AEI resident scholar Christina Hoff Sommers discussed the time she was made to bring “six martial arts experts” to a free speech event in Portland during her talk at Bucknell University on Thursday with Breitbart’s Tom Ciccotta.
“I didn’t need the services of those six martial arts experts and I’m very happy to report that in anarcho-vegan hipster intersectional protest capital of the world, Portland!” joked Hoff Sommers. “Four hundred people came together and we did not all agree, but we managed to have a civil discussion. Some of the students that came to protest, initially they were jeering and heckling the speakers, but soon then they listened and in the end many of them stayed and joined the discussions.”
“Now at the end of the event, this fellow on rollerblades rolled up to me, skated up to me to say thank you. He said he had come to protest, but he had enjoyed the discussion,” she continued. “By the way, he also had a mohawk and I think he was wearing a cape, but in these riotous times right now, this event at Portland state university told me that we can still speak to one another as equals, we can still respect one another, one another’s right to speak, to listen, to disagree, and if that can happen in Portlandia it can happen in Bucknell, it can happen anywhere!”