This past spring, as I was organizing an evening of intellectual discussion with speakers Yaron Brook, head of the Ayn Rand Institute, and Carl Benjamin, a prominent political commentator on YouTube in the United Kingdom, my university administration was busy mitigating threats surrounding it.
King’s College London decided that the “controversial” Libertarian Society debate needed a safe space, and enacted a policy giving any student the unquestioned right to shut down the speakers if they felt offended by them.
This safe space policy asserted that students should be protected from verbal prejudice against their ideology, culture, or religion and that any speaker contravening this may be removed from the podium during an event. The administration has increasingly undermined the autonomy of student societies by imposing authoritarian measures such as these, which they believe will keep the peace on campus.
The policy was first enacted as a response to violence waged by anti-Israel students in January 2016 against a former Israeli Security Agency head. The university decided to enact restrictions on student societies that supposedly invite “controversy” on campus, in order to satisfy the intolerant protesters who seek to shut these supposedly offensive speakers down.
It clearly did not achieve the desired effects. On March 5, against the backdrop of an active Safe Space policy, Antifa stormed campus and disrupted my Libertarian Society debate, turning it into an evening of violent chaos and destruction.
Antifa began as a fringe socialist group enacting revolutionary violence as a means of defeating Nazism. Since President Trump’s candidacy and election, Antifa has mobilized across the globe, on campuses and beyond, to wage a war against free thinkers and Western values.
At my university, Antifa set off smoke bombs, punched their way through campus security, hospitalized a security guard, and damaged university property. However, while Antifa’s methods are deplorable, the real, insidious threat arises from the largely unchallenged ideology their actions are based upon.
Antifa justifies its violence on intolerance and paternalism, which has inspired safe spaces, trigger warnings, and no-platforming. During the brutal communist takeover of Eastern Europe, Stalin used the term “fascist” as a smear to legitimize his murdering of a broad spectrum of opponents. Today, Antifa follows in these footsteps, indiscriminately shouting “fascist” or “alt-right” as an anti-intellectual tactic to justify the violent silencing of their political enemies.
Antifa also bases its actions on a paternalism, which holds that students and other members of the public should be protected from offensive ideas. Instead of encouraging rational debate and dialogue with those whom we disagree, Antifa paints a vision of humanity where individuals are debased to violent thugs who terrorize their political opponents with violence.
Repeated victories and chaos on campuses such as the University of California, Berkeley have been observed in awe by an international audience. Now, replicas to Antifa are forming in the U.K., with the aim of spreading the successes the organization has had in poisoning campus culture in the U.S. to a new university environment across the pond. The U.K. is largely unprepared to deal with this challenge.
So far, my university has failed to punish any of the students responsible for inviting Antifa to instigate violence on their own campus. Investigations remain ongoing, but it seems likely that the focus of the university’s resources will continue to go towards policing speech instead of punishing individuals for tangible physical harassment and assault.
The United States, as the world’s leading superpower, sets the tone for political debates across the world. On American campuses, however, the ideological battle for intellectual freedom is being lost. University administrations are increasingly changing their curriculums, facilities, and classes to accommodate students who are easily offended. Both Antifa and their ideology are challenging the foundations of Anglo-American universities as bastions of intellectual inquiry, diversity of opinion, and human progress.
Those who believe in the values of freedom and rationality must stand up and make the ideological arguments against censorship and paternalism. The turn of events in the US and now the UK reveal the dangers of allowing such afflictions to go unchecked.
