Ben Shapiro’s presentation at Berkeley might have passed without incident, but a new storm is now brewing.
University of Utah students are planning to disrupt a speech Shapiro is slated to give there later this month. On Tuesday, student protesters attempted to force university president, David Pershing, to cancel Shapiro’s address.
Pershing refused, but offered a somewhat boring post to the university website in which he explained, “As much as I may disagree with what is being said, the Constitution does not permit me to regulate what can and cannot be said, even when there is speech I abhor.”
Pershing is right, of course, but the fanatics weren’t satisfied. The University’s student paper noted that one protestor, Erin Hight, told Pershing “If every student in this room threatened to pull their records from the university right now and you lost all of that tuition money, we know you would find a way to make it work. Institutions find loopholes, and when they don’t find them, they make them. So make one.”
Such quotes speak to minds that have spent far too much time on protest routes and not enough studying at the library. For example, the most famous efforts by government institutions to find “loopholes” in the First Amendment and prevent the free expression of ideas involved Nineteenth Century efforts to silence those speaking out against slavery (including censorship of the mail), and the scads of frivolous libel cases that were brought by Southern segregationists in the Twentieth Century to silence news coverage of the Civil Rights struggle.
Still, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised about the uproar here. After all, the student group spearheading the protest is the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlan (M.E.CH.A). Fusing socialist revolutionary politics with Mexican nationalism, M.E.CH.A is utterly dedicated to the usurpation of free debate and the marginalization of conservative viewpoints. It has no interest in engaging with others’ ideas, seeking only to inculcate its followers with a warped view of social justice.
And so, once again, the battle lines are formed.
