Posted on 11/01/2013 8:15:00 AM PDT by Kaslin
When New York City's strikingly successful police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, arrived to address students at Brown University, he was harassed, booed and heckled for 30 long minutes. "Racism is not for debate," they shouted. A university official pleaded with the goons, er, students to permit Kelly to speak, reminding them that they would be free to express disagreement during the Q-and-A session afterwards. "Shout him down!" responded a man in the audience, and the crowd did.
Episodes like this are tolerated in America because college faculties, administrators and the press almost uniformly share the students' prejudices and haven't the spine or the integrity to uphold boring American values like free expression. Brown's president issued a wan apology noting that it was a "sad day" for the university, but there were no suspensions or other punishments for those who organized and carried out this thuggish intimidation. Instead, the university will convene "a forum for the campus to discuss our values and expectations as a community." That'll help.
These outrages get noticed in the conservative press and largely ignored by others. It goes without saying that such tolerance for intolerance would not prevail if conservative students behaved this way toward, say, an advocate of same-sex marriage.
Members of the press indulge left-wing students, imagining that their hearts are in the right place, even if their heads are a little hot.
Is that really true? Consider that Kelly has presided over a policing regime in New York City that has resulted in poor and minority neighborhoods seeing victimization drop to levels not seen since 1963. New York's crime rate is the lowest among big cities in the United States. The most dangerous neighborhoods, which are majority black and Hispanic, have seen the greatest improvements in quality of life.
As Kelly noted on "Meet the Press" last summer, during the past 11 years, there have been 7,363 fewer murders than during the preceding 11 years. Based on victimization patterns in New York, that means there are about 7,000 more black and Hispanic young men alive today than would have been the case absent Kelly's leadership. The homicide rate for Chicago teens, for example, is four times that of New York.
Self-styled "activists" such as those at Brown (along with Al Sharpton, would-be mayor Bill de Blasio and the federal judge who ruled "stop and frisk" unconstitutional) claim to speak for the poor and minorities. But who speaks for the majority of law-abiding blacks and Hispanics bullied and harmed by criminals in their housing projects and neighborhoods? As Heather Mac Donald of City Journal points out, "the per-capita rate of shooting in Brownsville, Brooklyn, is 81 times higher than in Bay Ridge, which explains the why the stop rate in Brownsville is 15 times higher."
Mac Donald urges doubters to speak to people like Ivan De Bord, who acknowledges that he was himself stopped by police many times when he was younger. He's now an apartment superintendent in the South Bronx. De Bord welcomes police attention to his building, to keep at bay the gang who colonized the lobby, "smoking (weed), selling drugs, peeing everywhere, not respecting people, playing dice. It's very bad."
It's so easy and, frankly, cheap for Brown students to fancy themselves more enlightened and compassionate toward minorities than Ray Kelly. Most of them come from upper middle class communities. Only about 15 percent of Brown students get Pell grants, for example, which are awarded to students from low-income households. According to The Brown Daily Herald, about 44 percent of the 2012 class received financial aid, meaning the other 56 percent managed to pay the roughly $55,000 yearly fee out of pocket.
Even many of the minority students at places like Brown are not from poor families. A study in the American Journal of Education found that a significant percentage of black students at highly selective institutions were from middle-class immigrant families.
Brown, like other highly selective schools, is dominated by students who've never had to look over their shoulders on their walk to school, worry about whether the drug dealer on the corner is armed, or cower in their apartments for fear of gangs.
Ray Kelly has dramatically improved the lives of poor and minority New Yorkers. That he should be shouted down as a racist is ignorant and fascistic. That Brown tolerates this -- however sadly -- is contemptible.
Any money from the federal government finding its way to Brown in any form (grants, scholarships, tuition aid) should be completely cut off.
That will get the attention of the punks a lot faster than holding hands and singing Kumbaya.
There is a strong totalitarian streak in liberalism.
Liberals are all about tolerance and free speech and such, as long as you are shouting liberal ideas or slogans.
Anyone wanting to discuss conservative ideas will be silenced. The liberals who are so tolerant insist on silencing anyone who deviates from liberal group think.
Slightly off topic, but the liberal Juan Williams is a prime example. After being fired from NPR, and the head of NPR suggesting that William talk to his psychiatrist about his fear of Muslim men, the conservative leaning Fox News gave him a full time job. Juan is liberal as ever on the air, from what I hear, but, the point is, he has a place to speak freely on the conservative leaning network. While the very liberal NPR fired him.
A harbinger of what all those scu&bags will do when they gain absolute power.
IMHO
Those who fear cannot hear.
Those who shout have the fear of doubt.
All is well when all think the same,
No fear, no doubt, no blame, no shame - - - .
I’m not thrilled with stop and frisk but I am also not trilled that the left is slouching toward their totalitarian roots.
This is the civil and sophisticated left, so urbane and intellectually superior, willing to listen to all sides of an issue.
We have to respond in kind.
There really is no other choice, and CW-II will be the proof.
Wanna bet lots of them are involved in zero’s little band of bandits that he wants to be as strong our military?
I don’t want to sound over the top but this is beginning to get scary. The band that got fired for halloween because they weren’t black at Hampshire College? The cabinet secretary that compared evangelicals to the Muslim Brotherhood? Ray Kelly gets hooted down like Brown University is a Nazi beerhall? How far away are we from re-education camps in Alaska? Seriously - they pretend they are independent thinkers that value individualism but they’re just a group-think mob.
“Juan is liberal as ever on the air, from what I hear, but, the point is, he has a place to speak freely on the conservative leaning network. While the very liberal NPR fired him.”
Fox isn’t conservatie, and the Juan Williams affair demonstrated that for any doubters. The left doesn’t give conservatives a forum for their views, and right shouldn’t accomodate the leftists that fall out of favor with the Dems.
This reminds me of Columbia - They have a dinner for Ahmadinejad and they are all wide-eyed with admiration while he spoke. Then when Ann Coulter came it was non-stop hostility, I think they even threw a pie at her or maybe that was at another college, but of course missed because male liberals throw like John Kerry.
With DeBlasio about to become mayor of NYC, I hope that Kelly resigns before he is sworn in...
There is a strong totalitarian streak in liberalism.
One recent example was the IRS targeting Tea Party and other conservative groups. Progressives saw nothing wrong with that.
Liberal motto:
Free speech for me, but not for thee”
Anyone who sent their kids to Brown is probably in full agreement with this attack on free speech.
Duh. Everyone thinks this is cute and wants to keep up the “imagine if they were Tea Partyers” mantra.
Unless you take back the media and education our freedoms and our wealth are gone.
I have more or less quit watching Fox news. Can’t stand their ‘fair and balanced’ schtick. Every time they have someone that makes sense on they have someone with them that is unhinged spouting Obama talking points.
It is actually simpler than that. If Kelly were lying, that could easily be proven. It is because he is telling the (uncomfortable) truth that he has to be silenced.
Those protesters who are not students (bussed in) need to be prosecuted for trespass and public disruption...
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