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Now this happened a while ago, but it still pisses me off. A group of students at Columbia University in NYC rushed the stage while the head of the Minutemen group (who had been invited there to speak) was speaking. One group rushed the speaker while another jumped up on the far side of the stage with a big banner and started yelling slogans. I find this funny since said students were from various left-wing clubs and what not, and I thought it was the conservatives who try to go around and oppress free speech. That's what the propaganda says anyway. Kudos to Jon Stewart for doing a good piece on this, which you can see above. The only thing I take issue with is when he makes a joke about the Minutemen not being able to secure the speaking podium, let alone the border. It's Columbia University's job to provide security for their own guest speakers. You can see that it is woefully absent, however.
As I said, this thing at Columbia really angers me, especially (if you watch the full video) when a group of students starts chanting something about the Minutemen being Nazis while they themselves are using Nazi tactics. The left are the supposed champions of free speech, right? So why can't they let an invited guest speaker say his peace and leave? You're telling me we can let Illinois Nazis march through a town full of holocaust survivors but this dude can't get up an talk for an hour or so in a closed auditorium? If they don't like what he has to say, can't they just leave or not even go in the first place? Isn't that the classic reason why we shouldn't have restrictions on TV programming, because you can just "change the channel"? This is basically an intimidation and scare tactic, as if this group of students is telling conservatives to stay the fuck off of their campus. It's like a warning to the next person who may hold a viewpoint they disagree with. The next person is supposed to see that and go, "Man, I was invited to speak at Columbia, but what if this group shows up and tries to do the same thing to me? I don't want to go through that." If that's not fascism, then I don't know what is.
2 comments:
Yeah, I think more than anything the whole thing is disrespectful. Like you said, let the guy say what he wants to say. I'm left-leaning, but I still find this ridiculous.
That being said, I don't think it's the dire condemnation of the left that you say it is, especially since I'm sure this has happened plenty of other times before with party roles reversed: someone rushed the stage of someone else in protest of something-- this is hardly news, and you can't tell me with a straight face that no conservative has ever been guilty of the same.
So yeah, I understand the idea of protest, but the application is completely inappropriate when it disrupts a message. And yeah, any fingerpointing invoking Nazism is retarded. Reminds me of an article I read about conversational terrorism.
The post about this incident is not a condemnation of everyone who is left-leaning anymore than say, the blog you did about political correctness is a blanket condemnation of anyone who has ever criticized PC at any point in time. Rather, this post is a condemnation of the left-leaning students who participated in this. At no point did I make any blanket accusations. I did say that the left are the supposed champions of free speech, but that is true, and the students who participated in this are left-leaning. I have quite a few left-leaning friends, so I know better than to accuse all of them (let alone every other left-wing person in the world) for being in cahoots with a group from Columbia. I mean, Jon Stewart himself is left-leaning, so why would I give him kudos and have a link to how he covered the story if I was pushing all liberal-thinking people down the stairs?
That being said, a sizeable group of these students weren’t even part of radical, fringe organizations. That’s one reason I think it is worth mentioning. One of the main organizers behind this protest was the college Democrat club from Columbia. If I were a Democrat, I might even be a little concerned about that, b/c a Democrat college club is more mainstream than a lot of other clubs that exist on campuses and I wouldn’t want these students speaking for me in such a way. Another reason for the post was to show the blatant hypocrisy by these students. As I said in the post, it makes me twice as angry when I’m sure these people would not hesitate to describe themselves as protectors of the 1st amendment but are accusing a guest speaker of fascism while they themselves are using “Blackshirt” intimidation and scare tactics.
Don’t worry though, pooky, I wasn’t talking bad about you :)
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