We Are Losing Our Free Speech

Ever since Donald Trump won the election we have seen an unprecedented attack on the free speech of the right. For some reason liberals believe that any opinions, ideas or even simple comments from conservatives has become the enemy of the state. We have seen this at multiple places of so-called ‘higher education’ across the country. We had one of our ‘prestigious’ universities allow Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on their campus, even though his country is an enemy of the United States, and the college president even defended it on the grounds of ‘free speech and academic freedom’. Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger defended the university’s decision to invite Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at the campus today on “Good Morning America,” citing free speech and academic freedom.

“What is at stake is the ability to learn about the world and know about people, even dictators, even people who are highly repressive and highly dangerous, as Dr. Ahmadinejad,” Bollinger said.

“It’s extremely important to know who the leaders are of countries who are your adversaries, to watch them, to see how they think, to see how they reason or don’t reason. To see whether they’re fanatical or whether they are sly. These are issues that are right at the core of the world today.”

Protesters say the Ivy League university should not be hosting what they call a dangerous despot whose country is allegedly arming insurgents in Iraq and secretly building nuclear weapons.

Ahmadinejad has also said in the past that Israel should be “wiped off the map” and that the Holocaust is a “myth.”

Dov Hikind, a New York state assemblyman representing parts of Brooklyn, likened the Iranian president to Hitler.

“There is no excuse to have a madman, this little Hitler, running around all over the world killing our soldiers!” Hikind said.

Critics say that someone like Ahmadinejad should not be given a platform to spew his hate-filled rhetoric. [1]

This would be the same as inviting Adolf Hitler or even Saddam Hussein to speak. The president of the college defended the decision but there really is no excuse for this kind of stupidity in this office of authority at this college. Now this happened in 2007. Ten years later at this same ‘college’ we see a completely different reaction by the college concerning an actual open panel discussion on free speech, the very reason they allowed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on campus. New York’s Columbia University cancelled a panel that was due to feature Breitbart’s Allum Bokhari and Charlie Nash, and The Gateway Pundit’s Lucian Wintrich, following “security concerns.”

“The Gateway Pundit’s White House correspondent Lucian Wintrich, along with Breitbart writers Charles Nash and Allum Bokhari, were booked by a Columbia University student organization to give an open panel discussion on campus free speech set for Thursday, March 2nd,” reported The Gateway Pundit on Friday. “The student organization was also organizing to invite a liberal writer on the panel to debate Wintrich, Nash, and Bokhari.”

“Days before the event the University decided to cancel the event due to ‘security concerns’ when they discovered that the speakers were from The Gateway Pundit and Breitbart,” they continued. “After school administrators found out that after March 5th, Nash and Bokhari would be back in London and Wintrich is back in D.C., the administration said that Wintrich, Nash, and Bokhari are welcome to speak on the 9th. Obviously, that is an impossibility.”

Wintrich has been cancelled from three universities in the past two weeks, including New York University, according to The Gateway Pundit.

“The MSM, along with university professors, have created such a vitriolic narrative in this country that I think many students have become genuinely scared of diversity of thought, which has led rise to groups like Antifa,” declared Wintrich to Breitbart News. “Adding humor to the entire ordeal, we invited a liberal to debate us on panel. Mic’s Gabe Gonzalez and HuffPo’s James Michael Nicholas both refused. It’s hilarious how liberals in media are so used to simply copy and pasting Media Matters’ narrative that they are fully incapable of speaking off the cuff or engaging in an actual debate.”[2] The disgusting thing about this is our colleges can’t seem to teach that everybody has the right to free speech, liberals and conservatives alike. This college along with UC Berkeley and several others have failed miserably at teaching that all have the right to their opinion and have the right to express it. Liberals say this but are appalled when they actually hear a different opinion. They have to run off to a safe space, play with playdough, color and whatever else they feel the need to do because someone stated an opposing opinion. This is complete and total failure of our education system.

Colleges and universities used to be a place where different ideas and points of view could be intelligently discussed. But today with mostly rabid liberal professors students are flunked if they hold a conservative point of view. A humanities professor gave a 16-year-old girl four consecutive “zero” grades on assignments at Polk State College in Lakeland, Florida, for refusing to conform to his anti-Christian worldview.

Grace is enrolled full-time in a virtual school she attends from home. Her mother, Kristin Lewis, tells Breitbart News that assignments given by Professor Lance “L.J.” Russum required students to respond to various questions, the premises of which reflected a strong anti-Christian bias and demanded responses that confirmed his anti-Christian perspective.

Lewis said her daughter is an accelerated student with a 3.9 grade-point average who began taking college courses last fall. Her parents decided Grace would take a humanities course since they knew the credits would transfer to any college she ultimately attended. Lewis said Grace was placed in Russum’s class as a virtual student. [3]

A former student at the Rhode Island College School of Social Work is suing the school and several of his professors for discrimination, saying he was persecuted by the school’s “liberal political machine” for being a conservative.

William Felkner, 45, says the New England college and six professors wouldn’t approve his final project on welfare reform because he was on the “wrong” side of political issues and countered the school’s “progressive” liberal agenda.

Felkner said his problems with his professors began in his first semester, in the fall of 2004, when he objected in an e-mail to one of his professors that the school was showing and promoting Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” on campus. He said he objected because no opposing point of view was presented.

He said Professor James Ryczek wrote to him on Oct. 15, 2004, saying he was proud of his bias and questioning Felkner’s ability to “fit with the profession.” [4]

Multiple professors at one college are using their positions of authority to regulate their students’ speech, threatening to flunk or even expel young people from class if they use certain offending phrases in class – like “referring to women/men as females or males.”

Gender and homosexuality politics are among the areas the professors are looking to influence the young people in their classes, along with race and immigration ideology.

The affronting terms that could land students in hot water in a number of Washington State University classes include “illegal alien” and “illegals,” CampusReform.org reports, but also considered oppressive and hateful by one teacher are the very definitions of gender, “male” and “female.” [5]

Where is their stand for the diversity that they demand of the conservatives? Where is the common sense that there are only two genders, male and female? Failing a student simply because they identify a person by the obvious gender that they are? Our educators are in great need of and education themselves. Is it any wonder why we can no longer compete in the world arena? Professors that can’t even correctly identify a gender has no right to be teaching our kids about anything.

Our right to speak the truth is being taken away because of liberal pressure and violent threats and actions but our right to speak in general is being denied because if our point of view ‘triggers’ aggression in the left we must be silenced instead of the left learning to understand there are valid different points of view.. Pansies that never learned to lose, always won a ‘participation’ trophy, never had to experience real life. Now they can’t handle not having their own way.

If something like Pearl Harbor happened today we would see hundreds of thousands of millennial’s running for their safe space. In 1941 we saw the younger generation run to the recruiting stations to sign up to defend America. A big price will be paid for the loss of our free speech but it won’t be paid until it’s too late.

E-Mail Roger Anghis: roger@buildingthetruth.org

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