Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Day of Absence, and Other Out-of-Control Protests

Stephen Kershnar

Arrest Violent and Destructive Campus Protesters

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

October 15, 2018

            In recent years, out-of-control protests have rocked college campuses.

            At the University of California at Berkeley in 2017, masked and black-clad Antifa and other black bloc members protested a planned speech by libertarian Milo Yiannopoulos. They set fires, destroyed property, violent assaulted and pepper sprayed people, and threw rocks at the police. This intimidated Berkeley authorities into canceling not only Yiannopoulous’s talk, but also a later talk by conservative intellectual Ann Coulter.

At Claremont McKenna College in 2017, Black Lives Matter protesters prevented audience members from entering a building where conservative intellectual Heather Mac Donald was to speak. Out of fear for her and others’ safety, the college moved her to secure location where she had to speak over the web. The protesters were mad at Mac Donald because, in her book The War on Cops (2016), she argued that no one is more committed to protecting black lives than data-driven and accountable police departments.   

At Middlebury College in 2017, protesters caused the college to cancel a talk by political scientist Charles Murray. With police escort, Murray had to flee the campus. Protesters assaulted the female professor who invited him. Murray along with Harvard University’s Richard Herrnstein wrote the ground-breaking book: The Bell Curve (1994). This book argued that general intelligence is in part inherited, affects how well people’s lives go, and should affect public policy.

At Evergreen State College in 2017, campus protestors disrupted the campus after a biology professor, Brett Weinstein, refused to stay off campus during the Day of Absence. This is a protest day in which, following the election of Donald Trump, campus activists demanded that white people stay off campus. Campus police told the professor that it could not protect him and recommended he stay off campus. Weinstein and his wife (also a professor there) left Evergreen. Evergreen later paid them half a million dollars for failing to properly protect them.  

Despite these protests, there are only a few areas of unprotected speech in the Constitution and they are irrelevant to the above political speech. The Constitution does not protect fighting words, incitement of imminent violence or destruction, defamation, obscenity, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Campus political speech does not fit into these categories.

In the context of fighting words, governments may ban words that are directed at an individual and that that tend to provoke an immediate violent fight. They may not punish, ban, regulate, or financially burden speech merely because it might offend a hostile mob. In the context of imminent law lawless action, the state may ban speech that is intended to bring about imminent lawless action and likely to do so. In the context of defamation, a victim may recover for defamation only if the speaker carelessly made a false statement directed at an individual and it causes unjust damage to the target’s reputation or livelihood. None of this has to do with careful arguments on immigration, intelligence, policing, and political correctness.  

In contrast to the political speeches, the protesters committed crimes such as assault (including battery and threats), disorderly conduct (including disturbing the peace), trespass, and rioting. Thus, protesters who were violent and destroyed property should have been arrested.

            There are also good moral reasons to allow such speech. One reason to protect free speech, even when offensive, is that on the whole it contributes to the marketplace of ideas. Just as the marketplace of goods usually results in the spread of goods that are better or cheaper than competitor goods, the marketplace of ideas usually results in the spread of ideas that are true or better justified than competitor ideas.

A second reason is that people should be able to shape their own lives. They can do so only if they can consider the full range of ideas and decide for themselves what to believe and how to live. This is hard to do when campus censors and leftist thugs shut down access to some ideas.

            A third reason is that campus history at universities such as Michigan and Wisconsin shows that when campuses try to ban some types of speech (usually hate speech), this is invariably done via rules that are vague, too broad in that they cover protected speech, and lead to overreach. For example, such rules generated complaints when students expressed ideas in class such as homosexuality is a disease, minorities have difficulty in certain courses, and Jews use the Holocaust to justify mistreating Palestinians. These topics are worth discussing even if one disagrees with them.

            There are further good reasons not to ban speech that is merely offensive (again, consider bans on hate speech). First, as philosopher J. Angelo Corlett argues, there is no principled ground by which to decide which speech is truly offensive and which is not. For example, it is unclear whether the claim that the Christian God condemns gay people to hell is offensive or merely reports what the Old Testament says.

What is offensive can’t be merely what offends someone because this applies to almost every controversial statement worth listening to. Even if there were a principled criterion for what is offensive, there is no principled measure of when something is offensive enough that it should be banned.      

            Worse, a ban on ban offensive speech would likely be applied inconsistently and without regard to context. Corlett notes that the same people who want to ban racist words (chink, kike, nigger, and spic) because they offend people are often oblivious to the offense caused when the American flag is burned or confederate monuments smashed. Those who want to mechanically prohibit words usually fail to take context into account. A black chemistry student saying to a fellow black student, “Nigga, you da shit!” is not expressing hate or causing offense. Note the n-word here is being mentioned not used.

            Conservative intellectuals’ speech on campus is legally protected and morally deserves to be protected. In contrast, protesters’ violence, property destruction, and suppression of speech should lead to arrests.