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Cal State Cancels Ben Shapiro Speech After Activists Compared It To A KKK Meeting

200px-CSULA_sealI have been writing about the increasingly hostile environment for conservatives and libertarians on our campuses as professors and activists shutdown events and censor or sanction unpopular views.  The latest such case can be found at Cal State LA where officials canceled a speech by conservative journalist Ben Shapiro after students complained that they feared for their safety due to the mere fact of a conservative speaking on campus.  Activists further compared the event to an “undercover KKK meeting.” Emails obtained by the site Heat Street through the Freedom of Information Act showed both the successful campaign to bar Shapiro as well as the backlash from people who believe in free speech.

Shapiro is a  native of Los Angeles, California graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles.

One email on Dec. 7, 2015 was from Scott Bowman, dean of the College of Natural and Social Sciences, who informed top administrators, including President William Covino, that a conservative group on campus planned to invite Shapiro to speak.  Bowman acknowledges that “Nothing he says is hate speech in my view but his critiques of the Left’s obsession with micro-aggressions and various tactics of groups (e.g., Black Lives Matter) would be labeled racist by them, which is his point, by the way.”  Bowman does say that students have a right to hear from him.

Bowman in another email suggests that the school should put Shapiro in a “designated place” because  “we don’t want to put him in a forum that will incite.”  Later, however, Bowman effectively cancelled the event after both professors and students rose up against allowing people to hear Shapiro.  The inclusion of faculty in this effort to silence opposing views is particularly chilling.  One student wrote “I DO NOT FEEL SAFE! . . . The fact that so many right wing conservatives that own guns RSVPd to this event makes me feel extremely uncomfortable.” The student added “We should be able to go to an event without worrying about our safety. And frankly this event sounds like an undercover KKK meeting. This event in general speaks volumes as to how little our lives matter…”

Shapiro showed up anyway and was met by protesters who sought to prevent him from speaking or prevent follow students from hearing his views.  Students who did not even attend the speech wrote the university about being traumatized by the fact that Shapiro spoke on campus.

The incident — including the involvement of faculty seeking to silence a conservative — reflects the growing intolerance and taste for speech controls on our college and university campuses.   We are seeing faculty who teach students that it is right and honorable to silence opposing views and disrupt events that you do not like.  Free speech is now viewed as the enemy of diversity as both academics and students seek to prevent the still ill-defined “microaggressions” on campus.  We are raising a generation of speech censors and bullies who believe that they have a right to stop others from hearing views that they find obnoxious or insulting.

 

What do you think?

68 thoughts on “Cal State Cancels Ben Shapiro Speech After Activists Compared It To A KKK Meeting”

  1. The virtues of Ted Nugents self professed history of child rape is an “unpopular view” just like Ben Shapiro’s rancid repulicanism. They both have no legitimate use.

  2. Censor!
    Call the Censor!
    What kind of people call the Censor?
    Fat kids, skinny kids, kids who climb on rocks.
    Dumb schmucks, Turley pucks..
    Even kids with chicken pox yell Censor!
    Call the Censor!
    No free speech on this blog!
    dun dun da dunk!

  4. Funny how the liberals here seldom comment on these 1st Amendment posts. Liberals like to subvert the Constitution behind closed doors.

  6. The answer to speech with which you disagree is more speech – the logical counter argument. If the PC police had arguments that could stand up to alternative views they might not be so militant.

  9. I actually found a copy of Liberal Fascism on line. Here is pdf form. I also ordered a hardback copy. But in case anybody else wants to skim through it.

    https://ia802609.us.archive.org/16/items/LiberalFascismByJonahGoldberg/LiberalFascism_byJonahGoldberg.pdf

    Plus, here is the cover of the book, which shows the nature of the American version:

    http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/411SPQyUSQL._SS500_.jpg

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  10. No surprise. Sheer cowardice all around and mendacity and lies and political correctness. The New fascists, or as Jonah Goldberg called this kind of thing, Liberal Fascism. I have been meaning to read his book, but here is a blurb from a short review of it:

    Moreover, during the 1920s “progressives” in the United States and Britain recognized the kinship of their ideas with those of Mussolini, who was widely lionized by the left.

    Famed British novelist and prominent Fabian socialist H.G. Wells called for “Liberal Fascism,” saying “the world is sick of parliamentary politics.”

    Another literary giant and Fabian socialist, George Bernard Shaw, also expressed his admiration for Mussolini — as well as for Hitler and Stalin, because they “did things,” instead of just talk. In Germany, the Nazis followed in the wake of the Italian Fascists, adding racism in general and anti-semitism in particular, neither of which was part of Fascism in Italy or in Franco’s Spain.

    Even the Nazi variant of Fascism found favor on the left when it was only a movement seeking power in the 1920s.

    W.E.B. DuBois was so taken with the Nazi movement that he put swastikas on the cover of a magazine he edited, despite complaints from Jewish readers.

