Predictably, for a newspaper whose editors promote the cult of Che Guevara and his Antifa descendants, The Capital Times gives a free hall pass to the speech disrupters.
Confronted with silenced speakers here and across the nation, The University of Wisconsin Regents voted last week (more here) to penalize students who “materially and substantially disrupt the free expression of others.” To The Capital Times, this is “an assault on free speech.” Talk about Alice jumping into the rabbit hole!
“Regents want to dumb down the discourse on UW campus,” Your Progressive Voice posited — as if the young totalitarians who interrupted Ben Shapiro’s speech for almost a half-hour last November on campus were even capable of “discourse.” Instead, all they did was shout the words “shame” and “safety” as they menacingly occupied the stage. Not exactly William F. Buckley versus John Kenneth Galbraith.
Free speech for The Capital Times means some students are free to disrupt the speech of those with whom they disagree. Who are these speakers deserving of the heckler’s veto? The Bad Guys, of course.
Their speech, the CT has preemptively concluded, are “outright lies and hateful provocations.” How they would know that without actually — you know, hearing them speak — is one of the Left’s great magic tricks.
Providing intellectual cover to Antifa and its wannabes, The Capital Times wants us to believe the new Regent policy would “suspend and expel students who dare to protest against the hatred expressed by Nazis, fascists, and defenders of the Confederacy.”
That’s a page torn right out of the Antifa handbook! The black-masked thugs know that if they first define their targets as fascists, klansmen or undifferentiated “extremists” they can smash windows not only with impunity but with the the holy chrism of a medieval crusader sacking Constantinople.
Ironically, Shapiro’s talk last fall was about the injury campus “safe spaces,” free from opposing ideas, can do to the concept of sifting and winnowing. Tuesday night, students on both side of the ideological divide understood what The Capital Times does not.
Author Katie Pavlich spoke about the right of women and other vulnerable people on campus to carry firearms to protect themselves. Yes, there were protests — outside the venue. Inside, the Brogden Psychology Building, the speaker spoke, the audience was able to consider her ideas. They may be sifting and winnowing even today.
We guarantee if Young Americans for Freedom ever disrupted a speech by the Communist murderer Angela Davis, The CT would cry bloody murder. That being a hypothetical, we can recall no time when the CT demanded a conservative speaker be heard or denounced his or her silencing. (The CT blasted Justice Samuel Alito when he mouthed — not spoke but mouthed — the words “not true” as President Obama, during his State of the Union, miscast the Citizens United case and excoriated the justices sitting before him. So much for dissent.)
No, Your Progressive Voice celebrated the pre-dawn raids of the speech police, battering rams at the ready. It spoke not a discouraging word when the Madison campus imposed speech codes — the most draconian in the nation, according to Alan Dershowitz. Sadly, the publication’s First Amendment virtue is entirely partisan.
For a corporation that makes its living off the First Amendment, such mendacity is inexcusable. Even, dare we say, hateful.
Education
Blaska Policy Werkes 
Pavlich’s lecture did indeed go on as scheduled without interruption or delay. Protesters voiced their objections (less than tastefully, perhaps), no one was threatened or arrested. In other words,free speech was allowed to flourish, the system worked, and all was well. I can’t help wondering, however, what might have happened had the Board of Regents not passed its totally reasonable restrictions on the actions of those intent on impeding or preventing non-leftist speakers from presenting their views on campus. We could easily have seen a repeat of the shameful Ben Shapiro fiasco.
Let’s not forget, though, that those who deserve the most blame for today’s sorry state of free speech on campus are the craven, spineless, duplicitous administrators, who for decades have caved in to (and sometimes actively enabled) every whim of leftist students, professors, and professional agitators. If they had been doing their duty from the start, colleges wouldn’t have to be clawing their way back, inch by inch, to a point where more than hypocritical lip service is paid to the whole “sifting and winnowing” thing.
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Yes, the Board of Regents policy works. Everyone had their say. No paucity of liberal-progressive-socialist speakers on campus. 90% of the faculty …
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Dave, I think it’s time to drop commenting on the Crap Times. It’s a joke website and a joke paper. You’d be better off taking on the Onion as it’s a more reliable source of news.
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And edited better.
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Wrong caption. Should read,
“This is what Democrats look like”
Apparently a vanishing small subset of humanity since their discovery of (other) dildoes.
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In my opinion, both Madison papers do a disservice to their readership. Both papers fail to call out our poor city and county leaders and both fail to hold these same so called leaders accountable to the people. It’s quite telling when you write to your elected mayor and are ignored over and over and over and the media turns a blind eye to it. Nothing will change while poor leaders serve their own interests and ignore the people until someone starts holding these bad actors accountable.Both papers lean progressive and both provide cover and enable Madison’s bad leadership. Both papers fail this city so I expect very little from them on the free speech issue unless it serves their own agendas.They play it safe instead of fighting for what’s right. Makes their papers a little boring in my opinion.
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In addition to which, both papers act a cheerleaders for UW-Madison, which they cover by printing UW press releases and occasionally doing puff pieces on the wonderfulness of all things Bucky. They’ve ignored (or excused) the erosion of free speech on the UW-Madison campus for decades.
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Any idea what Zweifel and his cronies were smoking when they wrote that editorial? It is like they live in an alternate universe where the Confederacy won the war.
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