(Note: This entry was written in 2017 - long before the Palestinian campus protests)
In our divided nation now it's not uncommon for people to attack speakers or lecturers who disagree with them, in other words - people outside their bubble. On college campuses across this country liberals in particular are guilty of denying people who don't agree with them their right of free speech. And that, in my mind, is as bad as anything those speakers would have said.
Don't get me wrong, protesting may be called for, but there is a fine line between protesting and disrupting. Peacefully picketing with signs and chants outside the venue is protesting. Lighting things on fire, physically attacking the speaker or his/her supporters, shouting the speaker down during his/her speech so loudly that he/she can't speak, is wrong.
The first amendment has always been high on the list of liberal causes. I'm old enough to remember when the Nazi party wanted to march in Skokie Illinois (a mostly Jewish suburb of Chicago). People were outraged. But liberal Jewish lawyers from the ACLU fought in court for those Nazis 1st amendment right to march.
Hey Liberals reading this, imagine if Barak Obama was going to speak at Freedom University and students lit cars on fire, beat up liberal supporters, sang as loud as they could during his whole speech so he couldn't speak. Imagine how outraged you'd feel. That's exactly how conservatives felt about the treatment that Milo Yiannopoulos got at Berkeley a few years back.
Now before anyone freaks out, I am not condoning or condemning Yiannopoulos. And I’m not putting Obama and Yiannopoulos on the same level. As I said in my mission statement, I'm trying not to take sides on issues outside my central thesis. I'm simply using his incident because it was a very visible and extreme one.
Those protests didn't work. Yes, they kept him from speaking to maybe 200 students, but they also gave him national media exposure. Internet hits on his writings the next day were in the millions. He was given half an hour on Bill Maher's show and several others. In short, those protests gave him a much bigger soapbox.
A stronger approach, the one Universities themselves encourage, is to let controversial speakers have their day, listen to them and learn about their perspective. Question it. Then if you don't agree with it, challenge them on it. If they have a Q&A open microphone politely take the opportunity to challenge what they were saying with facts. Challenge him/her to a debate and use your superior intellect to quash them. Write an op-ed piece in the school paper disputing his/her facts. Heck, deliver a counter argument speech an hour later in the same hall.
I know this: Using a controversial speaking engagement as an excuse for a street brawl is not helpful. It's also completely hypocritical of what Liberals claim to stand for. So stop. Just stop.