‘Woke’ Liberals Prove UVA Student’s Point in Her Op-Ed About Fear to Speak Out in Case Someone Gets Offended

‘Woke’ Liberals Prove UVA Student’s Point in Her Op-Ed About Fear to Speak Out in Case Someone Gets Offended

There are many “woke” college campuses across this country with absolutely toxic anti-free expression, pro-liberal groupthink environments that conservatives and other independent thinkers frequently have to endure, whether they be students, professors, guest speakers, or administrative staff.

The examples are too numerous to document in one post. Still, one recent incident involves a student at one university who took her frustrations to her student newspaper and then the New York Times.

In her guest essay, University of Virginia senior Emma Camp talked about how self-censorship was common. Her conversations with fellow students and faculty members sometimes are in hushed tones because they’re afraid they’ll be overheard by someone who might take offense:

Each week, I seek out the office hours of a philosophy department professor willing to discuss with me complex ethical questions raised by her course on gender and sexuality. We keep our voices low, as if someone might overhear us.

Hushed voices and anxious looks dictate so many conversations on campus here at the University of Virginia, where I’m finishing up my senior year.

A friend lowers her voice to lament the ostracizing of a student who said something well-meaning but mildly offensive during a student club’s diversity training. Another friend shuts his bedroom door when I mention a lecture defending Thomas Jefferson from contemporary criticism. His roommate might hear us, he explains.

Camp also noted in her write-up that she’s not even a conservative and still feels the need to watch what she says at times because of concern about what will happen if someone gets offended:

I went to college to learn from my professors and peers. I welcomed an environment that champions intellectual diversity and rigorous disagreement. Instead, my college experience has been defined by strict ideological conformity. Students of all political persuasions hold back — in class discussions, in friendly conversations, on social media — from saying what we really think. Even as a liberal who has attended abortion rights demonstrations and written about standing up to racism, I sometimes feel afraid to fully speak my mind.

At the end of her piece, Camp correctly pointed out that one of the purposes of higher ed institutions was to have rigorous debates and to have ideas challenged “in ways that allow us to grow”:

We cannot experience the full benefits of a university education without having our ideas challenged, yet challenged in ways that allow us to grow. As Ms. Sacks told me, “We need to have conversations about these issues without punishing each other for our opinions.”

Now, the woke left is very fond of virtue signaling about how “tolerant” they are of diversity and differing viewpoints, but when you have the nerve to point out that in reality, their claim is a lie, their immediate response is to … prove your point:

1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones was one. Hannah-Jones wrote a multi-tweet thread proving that she only read select portions of the piece. For instance, in the below two tweets, she completely ignored the fact that Camp wrote in her article that even liberals on campus feel the need to self-censor. Plus, Camp also wrote about how it wasn’t just about feeling uncomfortable during class discussions:

I haven’t met a single Black person at UVA who has found this a particularly progressive institution and have talked to quite a few who indeed self-censor. If the best example she has of repression is a room feeling tense, shifting in seats, I wonder what she came to college for? pic.twitter.com/mZFDLGU7zW

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) March 7, 2022

In her last tweet, Hannah-Jones did what a lot of other fauxfended leftists who read Camp’s piece did: Suggest that by her choosing to air her grievances in a nationally known newspaper like the New York Times that her complaints about feeling afraid to speak out rang hollow:

I also do not understand the notion that you are so afraid to speak up about your views that you write about them for your school newspaper and now you write an entire opinion piece in the NYT. But sure.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) March 7, 2022

None of that considers that people who have gone through the same experiences Camp says she has will keep their feelings bottled up only for so long before they have to let it out in a very public way. That doesn’t negate that they felt they had to self-censor due to fear of being canceled.

University of Pennsylvania Department of Religious Studies Professor Anetha Butler, an MSNBC contributor who is so committed to the free exchange of ideas that she has me blocked, went the “whataboutism” route. She ended her rant with a swipe about how publishing this made the New York Times look like “the laughingstock of twitter” with the “ridiculous BS” they put out there:

Let me know when the @nytimes and the @NYTimesOpinion are ready to hear from the professors who have been targeted by right wing operations like Turning Point and Campus Reform who have endured attacks and in some cases losing jobs over silencing. Otherwise

— ProfB (@AntheaButler) March 7, 2022

and it's a shame, because there are great journalists and editors at the @nytimes who I worked with that I respect a great deal, but this constant drumbeat of ridiculous BS is tiring.

— ProfB (@AntheaButler) March 7, 2022

I gotta say that it takes a helluva lot of chutzpah for a contributor to the Joy Reid network to be complaining about the supposed “ridiculous BS” that comes from other news outlets.

NBC News senior reporter Ben Collins mocked Camp’s article with a fake headline before he chided the Times for allegedly “capitalizing” on what he boiled down to the normalcies of college campus life:

Anyway, who's really at fault here? The paper. Nobody should expect their popularity at college to be acceptable grist for the op-ed mill. Everyone says and does stupid things in college. It's the place to do that! You grow there. The paper should not be capitalizing on that.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) March 7, 2022

Twitter blue check Rafael Shimunov seemed particularly obsessed with dunking on Camp, posting a thread with some 20 tweets or so that included fake headlines:

in my feels pic.twitter.com/UgN0ytS1bA

— Rafael Shimunov (@rafaelshimunov) March 8, 2022

This Twitter user summed things up pretty succinctly:

Emma Camp makes a complete accurate point about how colleges & universities basically demand rigid ideological conformity and the left's response is screaming "SHUT UP" at the top of their lungs.

— Jack in the East (@talkradio200) March 8, 2022

The woke left are nothing if not consistently inconsistent. That’s for danged sure.

— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —

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