Safe spaces at full capacity.
Via Campus Reform:
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro and comedian Adam Carolla testified on Capitol Hill Thursday about their experiences with today’s college students.
The hearing, called by the House Oversight Committee, aimed to “identify the harms of infringing on the right to free speech on college campuses” while seeking “recommendations on how to encourage and protect First Amendment rights” from a panel of experts, including Shapiro and Carolla.
Republican Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) began the hearing with a reel of video footage showing many of the several campus disruptions that have taken place over the past few years, including the violent takeover at Evergreen State College, where President George Bridges was held hostage by student protesters.
“This is where it all ends. You start with safe spaces…and it ends with students holding hostage the president of a university,” Jordan remarked, noting that Bridges was invited to testify but refused. “That’s why we’re having this hearing.”
hapiro, who has spoken on dozens of colleges campus, began his testimony by noting that he has “encountered anti-free speech measures, administrative cowardice, [and] physical violence” firsthand.
“In order to understand what’s been going on at some of our college campuses, it’s necessary to explore the ideology that provides the impetus for a lot of the protesters who violently obstruct events, pull fire alarms, assault professors, and even other students, and the impetus for administrators who all too often humor these protesters,” he continued, explaining that free-speech is under assault because of a “three-step argument” used by student protesters.
“The first step is that they say that the validity or invalidity of an argument can be judged solely by the ethnic, sexual, racial or cultural identity of the person making the argument,” he stressed. The “second step” is to suggest that “those who claim otherwise are engaging in what they call verbal violence,” while the “final step” is to “conclude that physical violence is sometimes justified in order to stop such verbal violence.”
Shapiro concluded that, as a result, “the value of a view” is no longer “based on the logic or merit of the view, but on the level of victimization in American society experienced by the person espousing the view.”
He went on to note that the popularization of the term “microaggression” has taught students to believe that offensive words “can be the equivalent of physical violence.”
“Words you don’t like deserve to be fought physically,” he went on. “Indeed, protesters all too often engage in physically violent disruption when they believe their identity group is under verbal attack by someone, usually conservative but not always.”