Vassar hysteria over my free speech lecture was “like walking into an alternate reality”
My interview on Lars Larson Show: “a significant portion of the campus just lost it”
On Tuesday night, October 31, 2017, I appeared on the Lars Larson radio show to talk about my experience at Vassar College. See these posts for the details:
- Safe Spaces and Safety Teams at Vassar College for My Lecture on Free Speech
- Actual Malice at Vassar College
Here are some of my comments during the interview:
They completely lost their minds. As soon as they heard that I was going to talk about “hate speech” as possibly being protected speech, which legally it is, they literally went nuts. They organized against me coming. They falsely accused me of wanting to bring neo-Nazis and White Supremacists to campus to target minority students. They accused me of posting the event on White Nationalist websites, all of which was completely false.
They had a meeting with almost 300 people on this small college campus devoted to how were they going to protect students from me and my supporters. They smeared me, you can imagine what they said about me. And it really was just this moment where a significant portion of the campus just lost it. And they even tried to get my speech cancelled…. It was just a very, very crazy, scary situation…. You’ve known me, I’ve been on your show before, I don’t normally talk like this. This was an absolute lunacy that went on on campus.
* * *
[The social justice activists] view everything through the prism of how does it affect their activism. How does it affect what they consider to be social justice. And if words are harmful to their movement, they consider it an act of violence. They literally consider words that they don’t like to be an act of violence.
I then discussed the lecture itself, which was successful:
So you have the actual event, where you had probably total close to 300 students who showed up for this, and engaged with me in a productive manner versus the social justice activists who didn’t want me to appear, who called me names, who whipped people into a frenzy based on false information. So it really was this dichotomy. And I wonder long term what impact it has on the campus, whether these students now realize they are being manipulated by these social justice warriors. That these people do not have their interests in mind, that these people are totalitarian in nature, and that they are the ones that people should be afraid of, not me.
* * *
The students who tried to prevent it from happening, who spread the lies, as far as I know, have not been called out by the administration. They’ve been coddled by the administration, and they need to be held accountable for what they did. Because they tried to deprive all these other students of those students’ right to education. They wanted to hear me speak.
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Comments
“Progressives” are just that. Mental illness is not just a sudden thing. It progresses in stages.
“The students who tried to prevent it from happening, who spread the lies, as far as I know, have not been called out by the administration.”
This is a question for Prof. Bill; what tools do you know of within the academe that could be brought to bear to that end?
Put a letter in their permanent file…. stuff like that crushes those fragile snowflakes. (sarcasm note…. just in case it wasn’t noticeable)
Your speech was awesome. I learned a lot, and I got an A- in Constitutional Law!!
Q: What are the differences between an Islamic fundamentalist and a Vassar SJW?
A: For starters, you can have a reasonable discussion with the fundamentalist and he’s more open to dissenting views.
Allison Stanger is the Middlebury professor who had her neck rung when Charles Murray tried to speak there. She did an interview with Brian Lamb on CSPAN this past Sunday night. Your experiences have a lot in common. She didn’t really dwell on it, but she mentioned that the radical faculty shared some of the blame for working a small minority of students into a frenzy prior to Murray’s appearance.
Read the book, “Extraordinary Mass Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”. Large segments of society are capable of engaging in mass delusions, especially when they form mobs.
“They literally consider words that they don’t like to be an act of violence.”
Doubtful. It seems more likely that they know perfectly well that words are not violence but pretend they are in order to manipulate the rubes.
I agree. I think the substance only matters to the extent that it is a general threat to the leftist agenda. The details do not even get considered. The threat is simply your appearance and having the freedom to speak what you think. That freedom itself is anathema to a totalitarian. This is simply Alinsky applied.
The left focuses on process while the right focuses on substance. The left is in a street fight while the right hurls logic. The right needs to keep the logic but add the street fight to their side. Machiavelli pointed out the fate of the unarmed profit.
Their purpose is far more nefarious. They insist that our speech is violence to justify their violent methods of opposing it. They believe this gives them a leg up over us, because we won’t attack them physically for their speech, which is true.
However, we can certainly attack them physically if they first attempt to physically attack us, which is simply a matter of being prepared for violence and meeting it with overwhelming (justifiable) force. Simple, but not easy.
Sounds good, but the main stream media will twist and distort and present false news. The “antifa” will be presented as squeaky-clean do-gooders who were attacked by the evil Nazis, regardless of who strikes the first blows, and who is legitimately defending him/herself. If we come prepared to defend ourselves, the MSM will present it as either we are initiating the violence or that we are provoking the violence.
Also, Lars, the oft invoked “you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater” should be permanently banned from usage. It was used as an analogy by Oliver Wendell Holmes in a Supreme Court opinion to rationalize throwing a socialist Jewish immigrant into jail for handing out pamphlets written in Yiddish opposing the draft in WWI.
That case was an abomination and thankfully the case in which the phrase was used is no longer good law. Please stop using the phrase. It’s only useful to people who want to find a way to use government force to limit our liberty.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/339355/schumers-false-fire-charles-c-w-cooke
People use it because it is a simple illustration of the principle that there are limits to free speech. Are you free to lie to an FBI investigator? Are you free to conspire to commit a crime? Are you free to instigate a deadly riot? That is a limit to free speech. Yelling “fire” in a crowded theater may not be the best example, but if you do it, and there is no fire, and people get injured or killed in the ensuing chaos, it is a safe bet that you’ll suffer the consequences.
In the Progatarian world, free speech that they don’t like is violence, while violence directed against those they disagree with to silence them is free speech.
The social life in college towns has long been noted for its Dionysian tendencies, but the core task of the university has always been Apollonian in nature. This has changed over the last half century.
The “humanities” are now strongly anti-Apollonian, and due to the fact that “studies” departments are much easier to grow than science and engineering departments, the self-aggrandizement of college administrations is much better served by favoring Dionysus. Unfortunately, the madness is spreading to STEM as well.
The result is that academe is now infested with maenads. You were lucky not to be torn limb from limb.
You are still missing the point. The position of the liberals has NOTHING to do with justice. It is simply a naked attempt to grab power. They wish the totalitarian power to control speech and thereby control thought. If you do not think as they do, you have to be purged from society. And, it has always been that way among the liberals.
What has changed is the fact that the rest of society will no longer tolerate the acquisition of power by the liberal/Progressives. The libs are therefor fighting this trend both physically and by stifling debate. Get used to it. The war is well under weigh now.
Michael Savage coined the phrase ” liberalism is a mental disorder ” any doubts about that folks