Vassar activists: Free Speech rights invalid “in our white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society”
It’s “not about one’s individual, legal right to free speech, but is instead about the collective well-being of all members of our society”
Healing to Action is the Vassar College student group which organized the incitement against me by making false claims that the campus was in danger by my lecture on “hate speech” and free speech.
The fabricated claims included that I was posting event information on multiple White Nationalist websites in order to bring people to campus to target minorities, LGBT and Jewish students. The details of those false claims are documented in these posts:
- Safe Spaces and Safety Teams at Vassar College for My Lecture on Free Speech
- Actual Malice at Vassar College
The result of the fabricated claims, spread to every student on campus by the Vassar Student Association, was that the campus was thrown into a frenzy.
I’ve tried to explain in numerous interviews what a dangerous situation was created by this manufactured hysteria. You can listen to my interviews with Mark Levin and Lars Larson how despite the hysteria the lecture went well, with almost 300 students listening to my 45 minute lecture and staying for a productive 120-minute Q&A.
I appeared yesterday on Cam & Co. on NRA TV, and explained another aspect of the problem on campus, which is “a hardcore segment [of the student population] that doesn’t bring the values of the Constitution to the table like you and I do.”
Here’s some proof of what I was talking about. Healing to Action posted a statement in Vassar’s student newspaper, The Miscellany News, in which it expressly rejects any individual rights under the First Amendment:
Demands for the protection of free speech under the First Amendment are based on the assertion that all voices are given equal weight in society and they all need protection from censorship. This is objectively false in our white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society. These demands fail to acknowledge systems of oppression that give power to privileged people (those who are white, cisgender, heterosexual, wealthy and/or able-bodied) at the expense of the “others” of society. The Constitution was created to justify genocide of indigenous peoples and institutionalize chattel slavery. It is inherently racist, and is currently used to justify modern day acts of racism. Hate speech is a violent tool used by oppressors to preserve white supremacy, the patriarchy, etc., and any rhetoric that serves to protect it is inherently linked to this violence. We wish to alter the framing of this issue altogether. The issue at hand is not about one’s individual, legal right to free speech, but is instead about the collective well-being of all members of our society. Healing to Action is premised on the idea that what affects one individual affects us all. Speech, whether it is legal or not, can be and is violent. We have a collective responsibility to stand up for those in our communities who are harmed or disenfranchised by speech, whether it is technically legally permissible or not.
I don’t know how you can reason with people who reject one of the most fundamental rights in society, the individual right of freedom of speech. To them, it’s all collectivist, and individual rights are subsumed in their political cause.
It’s the stuff of which totalitarian societies are made.
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The United States version of Mao’s Red Guards.
I wish more people recognized these people are just as dangerous and just as irrational as Mao’s Red Guard.
Time to wake up folks. Just like the Red Guard some of the first to go will be the leftwing professors that are closest to them (ask the Evergreen State professor) but the rest of us will be right behind.
“Just like the Red Guard some of the first to go will be the leftwing professors that are closest to them (ask the Evergreen State professor) but the rest of us will be right behind.”
That won’t work too well in this country. Most of us out here are well armed and can shoot quicker, and with a great deal more accuracy, than these poltroons. Oh, they’ll try but they’re expecting us to roll over like their professors and administrators … they’ve quite a shock in store when that reality doesn’t come anywhere near their expectations!
While the snowflakes are at most the Left’s cannon fodder, the Left’s elite are not planning on getting into a gunfight with folks on the right. They’ll leave that to Federal agencies and the military.
Won’t work, and I suspect they know it.
Responsible adults are particularly reluctant to shoot at children, and since these people are all functionally twelve years old, they’re not suitable targets no matter what their crimes may be.
Nope. If they are adults, they have a responsibility to behave as rational adults. If they choose not to do so, they will suffer the consequences. No more coddling them.
A couple more white volunteers shooting up Vegas again and our leaders will forget all about the 2nd Amendment.
Since they do not believe in the 1st amendment, it is time to use whatever measures are necessary to throttle their speech. How about wiring their mouths shut, or better yet, give each of them a healthy does of urethane foam in their yaps. One can should silence 40-50 of them.
Also, many people since the founding of America have died defending civil liberties, maybe their lives should be added to the mix?
Healing to Action is premised on the idea that what affects one individual affects us all.
And, by “us all”, they of course mean only those people who think exactly like they do, and agree that they (“us all”) are better than everyone else, and deserve special protection.
You can’t reason with people who reject reason itself, any more than you can race people who reject all movement, or wrestle people who reject the use of their limbs.
It is impossible to have a rational debate with a committed Leftist,not that all Leftists are necessarily committed.
Many a long year ago I was trying to reason with my Leftist office mate. I said that both the right and the left had similar objectives (e.g. alleviating poverty, improving education, healthcare and the economy), they just disagreed as to the best way to achieve those objectives. She vehemently disagreed, saying that conservatives didn’t want any of those things, that we were just evil, greedy, hateful people. Well, she was right and I was wrong, though she did get it a little backwards regarding just who the evil, greedy, hateful people are.
