In our two prior posts, we explained how NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly was shouted down at Brown University by protesters against NYC’s stop and frisk policy:
- Brown U. students shout down Ray Kelly
- Brown U. student called “White Supremacist” for wanting to hear Ray Kelly speak
The protesters decided that others should not get to hear what Kelly had to say on the topic. One protester, Jenny Li (pictured above) revelled in the shut down:
So we drafted a petition last Thursday and as of today [October 29, 2013] there are over 500 signatures. We delivered it to the Taubman Center [at Brown] and they didn’t respond to our demand to cancel the lecture, so today we cancelled it for them.
It probably will not surprise you that Li is a fellow at the People for the American Way Foundation, the liberal activist group that runs the Right Wing Watch blog among other activities.
Author Mychal Denzel Smith writing at The Nation plays into every stereotype of liberal intolerance in supporting the shout down, and terming it “glorious”, Brown University Booed Ray Kelly and Racism (emphasis added):
NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly of stop-and-frisk fame was scheduled to speak at Brown University yesterday and deliver the school’s annual Noah Krieger ’93 Memorial Lecture. The title of his speech, and I’m not making this up, was “Proactive Policing in America’s Biggest City.” What happened instead was glorious.
After about thirty minutes of booing and interruptions, the lecture was cancelled. University President Christina H. Paxson said, “The conduct of disruptive members of the audience is indefensible and an affront both to civil democratic society and to the University’s core values of dialogue and the free exchange of views,” and wrote a letter expressing her disappointment, calling it a “sad day for the Brown community.” I understand this type of action is unseemly to some. It would have been more “civilized” to engage in a debate of ideas with Commissioner Kelly, rather than heckling him. But treating racism as a legitimate ideology doesn’t do anyone any favors….
A group of students decided they would rather not hear a justification for racism, and after their attempts to protest Kelly’s appearance didn’t work, they took to more drastic measures. For that I applaud them.
Of course, the question then becomes “who gets to decide what is and is not a legitimate opinion?” It’s tricky. There will never be an answer that satisfies everyone. But yesterday, Brown University students declared racism had no place in their intellectual discourse.
(Protester shouting down Ray Kelly at Brown University)
Needless to say, the racial discrimination component in the NYC stop and frisk case was a lot more complex than activists claim. As Cornell law professor Sherry Colb explained after the decision, a lot of the analysis used by a federal court to find the practice unlawful was a battle of baseline models:
In the course of its analysis of the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause question, the district court considered an important question that currently has no definitive answer: What is the baseline against which one ought to determine whether and when police officers (or others) have engaged in discriminatory profiling? That is, what would an officer’s behavior (or the conduct of a group of officers) have looked like if it did not result from racially discriminatory motives? ….
In Floyd v. City of New York, the plaintiffs and defendants offered very different baselines for determining—based on statistics—whether the police were involved in racial profiling in conducting their stops and frisks. The defendants argued that the appropriate baseline is the proportion of African Americans and Hispanics among the population of criminal suspects. That is, to determine whether police stops and frisks depart from a race-neutral norm, the defendants said the right question is whether the proportion of stops and frisks that are of African Americans and Hispanics deviates from the proportion of criminal suspects in the relevant area who are African American or Hispanic.
The district court judge rejected this proposed baseline, explaining that almost all of the people stopped by the police turned out to be innocent, and we therefore have no reason to expect their demographic characteristics, absent discrimination, to mirror those of the criminal-suspect population. She accordingly adopted the baseline proposed by the plaintiffs, determining that we should be looking at the population demographics in the relevant area and at the crime rates in different neighborhoods, to identify what race-neutral stop-and-frisk numbers would look like.
This is, of course, too nuanced for Ms. Li and Mr. Smith.
Instead, Ms. Li and Mr. Smith are following a now-familiar pattern: Demonize a speaker as racist and use the unilateral designation to shut down speech. It’s mob rule.
(Protester disrupting speech by Ray Kelly at Brown University)
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
PC run amok, mob rule, liberal fascism, if you’re not part of the solution, etc etc.
Ever since University admins caved in to student mobs in the 60s, this is the implied governing model for ‘higher education’. That President Christina Paxon wrung her hands over it AFTER the successful intellectual lynching is mere lip service to her duties. She should be fired for failing to provide security.
There is a very simple solution to this problem … JAIL.
Arrest them, convict them and put them in prison.
Let them scream their sorry chants at Bubbah, from 2 cells down.
However, one tiny weeny caveat to this Brown Protest. Socialist speakers must never be heckled, that would be so unfair and unjust. After all, the First Amendment only applies to those of the proper and correct political affiliation.
This is the great and powerful Oceania, you know, not some minor third rate wannabe country.
As always, missing the irony behind their successful shutdown of free speech. Needless to say, if she were at Tiananmen Square, she be clubbed between the eyes and literally tossed into a police van like a sack of garbage.
I was also thinking of her and Tienanmen Square, but I had her in the tank driving over top of the guy carrying his groceries home. It was her kind that helped Mao slaughter millions.
Ray Kelly, welcome to Ann Coulter’s world.
This small example is just sooooooooo representative of everything for which Democrats and liberals stand: Force.
Force, force, force.
“Do as we suggest, er say, and everything will be fine. Of course you’ll continue to have choice. So long as you make the right choice.”
Typical liberal tactics: shout out, intimidate, disrupt and especially silence the voice of those with a different opinion or point of view.
This is what totalitarian dictators do, from Stalin to Castro and Chavez.
There’s no arguing or reasoning with this kind.
As always: scratch a Liberal, find a Fascist.
99% of these idiots will change their minds once they have taxes to pay and a family and/or property to protect.
