There is but one thing more disgusting than the video of campus officials and police standing by as student thugs viciously silenced Minutemen founder Jim Gilchrist and the Columbia University students who assembled to hear him speak. That is the unconscionable attempt by Columbia University administrators and the thugs to blame the blatant assault on the First Amendment on the victims whose rights were violated, Gilchrist and his associate Marvin Stewart, and the College Republicans who hosted the two men on campus.
Quite simply, during Gilchrist’s speech, a group of chanting demonstrators suddenly leaped on the stage, unfurled a banner, shouted Gilchrist down and proceeded to conduct a chanting, arm-pumping demonstration of brownshirt thuggery in action. Readers are encouraged to view the video by going to this post by Powerline’s Scott Johnson: www.powerlineblog.com/
archives/015459.php. Johnson is absolutely right in observing that “public discourse at Columbia is for now in the hands of intellectual savages. Does the university have the wherewithal to restore the conditions of freedom?”
The thugs should be expelled from Columbia and barred from admission at any other self-respecting university. But frankly, we doubt that Columbia officials will do much of anything beyond delivering figurative slaps on the wrists of the offending students and their accomplices. Too many American academic officials have become cowed by fear of appearing to violate the politically correct orthodoxy that rules most campuses.
Christopher Kulawik, the College Republican president, told The New York Sun he was berated afterward by Columbia University administrators for allowing the speakers to say anything that would infuriate the crowd. It appears from the video of the event that those same administrators evidently instructed campus police to do nothing to stop protesters from taking over the event. The security officers simply stand there and watch as pandemonium breaks out and the First Amendment is torn to shreds by Columbia students. That is an open invitation to more thuggery at future campus events.
The Alice-in-Wonderland logic of the PC orthodoxy that encourages brownshirt thuggery at Columbia and elsewhere in academe was also on display in a subsequent statement issued by the demonstrators who speciously claimed “we celebrate free speech,” but then justified their depriving Gilchrist and the College Republicans of free speech by proclaiming “the Minutemen are not a legitimate voice in the debate on immigration. They are a racist, armed militia. …”
That’s PC in its purest form: We’re for free speech unless we disagree with your views, then it’s just fine forus to proclaim your views illegitimate and do whatever is needed to silence you. One of the organizers appeared on a cable news show and kept insisting that the students didn’t violate anybody’s First Amendment rights because “we allowed Gilchrist to speak for 45 minutes” before taking over the stage. That the students of an elite American school believe the First Amendment grants them to right to decide who they will “allow” to speak for how long is yet another clear sign that something is radically wrong in this nation’s classrooms.