    Even after Hitler achieved dictatorial power in Germany in 1933, DuBois declared that the Nazi dictatorship was “absolutely necessary in order to get the state in order.”

    As late as 1937 he said in a speech in Harlem that “there is today, in some respects, more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past.”

    In short, during the 1920s and the early 1930s, Fascism was not only looked on favorably by the left but recognized as having kindred ideas, agendas and assumptions.

    Only after Hitler and Mussolini disgraced themselves, mainly by their brutal military aggressions in the 1930s, did the left distance themselves from these international pariahs.

    Fascism, initially recognized as a kindred ideology of the left, has since come down to us defined as being on “the right” — indeed, as representing the farthest right, supposedly further extensions of conservatism.

    If by conservatism you mean belief in free markets, limited government, and traditional morality, including religious influences, then these are all things that the Fascists opposed just as much as the left does today.

    The left may say that they are not racists or anti-semites, like Hitler, but neither was Mussolini or Franco. Hitler, incidentally, got some of his racist ideology from the writings of American “progressives” in the eugenics movement.

    Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” is too rich a book to be summarized in a newspaper column. Get a copy and start re-thinking the received notions about who is on “the left” and who is on “the right.” It is a book for people who want to think, rather than repeat rhetoric.

    https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/02/08/who-is-fascist

    It is hard to put an exact name on things sometimes, because ideas tend to slop over between movements. But the methods of modern liberals seem to be the same methods of the Nazis. One way of thinking, one acceptable viewpoint, and gee won’t we raise hell if we don’t get our way.

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

  12. Reminds me of one of my all-time favorite movie quotes: In “Hello Dolly,” general store owner Horace Vandergelder (played by the great Walter Mathau) says to his two young male store helpers, “All you pay a man to do before he’s 40 is make mistakes.”

    The USA long ago became a third rate banana republic. It’s over. Get used to it.

  13. BTW, these special snowflake will be unemployable. No wonder robots are taking over.

  14. I do understand the ‘underground KKK’ reference. Has the student been to an underground KKK meeting so they know exactly how they felt or are they speaking hyperbolically?

    1. How funny that the KKK was a government secret operation from the beginning, set up to entrap people that they don’t like. The Civil Rights Act is all about allowing illiterate 18 year olds who cannot read or write, including recent immigrants, gathered together with all sorts of oddballs and misfits to select a hunchback communist as President of the United States of America because he’s a college professor type. Perfect sequel to the mysterious gay African and his transgender football star wife who have no problem lying about their past or their identity. Yet a successful and productive business executive who’s been in the public eye his whole life runs for President and is considered ‘scary’. The reason he’s scary is mainly because he isn’t black or gay or foreign and precisely because he is successful in his endeavors and has not been living on tax dollars. Hatred of Trump is the same thing as hatred for Americans, and there’s so much hatred for Americans right now that even presidential candidates can express it openly.

      1. Fact-challenged paeans to Donald Trump, such as this one, with which I disagree, demonstrate that speech cannot harm me. Speech is free in the US because it is the best way we know to maximize freedom as we exchange ideas. When we can’t exchange ideas, our freedom is diminished. If today’s college students don’t understand this, there has been a significant failure to teach the values on which this nation was founded.

  15. It is absurd (not to mention a bad idea) to treat viewpoints that you don’t agree with as communicable diseases to be avoided and suppressed. If someone’s idea is bad and they sound like a fool, let them show up and sound like a fool and look bad. When you suppress their ideas you make them a martyr, giving them legitimacy and followers that they may lose when they show up and open their mouth.

    What are you afraid of, cooties? Well, maybe you SHOULD be afraid in open carry states, but that is a different topic.

    And maybe, just maybe, you might find some common ground. Or learn something. Even people you disagree with can teach you something, Yes, even lemming-haired Donald Trump. By listening to him, you can learn that, no matter how bad you think Hillary would be as President, Trump is exponentially worse. (Whether to vote for Hillary is a different matter, Maybe you want a “worser” President to create chaos out of which you hope that something better will arise.)

    One of my favorite things to do in college was to invite different groups, like the Mormon missionaries and the Hara Krishnas, over to visit me at the same time and have a group discussion.

    Grow a pair and let them talk.

  16. I think Mr. Shapiro might have a case that his civil rights were violated by the university.

  17. I remember a time when some whites said “I don’t feel safe having blacks eat in the same restaurant with me” or “my little girl won’t be safe if she has to attend school with blacks.” So they used feeling unsafe as a reason to oppose desegregation. The “I don’t reel safe” excuse is as wrong when it is used to deny someone an opportunity to speak as it was when it was used to oppose desegregation of schools and lunch counters. As we have to say over and over again, “the answer to speech you don’t like is more speech that you do like, not censorship.” As JH said above, eventually the censors speech will be censored, and soon no one will be allowed to speak.

  18. Justice Holmes, those people are not bright enough to figure that out. They are in college!

  19. People who shut down the speech of people with whom they disagree should consider what will happen when their speech is exclude by individuals who disagree with them!

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