Right-Wing 'Free Speech' Weeks Are Just Free Publicity For Milo Yiannopoulos
The cancellation of UC-Berkeley’s Free Speech Week serves as something of an ideological Rorschach test.
ERIN GLORIA RYAN
09.24.17 12:00 AM ET
On Saturday, organizers of UC-Berkeley’s Free Speech Week announced that the event had been called off. Aw.
The cancellation of UC-Berkeley’s Free Speech Week serves as something of an ideological Rorschach test. For people concerned about free speech on campus, it’s a distressing sign of the state of college. For those who find the ideas that would have been expressed dangerous, it’s a relief.
It’s neither of those things. It’s a stupid, cynical and self-perpetuating ouroboros of pearl-clutching self-righteousness.
From a distance, the attack on free speech on college campuses is distressing indeed. Headlines paint a picture of a postsecondary educational landscape driven by radical professors and their malleable barely-legal sycophants, young, dumb, and full of ummm, willing to resort to violence in the name of keeping their liberal snow globe free of new ideas. It’d be unfair to say there isn’t snowflakery on the left.
In Berkeley, site of the ill-fated right-wing bonanza, students had planned a protest march. On other campuses, students formed human chains, equated speech with violence, shouted down conservative speakers. Hell, college kids have shouted down allegedly liberal speakers who are liberal in the wrong ways. All of those expression of dissent are within the rights of a student body. Free speech goes both ways, from podium to protest.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/right-wing-free-speech-weeks-are-just-free-publicity-for-milo-yiannopoulos