How I wish that were true – but there are still a lot of card-carrying “progressives” with mortgages and car payments.
More likely upscale rent-controlled apartments and Prius payments.
Do People for the American Way Foundation advocate for “diversity”? Then they support racial discrimination.
Do People for the American Way Foundation advocate for redistributive change (e.g. Obamacare)? Then they support “stop and frisk”.
Then they are an oxymoron. Perhaps they are recent immigrants to America, and are unfamiliar with the American way, which recognizes individual dignity, and rejects redistributive change schemes.
As for proportionate criminal activity, black Americans commit a majority of violent crimes in disproportion to their population; Hispanics commit a majority of constitutional crimes (i.e. illegal immigration) in disproportion to their population; liberals commit or support a egregious human rights violations (e.g. premeditated murder) on an unprecedented scale.
If we were to follow the baseline set by this group, then the prison population would be disproportionately black or Hispanic, female, Democratic, and minority Republican.
Fortunately, for blacks and Hispanics, the baseline is not prejudiced. It is set by the principle of probable cause. Unfortunately, for Democrats, a minority of Republicans, and many women generally, support or tolerance of elective abortion condemns them without further investigation.
Two thoughts…
First, the lives of countless, nameless “people of color” have been saved, made free of painful days in a hospital, or from the loss of a paycheck by the “stop, TALK, and frisk” policy.
AND THEY were NOT from a ivy haven of privilege like Brown.
Second, if ever I am fitted with a plastic bag to suffocate the life out of me, I imagine it will be by a sweet-faced little fanatic like Ms. Li, her certain it is for the greater good of humanity.
not a fan of stop and frisk, even less of a fan of this type of conduct.
these “universities” need to be shuttered.
go to a voctech school, get a job, and leave people alone.
One student was accused of being a “white supremacist” by the hecklers for wanting to listen to the speech. What do they call the black people in audience who came to listen?
Paid up are you, Ms. Li??? OR are you on my tax dollars, that you will not pay back???
Tuition and Fees Brown <(OH MY,Dats Racis) University
Tuition and fees for the 2013-14 academic year are listed below.
Direct/Billed Costs
Tuition
$44,608 Fees $1,004
Room (Housing)$7,200
Board (Meals)$4,420
Subtotal – Direct cost
$57,232
Indirect Estimated Cost
Books $1,404
Personal $1,824
Total Direct and Indirect Cost
$60,460
OOPS!
http://www.brown.edu/about/administration/financial-aid/tuition-and-fees
If you think Brown is bad you should read about what happened at Swarthmore earlier this year.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/348945/doubling-down-swarthmore-madness-stanley-kurtz#!
These aren’t institutes of higher learning, they’re “glorious” seminaries of radicalism.
Big risk for these spoiled brats. This is the type of privilege that is insidious.
…and thus you have the reason that whenever I visit RI, the stay is short and to the point. I have friends and relatives there but nothing else.
I will never be buried there as the state has become an entity that represents everything I’m against. Why spend a lot of time and money where you are vilified for your views?
Roger Williams must be spinning in his grave…
With apologies to our host, I have yet to pass through Rhode Island and not be gravely concerned for the state of the human race.
(I fully realize that our host would be correct in saying exactly the same thing about Rhode Island’s neighbor to the north, but note well that those who founded Rhode Island were those who were thrown out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.)
Unlike life under a socialist regime, people in the United States have always been allowed an opinion – their own position without being ridiculed, mocked, or demonized and in the past most shared neighborhoods and block parties as republicans and democrats – making efforts to respect the other’s viewpoint even amongst the disagreements.
But the episode at Brown of such an extreme level of refusing to listen to a speaker of experience and authority certainly demonstrates intolerance. Ms. Li or Mr. Smith have no right to take away Mr. Kelly’s right.
Where were the police – and the teachers of principle? Hiding behind fear and guilt.
I am not sure they were ‘refusing to listen’, these totalitarian-lefties-in-training were practicing exactly the type of adults they hope to be.
Shouting down a speaker smarter than they will ever be just shows how powerful they are… Shouts today, stomps tomorrow, send in the storm troopers as soon as they control that lever of government- there are no limits to the mad dreams of Miss Li and her pals. Lock your doors!
The modern American Left isn’t your Grandpa’s liberal Democrat – although the seeds were there from the early days. They have returned, full circle, to Stalinism.
This is why no dialogue with leftists is possible. There is simply nothing to discuss. Either we yield absolute power to them, or they kill us in the process of seizing it. Or we kill them first.
It’s unfortunate. In a way the European/UK model is simplest: after the islamists kill all the leftists, we will have only one mortal enemy to eliminate instead of two.
“BROWN UNIVERSITY FORCEFULLY PROHIBITS FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS”
There, fixed that headline.
The Ivy League continues to marginalize itself; graduates (if they are not in sciences or engineering) will only become good for leftist employment – government, media and law firms. If I were hiring for a finance of manufacturing company, I would hire the B+ student from State U. over these Marxo-fascist clowns.
How long until some of these schools radicalize themselves out of existence, as Antioch did, and Oberlin, Swarthmore, Hampshire and Hamilton seem on their way to doing?
A degree in Angry Studies (especially from an Ivy) tells employers, “don’t you dare hire me, because I will do everything in my power to bring this company down”… or, at the very least, “I’m an insufferable, whiny little snot who’ll make everyone else in the office miserable”.
They should pay him double his honorarium, and take it out of student fees.
Universities are now officially echo chambers for the left.
These kids were obviously never taught that when they are out in public, they are a reflection of their parents and the job which was done when raising them.
If I had ever acted like this and my mother got wind of it…..