I know just what you mean. I have a friend who is a Glock fanboy and he won’t even consider the virtues the CZ 75B.
https://www.northwestfirearms.com/threads/for-lovers-of-the-1911-and-jmb.81442/
Can I still say, “Wow! Just wow!”?
“It’s the stuff of which totalitarian societies are made.”
Precisely. Seeing this happen to you, someone I know, admire, and respect, has been eye-opening. There is no one less racist, less white supremacist, less hateful, less (I mean come on) antiSemitic or Nazi than you. If YOU are what radical leftist loons attack on these grounds, there is no one safe from their violent, unhinged, ill-informed judgment. Literally no one.
Slowly slowly we are moving toward seeing the clear picture of the America the radical left has been working toward and that Andrew Breitbart saw coming and repeatedly warned against.
So awful, so repugnant, so deeply evil is their goal that far too many of us resisted accepting this reality for far too long. It was so “out there,” so unbelievable that we kept telling ourselves that it wasn’t real. No one, we thought, could be so deeply, so thoroughly, so malignantly evil.
And then it happens to someone we know personally, and we see that it is not only real but far worse, far more damaging than we ever imagined.
The horrible problem facing us now is what do we do at this point? We have let this go, let this grow, to the point that our speech, indeed this comment, is deemed a “violent act,” that any dissent from the SJW talking points is punishable by vigilante SJWs roaming campuses and the streets as they hunt for “Nazis.”
This is worrying in ways that we may not even be able to foretell at this point.
Perhaps these episodes, more exposed, will usher in rejection of these extreme and dangerous views. Perhaps the sea change is nearer than imagined, which is why the acting out grows so blatant.
The poison of identity politics and education is increasingly seen, as more people understand that progressive rule is illiberal.
I hope you are right, oldschooltwentysix, and I think that you are. It’s going to take courageous lefties to step up and call a stop to the insanity, though, and the few lone voices who try are cowed quickly into submission.
I hear you, Walker. I really do.
I just keep thinking about the radical ’60’s loons who saw violence as the answer and ended up turning off the entire American population. They killed police officers, blew up buildings, and turned everyone in America against them. The left is so destructive, so violent, so offensive on so many levels that they will do now as they always do and push the envelope to the point that they inspire hatred and backlash. They’ll be shunted back into the shadows as they deserve.
I must say, though, that I see the reports of antifa “armies” learning karate or whatever and just giggle. So clueless! Yeah, I’m letting you get within leg’s reach of me? Bwahaha!
Anyway, they can gear up for their pathetic attempts at violent “revolution” all day long; we do not have to and should not go that route. Protect ourselves yes. Defend our family and property, well, yes, of course. Actively seek to do violence to these pansy loons? Um, no. We are better than them on every level, not just in warfare, but in being better human beings who deserve to win any argument (or whatever confrontation).
Violence is not the answer, but I do worry that we’ve got at least two generations of these lunatics set to run our schools, our government for the coming decades. This needs to be stopped and reversed.
Very well put, Fuzzy.
Yes, that is exactly how our speech is perceived by these reactionary neosocialists, as is Professor Jacobson’s presence on NRAs Cam & Co.
Right now, H2A is almost certainly lobbying the VSA pointing at Prof. Jacobson’s appearance on Cam’s NRA show as reason to break his payment contract.
Correct, and in ways you would not expect. Small groups of people sometimes have outside impact in social movements.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15
To this crowd, anti-Semitism is a feature, not a bug.
Absolutely!
“It’s the stuff of which totalitarian societies are made.”
Yes it is!! I just read today that one-half of millennials would rather live in socialist/communist countries. WOW!!!
Congratulations to the public school systems and university schools of education throughout the country for teaching our young minds to hate America and our founding documents. And thanks for the future societal nightmares as we fight this scourge that has been unleashed upon the country.
Well, I wish I could say I was shocked at this puerile obtuseness from Vassar, but I’m not.
I am surprised at the depth of this virulent blend of willful ignorance, but I was witness to an earlier vintage.
The mantras of the left need to be confronted. “Speech, whether it is legal or not, can be and is violent.” Speech is speech; It is not violence. Time and time again, leftist activists are allowed to peddle this non-sense without challenge. The United Nations gave Leftist Activists a platform and they equated mean tweets and other social media posts with actual physical assault.
How long are activists going to be able to repeat their lies without being corrected?
If these people were Straight White Males you would simply tell them that they are wrong and why they are wrong.
Time to stop the coddling.
“It’s the stuff of which totalitarian societies are made.”
New slogan on campus–
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“I don’t know how you can reason with people who reject one of the most fundamental rights in society, the individual right of freedom of speech. To them, it’s all collectivist, and individual rights are subsumed in their political cause.
It’s the stuff of which totalitarian societies are made.”
