Leftist Mob at Binghamton U. Shuts Down Speech by Economist Art Laffer
More proof of the campus activist war on all right-of-center speech.
What is going on at the State University of New York at Binghamton? We just reported that a Trump-hating mob harassed and attacked conservative students at the school.
Now protesters shut down a talk by economist Art Laffer.
Laffer is not a politician, but Young America’s Foundation, a conservative student group, and the College Republicans co-hosted the event.
Laffer is considered a thought leader in supply-side economic theory, which the Reagan Administration embraced. Laffer served as an economic policy adviser in that administration. Just this past summer, President Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in the field of economics.
Jennifer Kabbany reports at The College Fix:
VIDEO: Unruly campus activists shut down speech by ‘father of supply-side economics’ Arthur Laffer
Rowdy and aggressive activists shut down a speech Monday night at the State University of New York at Binghamton by the famed “father of supply-side economics” Arthur Laffer, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in June.
Various videos of the incident show dozens of students yelling and disrupting the lecture, with one man with a microphone declaring “we are tired of being oppressed and we are tired of getting murdered by this administration,” referring to the Trump administration.
The speaker goes on to call incarcerations “the modern day slavery of our time” as a fellow activist hands him a bright spotlight that he shines toward the front of the room, apparently where Dr. Laffer is standing. As supporters of the economist move to block the light, many in the crowd erupt with laughter.
See the videos below:
Leftist protestors at Binghamton University disrupt and eventually shut down a @yaf lecture from economist Dr. Art Lafferpic.twitter.com/khyg4fGoon
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) November 19, 2019
Absolute madness at a Binghamton University event right now at an event Arthur Laffer was scheduled to speak at. Laffer spoke maybe five words before students started protesting. pic.twitter.com/hopCwzKiqy
— Dan North (@D_NorthTV) November 19, 2019
This video is from NY State Senator Fred Akshar, a Republican, who was at the event:
I’m disgusted by the chaos we’ve witnessed erupt across the @binghamtonu campus over the past several days. Our college campuses should be places where ideas and peaceful discourse can be shared freely by all individuals, no matter their differing politics or opinions. pic.twitter.com/75QENYMlRv
— Senator Fred Akshar (@fredakshar) November 19, 2019
Maggie Gilroy of the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin reports that police arrested two protesters:
Two arrested after protests disrupt Binghamton University speaking engagement
Two individuals were arrested Monday evening after protests at a Binghamton University lecture disrupted a presentation by economist Arthur Laffer, hosted by BU’s College Republicans, causing the event to be shut down.
According to a statement released by Brian Rose, BU’s vice president for Student Affairs, the university is investigating the individual students and student organizations who “encouraged or participated in any activity that violated applicable law and University policies.”
“The University reserves the right to pursue appropriate charges or disciplinary action against those organizations and individuals as relevant information is confirmed,” Rose said in the statement.
It is way past time to take action against behavior like this. People who shut down speech and sow chaos do not add anything to the education process. Instead, they impede it.
Featured image via Twitter video.
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Comments
Sentence the protesters to hard labor. Better they smash rocks than smash discourse.
Nah, I’d just remove them from the university. They clearly don’t “get it” and need to be elsewhere. They caused Laffer to be removed (and he probably won’t be back), so they should be removed.
Even better would be gathering all these ‘activists’ together, lining up. The 10th reoccurring person in line could be openly hung from a nice tree in front of his comrades. A little decimation might do the entire crowd good.
In a sane world, these jackbooted twits would be summarily expelled for their infantile, thuggish, and indefensible totalitarianism and obnoxious antics.
But, we know these idiots will be enabled, venerated and supported by the school administrators.
The future of America, unless a course correction is promptly undertaken – fanatical, obnoxious, self-reverential and narcissistic Dhimmi-crat zealot-brownshirts, engaging in violence and intimidation against all people whose beliefs are at variance with Leftist orthodoxies.
