Campuses.” Here is an excerpt:
The Coddling of the American Mind Page 10