Who is to blame for the stifling of First Amendment rights on college campuses? According to Fox News Contributor Guy Benson, it’s the left.
At an event for College Republicans at the University of Texas on Monday, Benson shared that free speech is dying because the left is silencing political debates.
He described how the left shuts down political discourse. According to Benson, words like “triggers,” “privilege,” and “microaggressions,” are used as blanket statements by the left to stop conversation.
“The lexicon of silencing (occurs) where the left takes genuinely important human impulses and phenomena and perverts them into something else in order to silence a group of people or to shutdown a base,” Benson said.
“The reason we pin this more on the left is that … the left dominates academia, mainstream media, and the entertainment industry … The tastemakers of our culture and our politics lean very far to the left.”
Benson, author of End of Discussion: How the Left’s Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun), does not believe that free speech should be a partisan issue, however.
“We need to talk to each other relatively openly about the problems that we face or else we will never be able to solve those problems,” he told students. “If we are on constant hair-trigger alert to be offended by what the other side has to say, it’s just an arms race of outrage.”
The students attending the event felt as though his presence on campus was a small victory for free speech.
“There’s a certain amount of bureaucratic red tape that has to be cut through to get speakers on campus,” Bryson Cobb, a sophomore studying economics, told the Daily Texan.
Benson believes that the left’s refusal of political discourse is creating an erosion of open communication and the ability to disagree with one another.
“There is false and there is true,” Benson said. “If that’s eroding completely, then you just live in your own little ecosystem, and you can believe all sorts of completely crazy things. That’s not good for our country.”
Aubree Poole is a contributor for Red Alert Politics who enjoys traveling and composing music.
