Predictably, for a newspaper whose editors promote the cult of Che Guevara and his Antifa descendants, The Capital Times gives a free hall pass to the speech disrupters.
Confronted with silenced speakers here and across the nation, The University of Wisconsin Regents voted last week (more here) to penalize students who “materially and substantially disrupt the free expression of others.” To The Capital Times, this is “an assault on free speech.” Talk about Alice jumping into the rabbit hole!
“Regents want to dumb down the discourse on UW campus,” Your Progressive Voice posited — as if the young totalitarians who interrupted Ben Shapiro’s speech for almost a half-hour last November on campus were even capable of “discourse.” Instead, all they did was shout the words “shame” and “safety” as they menacingly occupied the stage. Not exactly William F. Buckley versus John Kenneth Galbraith.
Free speech for The Capital Times means some students are free to disrupt the speech of those with whom they disagree. Who are these speakers deserving of the heckler’s veto? The Bad Guys, of course.
Their speech, the CT has preemptively concluded, are “outright lies and hateful provocations.” How they would know that without actually — you know, hearing them speak — is one of the Left’s great magic tricks.
Providing intellectual cover to Antifa and its wannabes, The Capital Times wants us to believe the new Regent policy would “suspend and expel students who dare to protest against the hatred expressed by Nazis, fascists, and defenders of the Confederacy.”
That’s a page torn right out of the Antifa handbook! The black-masked thugs know that if they first define their targets as fascists, klansmen or undifferentiated “extremists” they can smash windows not only with impunity but with the the holy chrism of a medieval crusader sacking Constantinople.
Ironically, Shapiro’s talk last fall was about the injury campus “safe spaces,” free from opposing ideas, can do to the concept of sifting and winnowing. Tuesday night, students on both side of the ideological divide understood what The Capital Times does not.
Author Katie Pavlich spoke about the right of women and other vulnerable people on campus to carry firearms to protect themselves. Yes, there were protests — outside the venue. Inside, the Brogden Psychology Building, the speaker spoke, the audience was able to consider her ideas. They may be sifting and winnowing even today.
We guarantee if Young Americans for Freedom ever disrupted a speech by the Communist murderer Angela Davis, The CT would cry bloody murder. That being a hypothetical, we can recall no time when the CT demanded a conservative speaker be heard or denounced his or her silencing. (The CT blasted Justice Samuel Alito when he mouthed — not spoke but mouthed — the words “not true” as President Obama, during his State of the Union, miscast the Citizens United case and excoriated the justices sitting before him. So much for dissent.)
No, Your Progressive Voice celebrated the pre-dawn raids of the speech police, battering rams at the ready. It spoke not a discouraging word when the Madison campus imposed speech codes — the most draconian in the nation, according to Alan Dershowitz. Sadly, the publication’s First Amendment virtue is entirely partisan.
For a corporation that makes its living off the First Amendment, such mendacity is inexcusable. Even, dare we say, hateful.
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