Mark Steyn, at NRO, has this to say about Ann Coulter‘s recent Kafkaesque experience in Canada:
A couple of days ago, I mentioned François Houle, the leftist apparatchik and provost of the University of Ottawa who threatened Ann Coulter with criminal prosecution before she’d even set foot on Canadian soil.
M. Houle warned Miss Coulter not to “promote hatred.” As this young lady points out in her report from the university, the only hate-promoter here is the buffoon Houle, whose barely veiled threats led to a gang of menacing Houligans (le mot juste) getting the event closed down. Alliances between the state’s ideological commissars and street mobs are a familiar feature of certain kinds of societies, and I suppose Canada will soon get used to its membership of this unlovely club. Ann Coulter says of her experience in the Great White North:
This has never, ever, ever happened before — even at the stupidest American university… Since I’ve arrived in Canada, I’ve been denounced on the floor of Parliament — which, by the way, is on my bucket list — my posters have been banned, I’ve been accused of committing a crime in a speech that I have not yet given, I was banned by the student council. So welcome to Canada!
What’s there to say about Canada? Settled by Tories who backed the wrong side in the Revolutionary War, it’s the original anti-American country, a giant, moose-infested land mass that only Sarah Palin could love, with roughly the same number of people as California — most of whom live within a few miles of Burlington, Buffalo, Detroit and Seattle, just in case they need to go to a real hospital.
So, Canada…
Yes Canada, the country that gave us Lorne Greene, William Shatner and Jim Carrey, seen here in the funniest, most politically incorrect show of all time, In Living Color. Try pitching this today:
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Steyn concludes:
Susan Cole, Canadian “feminist,” defending the mob on Fox News:
We don’t have that same political culture here in (Canada). . . . We don’t have a 1st Amendment, we don’t have a religion of free speech. . . . Students sign off on all kinds of agreements as to how they’ll behave on campus, in order to respect diversity, equity, all of the values that Canadians really care about. Those are the things that drive our political culture. Not freedoms, not rugged individualism, not free speech. It’s different, and for us, it works.
Translated from the original Canadian, “diversity” means “state-mandated mob-enforced conformity.” As for whether “it works” for Canadians, ask Guy Earle. On Monday Mr. Earle, a stand-up comedian of conventionally Trudeaupian views, goes on trial at the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal for putting down two hecklers at his nightclub act. They were, alas for him, of the lesbian persuasion, and so he is now charged with “homophobia.” What a wretched embarrassment to a once free society.
Your thoughts on our neighbors to the north, their definition of free speech, and how they treated Ms. Coulter welcome here. Not that Ann isn’t perfectly capable of defending herself.
I’ve given more than 100 college speeches, and not once has one of my speeches been shut down at any point. Even the pie-throwing incident at the University of Arizona didn’t break up the event. I said “Get them!”, the college Republicans got them, and then I continued with my rambling, hate-filled diatribe — I mean, my speech.
So we’ve run this experiment more than 100 times.
Only one college speech was ever met with so much mob violence that the police were forced to cancel it: The one that was preceded by a letter from the university provost accusing me of hate speech.
If a university official’s letter accusing a speaker of having a proclivity to commit speech crimes before she’s given the speech — which then leads to Facebook postings demanding that Ann Coulter be hurt, a massive riot and a police-ordered cancellation of the speech — is not hate speech, then there is no such thing as hate speech.