UCLA-Berkeley was the home of the modern free-speech movement. Now, it’s the home of its death. Not a natural death, either, but a murder in the first degree.
Berkeley has been the site of violent riots by left-wing extremists intent on shutting down speaking events they don’t like. But the conspiracy against free speech goes all the way to the top at Berkeley. It also puts into perspective the fight for free speech on campuses around the world.
The University of California-Berkeley invited a reporter to speak about free speech issues “of interest” to students. Their invited expert suggested altering the current interpretation of the First Amendment and suggested that free speech “absolutism” is being used as an “excuse for paralysis.”
In other words, letting people have free speech only encourages them to say stuff that triggers leftists. Clearly, that cannot be tolerated.
Having been invited to the university…[New Yorker staff writer Andrew] Marantz began his speech by denying the validity of the “marketplace of ideas”…
Why would that be? Oh, of course: because in a marketplace of ideas, people can choose not to blindly parrot the ideological bullshit of the left.
Marantz’s book is an expose of fringe political ideologues who he classifies as right-wing extremists. When asked about left-wing extremism, he insisted there is no “analogous mirror image on the left”.
It’s almost as if Antifa aren’t openly bashing and stomping their way across American cities, and even carrying out mass shootings and mounting terror attacks on US government institutions.
It’s almost as if the 1970s “Days of Rage”, when left-wing extremists set off thousands of bombs across American cities every year, didn’t happen, either.
What is even more instructive is just who this anti-free-speech zealot actually does like.
Marantz also opened up about his feelings regarding the press. “I bemoan the demise of Gawker,” he said…he believes the New York Times is “one of the few functional institutions in the country.”
So, he admires a scurrilous gossip site which went bust because it published a stolen sex tape of a has-been celebrity. He admires the newspaper with a shocking record of publishing the very biggest lies, from denying the horrifying 1930s famine in the Soviet Union to falsely smearing Duke University lacrosse players as rapists. The same newspaper notorious for hiring anti-white racists and anti-Semites as senior editors.
When it comes to free speech on college campuses, Marantz suggested that “the current interpretation of U.S. Supreme Court law” that guarantees First Amendment rights on public college campuses should perhaps not be “the interpretation of First Amendment law for time immemorial”.
https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=13958
Massey University are not an aberration, shocking as it is to realise. They’re following the same template as campuses across the West: destroying free speech rights in order to impose a radical, far-left agenda. They’re just another one of the boots stamping on the face of human freedom.