Stately Blaska Manor is a mobile free speech zone

The difference between a democracy and a republic has been explained thusly: A democracy is when two wolves and a lamb vote on what to eat for dinner. A republic, by contrast, protects the rights of the minority.

If our Founders, particularly the authors of the Federalist Papers, feared anything it was rule by the mob, rather than the individual rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

The hungry wolves gathered for an exercise in majority rule recently at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point. UW-Point apparently adheres to a curious practice: students get to decide which among them are allowed congregate for the purpose of political speech.

Students wishing to peaceably assemble under the banner of an organization called “Turning Point USA” appealed to the student government for official recognition, which would allow them access to university facilities, like a room for their meetings, for instance.

Like the Coliseum mob responding to Commodus, the student senate turned thumbs down. Release the ravenous wolves!

TV station WAOW reports the student government’s reasoning:

“The [student senators] listened to their constituents feedback that they received from students in their colleges and they took it to the floor and voted appropriately,” said communications director Tegan Griffith.

And when asked for the reasoning for denying recognition to Turning Point USA, Griffith said, “Well they listened to their constituents feedback and they listened to what other students had to say and that was their reasoning.”

James Madison, bow down your head and cry.

Earning a B.S. in Intolerance

Suffer not the grown children. “Unfortunately, the students in the Stevens Point student government are behaving just the way the adults are teaching them to behave,” observes Jim Wigderson at RightWisconsin.

When the campus administration sends out letters to students about “micro-aggressions” like “America is a melting pot,” and when members of the legislature oppose allowing free speech on college campuses [every single Democrat], should we be shocked when the students do their part to shut down speech the political left doesn’t like?

Would it surprise you that the by-any-means-necessary Socialist Workers Party is on their side? Or that the state’s major news media will observe editorial silence?

We checked out Turning Point USA. Not even Morris Dees’ Southern Poverty Law Center claims the operation is a hate group and that is saying something, since its list has ballooned to include anyone who holds a traditional view of marriage. Turning Point claims a presence on hundreds of campuses. It’s mission is “to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government.”

Egad! No wonder the student leaders at UW Point turned them down!

Closer to home, Democrats are in a dither that UW-Madison the nascent Tommy Thompson Center might be skewed toward conservative speakers.

The party’s designated attack dog One Scot Ross howled: “Our worst fears that this operation was nothing more than a University of Wisconsin factory for Republican junk science and propaganda have been confirmed.”

R-i-g-h-t. Gender and Race Studies, anyone? (Tommy Thompson, that hate monger!)

The science is settled and you’re a Nazi!

Back when Tailgunner Joe McCarthy was conjuring communists under every bed, liberals defended free speech. Today’s college campuses are monocultures of neo-Marxism. Disagree, you’re a Nazi. The tenured professors are apostles of identity politics and grievance mongering. Studying the party registrations of faculty at 40 of America’s top universities, three researchers for the scholarly Econ Journal Watch found that liberal-progressive professors outnumbered moderate-conservatives by 10 to 1.

“Even these figures understate the matter. The overall campus figures include professional schools and science, technology, business and mathematics departments. Political imbalance causes intellectual degradation. Riots against free speech are only a symptom.” — “Higher Education’s Deeper Sickness” in the Wall Street Journal.

The sifting and winnowing concept is proving more elusive than Higgins Boson. One in five college undergrads believe it’s O.K.  to use physical force to silence a speaker who makes “offensive and hurtful statements.” (“A chilling study shows how hostile college students are toward free speech.”)

When everyone with whom you disagree is a Nazi, there’s no need for debate.

“Shouting down a neo-Nazi … should be your patriotic duty,” writes Madison liberal Emily (“Block his ass”) Mills in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Her example of someone who needed blocking was Ben Shapiro. A Jewish neo-Nazi!

The vice chairman of the College Democrats of Wisconsin, a student at UW-La Crosse, boasted last month: “My new bit is tearing down all the pro-life Christian pregnancy resource center fliers that they put up around campus to try & trick people.”

People be too stupid to decide for themselves.