Here at LI, we covered extensively the George Floyd incident, including the resulting riots that spread across the entire nation and the subsequent trial of Derek Chauvin.
The myths and untruths surrounding this case are just as deeply embedded among the radical left as the fabricated “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative surrounding the death of Michael Brown.
Attempting to shine light on the fabrications and untruths regarding the George Floyd death and its fallout, Turning Point USA scheduled a time to show a film on campus at the Central Connecticut State University (CCSU). Their faculty advisor, history professor Jay Bergman, reached out to LI to let us know what happened next.
And what happened next is just as “sordid” and “ugly” as Bergman describes in his email and in a piece he wrote for the New Haven Register (archive link):
Recently, the student chapter of Turning Point USA at Central Connecticut State University attempted to show on campus a film, “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM,” produced by The Daily Wire and narrated by Candace Owens.Fifteen minutes into the film, before an audience of approximately 50 students and others intrigued by the title of the film and curious about its contents, roughly the same number of students, at least one faculty member and possibly others unaffiliated with the university stormed onto the stage, screaming that the film was “racist” and holding signs proclaiming it “hate speech.” By doing so, they prevented the audience from watching it.To his credit, Dr. Craig Wright, CCSU’s vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion, implored the protesters to disperse and continue their protest outside. Reluctantly, they did so.But by beating drums and screaming loudly enough, the protesters made it impossible for the audience inside to hear the movie. Periodically, protesters embedded in the audience screamed slogans and stormed the stage, preventing the movie from being seen.
Ultimately, this appalling scene demonstrates the leftist intolerance for diverse thought and viewpoints that has manifested across college campuses and into the corporate world.
Bergman continues:
The arrogance of the protesters and their enablers on the CCSU faculty is staggering. They clearly believe they can silence anyone whose opinions are different from their own, and that they will not be held liable for their thuggish behavior.. . . . After the more recent event, Jodi Latina, CCSU associate vice president of communications and media, stated publicly that suppression of speech would not be tolerated. But in the absence of any punishment, or even a reprimand, of the offending students, her promise rings hollow.What happened at CCSU is not unique. Suppression of opinions students find “offensive” is so pervasive on America’s colleges and universities that according to a recent nationwide poll of 45,000 students conducted by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression, 61 percent of those polled said they would feel “uncomfortable” expressing an unpopular opinion to fellow students on social media. When asked which opinions should be barred from expression on their campus, 73 percent agreed that speakers calling Black Lives Matter a “hate group” should be prohibited, while 60 percent felt the same concerning the immorality of all abortions. Even worse, only 37 percent of the students polled believe that shouting down a speaker at a university is never acceptable, while 22 percent said there were circumstances in which violence would be justified in silencing a speaker they disagreed with.
It’s clear that these students are far beyond “you can’t handle the truth”; they don’t even want to be exposed to it, or allow anyone else to hear it, either. This attitude and behavior are anti-intellectual, anti-academic, and frankly, anti-American.
Bergman goes on to note:
The justification several of the CCSU protesters offered for their authoritarianism is that the expression of certain ideas, even absent any exhortation to violence, can somehow jeopardize a person’s physical safety, and for that reason alone can be prohibited. But they cited no evidence to substantiate their concern. Not once in the over three decades on which I have served on the CCSU faculty has the expression of an idea, whether in a film or by a speaker on campus, led to violence or to any physical altercation.Unless universities are what John Stuart Mill famously termed “a free marketplace of ideas,” in which ideas are like the products in stores consumers evaluate freely before purchasing them, they are mere engines of ideological indoctrination. As such, they are no different from universities in the Soviet Union, Communist China and North Korea.
You can watch the whole sordid mess here.
This idea that speech is violence or that people are “unsafe” hearing ideas with which they disagree is deeply embedded on the left, and it is long past time to uproot it and toss it on the dustbin of history.
The truth is not “hate speech.” We can no longer be manipulated into self-censorship or silence by false claims of “harm” and assorted fabricated “victimhood”; instead, as Bergman illustrates, we must all stand up and speak the truth about this type of undemocratic viewpoint suppression on college campuses.
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