quote:

ORIGINAL: bounty44

if I were a student from the organization that's sponsoring the event, or an otherwise right leaning student, rather than let the leftists show up as a mass with the intent to disrupt, id work to invite individual liberals who are friends and ask them to go with me, and show up relatively early in order to secure the seats.

quote:

ORIGINAL: bounty44

if that is all true, then ann coulter is walking into another situation like milo---and still, something needs to be done somewhere by someone. to not is to be negligent.

I don't think its that they have any cognition of that they have lost the debate. I think rather its they think they are morally superior and that the right are evil, and therefore violence in opposition is justified.

quote:

ORIGINAL: bounty44

haven't read this yet:

"Conspiring to stifle free speech is a crime: Glenn Reynolds"

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/02/06/time-end-leftist-impunity-glenn-reynolds-column/97521138/

quote:

ORIGINAL: vincentML

~FR~

There is ample evidence that the tranquility of the neighborhood will be shattered when outside agitators like Ann Counter are brought in to cause trouble. If the police and Dept of Student Safety can't handle the situation it should be cancelled, but that would violate Coulter's right to free speech.

Seriously, folks, the heckler's veto is a prohibition against the government from arresting the speaker to maintain law and order.

The speaker can keep on speaking while being heckled but the hecklers cannot be prohibited their opinions unless they threaten to drown out the speaker.

It is problematic (in Case Law) for the government to arrest hecklers except I would guess if the hecklers are causing a danger to safety and property. Then, it is just riot law.

quote:

ORIGINAL: RottenJohnny

quote:

ORIGINAL: bounty44
what would you do, in whatever role you want to put yourself in, concerning this event?

Hire the Hell's Angels for security. It worked for the Rolling Stones.

quote:

It is time for new laws that will make higher education leaders take the 1st Amendment seriously.

They told me if Donald Trump were elected, voices of dissent would be shut down by fascist mobs. And they were right!

At the University of California, Berkeley campus, for example, gay conservative speaker Milo Yiannopoulos had to be evacuated, and his speech cancelled, because masked rioters beat people, smashed windows, and started fires. Protesters threw commercial fireworks at police.

According to CNN: “The violent protesters tore down metal barriers, set fires near the campus bookstore and damaged the construction site of a new dorm. One woman wearing a red Trump hat was pepper sprayed in the face while being interviewed by CNN affiliate KGO. . . . As police dispersed the crowd from campus, a remaining group of protesters moved into downtown Berkeley and smashed windows at several local banks. No arrests were made throughout the night.”

According to CNN, the protests caused over $100,000 in damage.

Yiannopoulous wasn’t the only victim of silencing efforts. At Marquette University, conservative speaker Ben Shapiro faced efforts by Marquette university employees to silence him.

The Young Americas Foundation obtained Facebook comments by Chrissy Nelson, a program assistant for Marquette’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies, encouraging people — at the behest of “one of the directors of diversity” — to reserve all the seats for the hall and then not show up. The purpose of this was “to take a seat away from someone who actually would go.”

So students who wanted to hear a speaker with alternative views would find themselves unable to get a seat, because a university employee had made fake reservations. All, apparently, in the name of “diversity.”

Likewise, when conservative Gavin MacInnes (a founder of Vice.com) appeared to speak at New York University, he was met by an angry mob that forced him to cut his talk short, while a woman who identified herself as an NYU professor urged police, whom she said were “protecting the Nazis” by keeping the crowd away from MacInnes and his entourage, to "kick their ass” instead of protecting them.

This stuff all looks terrible — so bad that Democrat operative Robert Reich was reduced to blaming “outside agitators” for the violence, a trope that, as law professor Ann Althouse noted, has unfortunate resonance with the Jim Crow era. And President Trump even tweeted that Berkeley should lose federal funding for its inability to ensure free speech rights for everyone on its campus.

Well, the rioters may or may not have been Berkeley students — as Althouse notes, since they were wearing masks, there’s really no way Reich could tell — but I think it’s safe to say that the rioting happened because they thought they could get away with it. (And with no arrests, I guess they did.) Likewise, I think that the staffers at Marquette didn’t entertain any thought that what they were doing might get them punished. (Nor, as far as I can tell, have they been).

That’s because there has evolved on our campuses a culture of impunity: Misbehavior on the part of lefty activists will get winked at, even as other groups (sports teams with sexist appearance rankings, say) get raked over the coals for minor misbehavior. This double standard is of a piece with many campuses openly taking sides over the election, treating Trump’s win like a terrorist attack, while investigating Trump supporters for racist allegations only to find no evidence that they had done anything except say “Make America Great Again,” as Babson College, a small school in Massachusetts, did. And as CNN's Marc Lamont Hill acknowledged, right-wing rioters are absent on college campuses.

Whether or not Berkeley loses its federal funding over the Milo riots (and it won’t), I think it’s time for action to address this double standard. First, state and local law enforcement agencies need to target violent rioters who seek to silence speakers. It is a felony under federal civil rights law to conspire to deprive citizens of their constitutional rights, among which is free speech. In addition, many states have laws (generally called Klan laws) that punish people who engage in mob violence or intimidation while masked. These should be applied as well.

Second, perhaps it’s time to have a Title IX-style law banning discrimination according to political viewpoints on campus. Many states (including California) already have laws banning discrimination in hiring and firing based on political viewpoints. Perhaps we need a federal civil rights law providing that colleges that receive federal funds (which is pretty much all of them) can lose those funds if they discriminate against students because of their political views.

Some colleges may complain that this is federal interference in their internal affairs, but given the limited resistance they’ve mounted to intrusive Title IX regulations, it will be hard to take such complaints seriously. America’s colleges and universities have a free speech problem. It’s appropriate for the federal government to take action to protect the civil rights of those affected.