William McGurn offers a compelling critique of the recent incident at Claremont McKenna in which respected conservative speaker Heather Mac Donald was effectively silenced by a radical student mob:
Ms. Mac Donald had been invited to talk about her book “The War on Cops” at Claremont McKenna College’s Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum. Among her arguments is that if you truly believe black lives matter, maybe you should recognize “there is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition” than the police who protect the law-abiding minority residents of high-crime neighborhoods.
You can imagine how well that goes over. At City Journal, Ms. Mac Donald offers a first-person account of that ugly evening. The day before, she says, event organizers told her they were considering changing the venue to a building with fewer glass windows to break. Such are the considerations these days on the modern American campus.
That evening Ms. Mac Donald ended up live-streaming her talk to a mostly empty auditorium as protesters outside banged on the windows and shouted. As a result, she could take only two questions before authorities deemed it prudent to hustle her out for her own security. ...
Today it’s common to lament the cheap and polarized politics in Washington. But no one asks whether this might have something to do with a generation of students indulged in the view that they should never have to hear an opinion different from their own. How much easier it is to bang on windows, block an entryway and drop your F-bombs than, say, engage the formidable Ms. Mac Donald in genuine argument.
This strikes close to home because an appalling similar incident happened just a few days before hand at UCLA. As Mac Donald explains:
My hosts, the UCLA College Republicans, had titled my presentation “Blue Lives Matter,” which campus activists viewed as an unspeakable provocation. After I finished speaking and welcomed questions, pandemonium broke out. Protesters stormed the front of the classroom, demanding control of the mike and chanting loudly: “America was never great” and “Black Lives Matter, They Matter Here,” among other insights. ...
At 8 PM, the organizers decided to end the event, and I was hustled out of the room with a police escort.
To my knowledge, the UCLA administration has not addressed the disruption of my presentation and interaction with students.
I complained to the Chancellor and the head of "UCLA Equity, Diversity and Inclusion" about the lack of any official statement, let alone any official action. <sarcasm>To my surprise, nothing happened.</sarcasm>
I remain outraged by the way my employer's supine administrators allow unruly mobs to intimidate and silence conservative voices on campus. Especially because if the show had been on the other foot, and a conservative mob had shut down a progressive speaker, there would have been crying sessions, CrossCheck Live discussions, official campus statements of support, creation of a hate speech database, and probably police intervention. But I'm not holding my breath that anything will ever be done to protect those of us who decline to fall into line with the hegemonic far left liberalism that pervades this campus these days.
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