Yet again we see it. In The Coming of the Third Reich (2003), historian Richard J. Evans explains how, in the early days of National Socialist Germany, Stormtroopers (Brownshirts) “organized campaigns against unwanted professors in the local newspapers [and] staged mass disruptions of their lectures.” To express dissent from Nazi positions became a matter of taking one’s life into one’s hands. The idea of people of opposing viewpoints airing their disagreements in a civil and mutually respectful manner was gone. One was a Nazi, or one was silent (and fearful).
Today’s fascists call themselves “anti-fascists.” Just like the Nazis, they are totalitarian: they are determined not to allow their opponents to murmur the slightest whisper of dissent. Forcibly suppressing the speech of someone with whom one disagrees is a quintessentially fascist act.
The Nazis were a reactionary force to the communist revolutionaries in Germany. Purge-counter purge. The Anti-fascists were the communists. Both played the same game of suppression, intimidation and mayhem. The Nazis promised stability (on their terms) against the instability of international communism. Their success was an appeal of national socialism versus international socialism. The error today is selective blindness to any socialism . Communism made Nationalist Socialism an amateur in the murder of tend of millions.
Really? A mob protest over Art Laffer? Did anybody bother to ask these angry children what they know about Laffer? How many of them would as “a cartoon character art critic”?
“Look! That cloud looks like Thaddeus Zaminski!! Let’s get him!”
They know absolutely nothing and can’t understand it, so they act out like this instead. A lot of this is kids who are overmatched at school so they express or cover their academic anxieties this way.
As a SUNY Stony Brook grad, I do derive some pleasure from watching the animalistic misbehavior of these Harpur clowns.
The “Harpur clowns” won. The university will not punish nor seek to identify them. Any future employers had better watch the videos or they might end up hiring them unknowingly.
The lead protestor doesn’t even know how to pronounce Mr Laffer’s name yet here he is protesting him because Laffer supports the current administration that is somehow “murdering” people.
The ignorance is astounding. One cannot argue with or rationalize with the profoundly stupid.
This is about process, not substance. It is about control.
A leftist (bully, sociopath) always interprets any reasonable behavior as a weakness to be exploited. A clear, unambiguous, strong response (administrative, legal, physical as appropriate) will end this BS in a “NY minute” so to speak.
Didn’t the U of Chicago lay down the rules and people behave like adults there?
This is only difficult for administrative eunuchs.
Yet another conservative shouted down, unable to speak (about the truly terrifying world of ECONOMICS!) and nothing will be done. When will the right fight back???
Obedient sheep aren’t known for their fighting skills, they’re better at getting shorn or slaughtered.
Obedient sheep won the American Revolution, the Texas Revolution, WWI and WWII?
Conservative, liberty-loving people know how to fight. But they also have faith in the rule of law (that’s might be one definition of “conservative”).
But at some point enough will be enough and people will decide it is time to physically beat these fools back into their basements. The only thing that can prevent that eventuality is our societal institutions solving this problem first. If they’re so far gone that they can’t/won’t, then things are going to get very, very ugly for these little fascist bitches.
That faith in the rule of law will swiftly die off. Police “standing down” during riots. Judges jailing people on a whim, or legislating from the bench. Two-tiered justice.
“Two-tiered justice”
Yup, that’ll do it
Those stand-up citizens of generations past were hardly obedient sheep- had they been these United States would be largely part of Mexico or colonies of England, Spain, and France and Europe would speak German had The Great War even occurred. Instead they were faithful, decent, solid members of a civil society comprised of widely varying backgrounds but all having the spine and sense to answer the call when their communities needed them to act in a manner reserved solely as the last resort. They acted decisively when an unavoidable threat to their decent, civil society arose and, through sacrifice and determination, achieved outcomes no “sheep” could even contemplate.
No, Sir, those were no sheep. Those were the foundation and guardians of this great nation- the “Citizen-Soldier” who has the knowledge and ability to wreak terrible destruction in defense of fellow citizens and the nation yet daily lives in harmony with all neighbors in accordance to their faith and beliefs. Some would call them sheepdogs, yet they are simply true patriotic American citizens- a concept and way of life that seems to be all-to-uncommon to these snowflake minions and their puppeteers.
I will note that the school has already taken action against those behind this terrible travesty…
They suspended the College Republicans (not joking 0)
What, are you serious?
