Republican presidential candidates are not really concerned about free speech on college campuses, they're simply going back to the 1960's and 1970's playbook in slamming liberal academia, liberal Hardball panelists insisted tonight.
Of course not once in the past few days has host Chris Matthews explained to his audience the sort of censorious radicalism displayed by the "Concerned Student 1950" protesters and sympathizers at Missouri.
"I think the points about free speech are important, but I don't think that's really what's on the minds of the Republican candidates who are trying to make political hay out of this. I think they're going back to the '60s' Republican playbook," Huffington Post Media Group editorial director Howard Fineman offered at the beginning of the panel discussion, seeing GOP leaders of today worried, as then, about safeguarding "traditional culture in a permissive society."
MSNBC contributor Joy-Ann Reid agreed:
I think that what you are seeing is the revival of just that '70s era, Nixon era politics on the right which is saying the Left is bullying us and is bullying white America in terms of our speech, and Christian America, in terms of our speech. The interesting thing, of course, is that they're able to get a multiracial pantheon on their side to repeat that as well in Ben Carson and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.
Hmm, that's funny. White liberals like Jonathan Chait have also been weighing in about the danger of the academic environment being hostile to free speech, but their voices won't be heard on Hardball. But then again, Chait drew the ire of Hardball regular Joan Walsh back in January over his complaints in a column about political correctness run amok. Walsh chalked Chait's old-school liberal ethic of prizing free speech – even and especially when it may be deemed offensive or controversial – to, you guessed it, that leftist bogeyman of white privilege:
[I]n his obsession with attacking ideas like “micro-aggressions,” Chait seems unaware that what he is seething about is just his own version of a micro-aggression. Because, really: If you want to dismiss the necessary project of making white people aware of their own racial subjectivity, and privilege; if you want to reduce that project to its smallest and most easily mocked components – well, you’re as fragile a flower in your own way as the women you criticize.
And make no mistake: It’s almost exclusively women of color being called out in this piece. On behalf of white liberal women who’ve had our feelings hurt on social media over the years, I feel like I’m supposed to thank Chait for coming to our defense. Because that’s how much of it reads: as an attack on women of color for saying some not-nice things to white progressive women. It’s chivalrous, almost; and chauvinistic, too, as though we can’t speak up for ourselves.
If you relied on Hardball for all your news about what's going on with campus craziness at places like Missouri and Yale you'd never know of censorious left-wing activism like these incidents:
- A few days ago a Missouri communications/journalism professor called for some "muscle" from a protest crowd to forcibly evict from a public space a student photojournalist
- Last week an angry mob loudly bullied two Yale faculty members over an email sent on the issue of insensitive Halloween costumes
- The Concerned Student 1950 protest group at Missouri last night segregated, by race, breakout sessions during an organizational meeting in order to provide a "black only healing space"
The examples are legion, and you can find much more of them at websites like Campus Reform. The average viewer made aware of these things would be rightly alarmed and concede that maybe, just maybe, Republican presidential aspirants speaking out for free speech are truly speaking in accord with reverence for this country's constitutional liberties generally, free speech particularly, and the vigorous no-holds-barred freedom of inquiry that should mark the American college campus.