Finally figured it out, huh? This is one of the biggest reasons why this country is in the state that it is in. The Professor is not alone. A huge number of people either did not see, refused to see or were incapable of seeing what the liberal/Progressives have been doing for decades.
Going back to the 1930’s, the Progressives began laying the groundwork for undermining the greatest strength of this country; the belief that anyone could succeed if they worked hard and applied themselves. The labor movement taught the workers that business owners and managers were its enemy. This, of course, did not include the wealthy members of the cabal who controlled the Progressive movement. This was the begining of the organized victim movement. The next big push came in the 1960s through the 1990s, when the black American community was indoctrinated to believe that they were the victims of white oppression, by the very whites [mostly Democrats] who had worked to defeat the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The 1980s and 1990s were the height of the women are victims movement. Reproductive rights [killing a person in the womb], sexual harassment and job discrimination were the vehicles in this program. The first decade of the 21st century was the era of the victimization of homosexuals and Latin American immigrants. From 2010 on the Progressive victimization program really went to work. Heterosexual, Christian, white males suddenly were presented as the oppressors of every other category of people in America. See, the pattern?
Now, why would any group wish to Balkanize this country? Is it to make it better? Is turning every group of people in the country against one another good for the country? It is, if your goal is to destroy the United States of America and all that it stands for. And what it stands for is freedom. The freedom to succeed or fail. The freedom to be happy or miserable. The freedom to choose. Instead, the Progressives want a stagnant society with little or no upward mobility. Where no one will challenge those in power.
And, it has been going on for over 100 years. But, many people refused to see what was going on. They drank the kool-aid. They chose to believe that the people pushing this agenda were simply misguided and that they could be reasoned with. But, they were wrong. Now, a kindly, reasonable professor is maligned and threatened for simply wishing to discuss the principle freedom upon which this nation was founded, the freedom to be allowed to speak freely.
Welcome to the Revolution, Professor.
Alinsky, Cloward, Piven, and Ayers.
Obama, Clinton
Even the Washington Post understands the problem (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-chilling-study-shows-how-hostile-college-students-are-toward-free-speech/2017/09/18/cbb1a234-9ca8-11e7-9083-fbfddf6804c2_story.html):
If speech is violence, then violence becomes a justifiable response to speech.
If identifiable Vassar students made malicious false statements of fact about you, Prof. Jacobson, you should consider commencing a defamation action against them. They will then discover what kind of speech is not constitutionally protected.
“I don’t know how you can reason with people who reject one of the most fundamental rights in society, the individual right of freedom of speech.”
You can’t, they also reject reason and logic. In fact, attempting to reason with them constitutes a violent attack, and violence in response is of course justified.
Professor,
THANK YOU for standing up and pushing back against this dangerous propaganda.
Terrible to imagine what would happen in this country if their ideology became law.
“It’s the stuff of which totalitarian societies are made.”
It appears to be a utopian movement that will accept nothing less than perfection. And which, therefore, intends to tear down all existing society and start over anew, de novo ex nihilo.
IF they were better educated they’d hear the echos of the Jacobins, and of Pol Pot and understand that the historical record of such utopian experiments is not merely bad but horrifying.
For The People never meet the standards of utopians, and never will. And therefore examples must be made of the recalcitrants; the use of violence as a shock tactic is all but inevitable, for the people will not learn!
If only they knew enough to know where this leads …
These people aren’t born as Marxist lunatics, they’re trained to be. If the education system (from pre-school to graduate school) that produces such results, isn’t destroyed, the country will be. If this situation is allowed to continue, there will eventually be enough of them to rule.
That’s why the rage from the Left. They were convinced it was in their grasp. Sauron’s trap was about to close… but this time it was sprung prematurely.
Confident in the Left’s generation and more of control over the indoctrination of America’s youth, Obama and his people moved to the next step: they (re)built the violent wing of the Party. They would have handed that to Hillary – provided she stayed in line, and they undoubtedly have enough on her to ensure that she would have.
Instead of _installing_ the President whose inauguration would have begun the “progressive” movement’s eagerly anticipated Thousand Year Reich, Trump deprived them, at least for now, of their victory. The Left’s apparatus has therefore been redirected to overthrowing the President of the United States.
But what about Sanders, you ask. Surely he was sufficiently of the Left?
Leftist, yes. Ambitious, sure. But he’s not ready for the major leagues and at his age never will be. He doesn’t have the years of building the network of Leftist activism (with an entrenched nationwide political machine and a politicized Federal bureaucracy)/leftist academia/NGOs/Leftist wealth/corporate cronies that Obama has after his eight years, let alone what the Clinton machine would have brought to the table had Hillary won.
But Shelob’s prey was snatched from her claws, and her fury is evident. At best she will “lay long in her lair, nursing her malice and her misery.”
We’re experiencing the American Cultural Revolution: “Out with the Four Olds”.
I have a feeling this isn’t going to age well for the left.