I was happy to see the police involved and clearing out the garbage. They retaliated against the Republicans? The Republicans were not up on the tables disrupting.
Yup, the CR’s have been barred from reserving rooms for meetings and have been threatened with disciplinary action, the college fix has the story
Correction, campus reform has the story.
My kingdom for an edit button lol
The Board of Regents should review funding for this SUNY campus.
According to the story at Campus Reform, the student government has silenced the College Republicans. How can the administration allow this to happen. If they don’t reverse it, they are complicit.
The administration is just letting the student government do its leftist dirty work.
Well, to be fair, it was likely the student government that was protesting. Of course they’ll do nothing but continue their efforts to silence any and all opposition.
Any student needs to be expelled and may be subject to arrest based on actions. Any non-student needs to be arrested and barred from future events.
He should pass out napkins.
Somewhere, Pol Pot is smiling.
According to the article over at The College Fix, the university will consider action against the College Republicans for unregistered tabling a few days earlier (plenty of unregistered tabling by various groups goes on) but will do nothing to the student who disrupted Laffer’s speech and will not seek to identify them, other than the two arrested.
Laffer was escorted out rather than really shutting down the disruption.
Clearly biased reaction by the university. If you want to shout down a conservative speaker, they’ll take him away and you get no punishment.
re: “Maggie Gilroy of the Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin reports that police arrested two protesters:”
This means nothing, but just give ‘bragging rights’ to the two spoiled children. Spank them until their butt cheeks bleed would stick in the little anarchists memories much better.
These clown demand prison reform. Fine. Convert lower level sentences to flogging. Touch their precious little bodies.
There needs to be some sort of canned Free Speech announcement done before each college speech such as this.
“Welcome to our lecture by ____, a noted (fill in notes). The administration would like to remind the audience that disruptions will not be tolerated, and any objections you might wish to voice to the presenter will be taken during the question and answer period afterward. People exhibiting disruptive behavior will be removed from the room, and if they resist being removed, will be arrested and subject to disciplinary action, including expulsion. We hope to have a pleasant time tonight, and without any further ado, please welcome our speaker, ____.”
Said before but bears repeating: To the Left, the truth is hate speech.
I reviewed the curriculum at this college. It is as soft as a pillow. It has 3 schools, business, nursing, and chemistry, that are rigorous. The rest of the schools specialize in the soft unspecialized opinion based courses of studies we see infecting the vast majority of schools. This gives the students who are merely parked at the school because they have nothing else to do with their lives opportunity to demonstrate their obnoxious group think.
They get paid, one way or another, to do their thuggery.
Young nerds make great political killers. Just as Pol pot and mao.
These monsters are the same product as Mao’s children in the Revolutionary Guard, created the same way, for the same purpose. Brainwashed little monsters.
60’s and 70’s: hippies on campus demanding free speech.
Today: Hippies training their students to demand free speech be taken away from others.
Consistent, just further along the planned trajectory.
“The speaker goes on to call incarcerations ‘the modern day slavery of our time’ …”
So here’s what to do: Find the prison closest to SUNY Binghamton. Bus all the convicts to the campus and release them there. Surround the campus with SWAT teams to keep anyone from leaving. Let everyone bask in the moral superiority: They freed the slaves! Oh, what a great day for America.
The next time you record people include their faces so they can be identified and prosecuted.
They are Stalinists, pure and simple.
The proper treatment is to call them what they are: spiritual descendants of the people who apologized for and enabled the Holodomor, the Purge Trials, the Gulag, the Iron Curtain, the Great Leap Forward, the Red Guards. They are also close kin of the Brownshirts and Blackshirts and Blue shirts who imposed fascism, Nazism, and the Holocaust, as well as the numerous tyrannies that have plagued the developing world in the past eighty years.
Humoring them as so many universities are doing at present is functioning the same way as the Weimar courts, that passed lenient sentences upon putschists and radical antisemites when they were arrested for violent crimes. Somehow the woke crowd must be forced to realize that these people are after something different, that they are not about diversity, or environmentalism, or anything else dear to the academic left, but about plain, brute power.