Skidmore College Professor Jennifer Delton penned an op-ed for the Washington Post on Tuesday that claims conservatives use “free speech” to instigate violence on college campuses.
“Maybe liberals shouldn’t be free-speech absolutists after all,” the column’s subtitle originally read, before the Washington Post stealth-deleted it and replaced it with the much more benign-sounding, “What we can learn from liberal anti-communists.” What follows is Skidmore College Professor Jennifer Delton’s attempt to argue that conservatives use “free speech” as a political weapon to attack the legitimacy of America’s institutions of higher education.
Delton argues that liberals shouldn’t be free speech absolutists. According to Delton, even “William F. Buckley would have agreed” the absolutist speech stance is “a luxury” that only a stable, peaceable society could afford. When faced with the threat of movements like the Communist Party in the past or the alt-right today — which Delton falsely accuses Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon and former Breitbart Senior Editor Milo Yiannopoulos of being “prominent popularizers” of — she argues that free speech becomes a weapon used by those looking to “destroy the cultural and political legitimacy of western democratic liberalism.”
“Quoting Voltaire is not going to preserve anyone’s liberties — least of all those populations most vulnerable to vicious racist, misogynist and anti-Semitic attacks,” she adds as a line of defense against her anti-absolutism stance.
“When right-wing provocateurs come to campus, they’re not defending free speech — they’re attacking the legitimacy of the university,” reads the caption under the article’s featured image.
Delton claims that conservatives use the issue of free speech to present college administrators with a dilemma: “Either uphold free speech on campus and risk violent counterprotests, or ban conservative provocateurs and confirm the “freedom of speech” crisis on campuses. Either way their institution’s legitimacy is undermined.”
She goes on to argue that the right has “weaponized” the concept of free speech to attack the legitimacy of the institutions. “Provocateurs seek to bait liberal institutions by weaponizing the concept of free speech, which is an issue that divides the liberal left,” she writes.
It is true that higher education has brought much of this on itself through the extreme policing of speech and tolerance of student protesters who shut down speakers with whom they disagree. But that doesn’t diminish the extent to which the alt-right and conservatives are using “free speech” to attack and destroy colleges and universities, which have long promoted different variations of the internationalist, secular, cosmopolitan, multicultural liberalism that marks the thinking of educated elites of both parties.
Most curiously, Delton claims that right-wing speakers are using the First Amendment to “create political spectacle and instigate violence.”
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