Free Republic

UPDATE: This piece has been updated to reflect statements from Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Cornell Student Assembly president Valeria Valencia and Speech First.The Cornell University Student Assembly unanimously voted in March to approve a resolution that would require instructors to inform students about “traumatic content” being discussed in class.The university rejected this proposal because it violates academic freedom and freedom of inquiry, according to an email obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.“Faculty must also be free to provide trigger warnings if they so choose, but it must be a decision left up to the faculty member...

Washington -- Are you familiar with the work of professor Simon Gottschalk? I have only become familiar with his work recently, but I commend it to you. He is a professor of sociology with the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He apparently watches a lot of television in the course of his work, and he even takes notes. He has come up with a brilliant, if alarming, insight. According to the professor, television assists in spreading the "infantilization of the West." For instance, if you have seen a grown man wearing shorts as winter approaches, pay attention. Probably, he...

You have to be a special kind of soft to require a trigger warning before anything. For those of you who are normal, whose parents loved them and have developed normal friendships with other human beings, a trigger warning is a note before some bit of information or words that might upset people. Again, not for normal people. For normal people this is just called life. For leftists, the participation ribbon generation who scream about opposing fascism while following in Hitler’s footsteps, a trigger warning is not only a requirement, it’s another opportunity to claim victim status, the most-coveted position...

The abject stupidity of the triggered left knows no bounds. According to Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), the National Archives in Washington, DC has added a disclaimer to their website saying that some of our historical documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution may contain “harmful content.” Boebert tweeted: “The National Archives have now put a disclaimer on their website that our historical documents may include Harmful Content. They even slapped this warning on the Constitution. We tried to tell you the Left wanted to get rid of it!” Lest you think we are making this up,...

Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher warned against the dangers of identity politics in his Christmas morning homily, suggesting that today’s snowflakes risk falling victims to a toxic narcissism. “As desires change, we can revise our bodies surgically or our beliefs ideologically,” the archbishop said. “But reducing ourselves to our tastes or to a single attribute risks neglecting other important things about us.” “Amidst celebrity adulation and identity politics, narcissism is now endemic. Too much focus on identity can be distorting,” he warned. Preaching to a standing room-only crowd of some 2,000 Catholics at St. Mary’s Cathedral Wednesday morning, Fisher said that...

A new study out of Harvard—the first randomized controlled experiment designed to examine the effects of trigger warnings on individual resilience—may indicate that Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt were right about trigger warnings.In the fall of 2015, Greg Lukianoff, First Amendment Lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (for which I work), and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU’s Stern School of Business, published an article in The Atlantic. In it, they detailed how college campuses may inadvertently promote mental habits identical to the “cognitive distortions” that cognitive behavioral...

People like thinking the best of themselves, which is partially why we have “trigger warnings,” “microaggressions” and claims of “taking offense” -- so these complainers don’t have to come to terms with the fact they’re spoiled, self-absorbed, tyrannical brats. Here’s how it works: when accusing you of “microaggressing,” the truth is that, generally, these snowflakes just don’t happen to like what you’re saying. But shouting “Shut up! I hate that type of expression!” makes you seem intolerant. So to preserve your image and self-image, you use the ploy of shifting the onus onto the one whose speech you want to...

I was disinvited from a college debate on the campus of the State University of New York in New Paltz last March. Left-wing professors didn’t want to hear me debate a left-winger on media coverage of the elections. It was the first time in academic history, to my knowledge, that an actual debate was cancelled because of faculty objections to one side of the debate. The ban proved to be embarrassing to the president of the university. Reminded in a letter from me that his campus website proclaims a devotion to free speech, he invited me back on October 20....

The University of Chicago's president, Dr. Robert J. Zimmer, wrote a Wall Street Journal article, titled "Free Speech Is the Basis of a True Education." In it, he wrote: "Free speech is at risk at the very institution where it should be assured: the university. Invited speakers are disinvited because a segment of a university community deems them offensive, while other orators are shouted down for similar reasons. Demands are made to eliminate readings that might make some students uncomfortable. Individuals are forced to apologize for expressing views that conflict with prevailing perceptions. In many cases, these efforts have been...

"WE DO NOT SUPPORT SO-CALLED 'TRIGGER WARNINGS,’ WE DO NOT CANCEL INVITED SPEAKERS BECAUSE THEIR TOPICS MIGHT PROVE CONTROVERSIAL, AND WE DO NOT CONDONE THE CREATION OF INTELLECTUAL ‘SAFE SPACES.'"

For some time now, sages and scholars have been alleging that so-called "trigger warnings" curtail vigorous debate on campus. It turns out that the allegation is more than mere hyperbole. "In college debate, which, unlike high school debate, is mostly student-run, it is a common practice to give trigger warnings before discussing 'sensitive' topics, and if a debater requests it, the topic must be changed," Daniel Charnis wrote in a special supplement to The Chronicle of Higher Education. "In addition, each tournament designates an 'equity officer,' who is also a student debater, to ensure that all debaters are given equal...

<p>What do campus microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings, speech codes and censorship have to do with higher learning?</p> <p>American universities want it both ways. They expect unquestioned subsidized support from the public, but also to operate in a way impossible for anyone else.</p>

By NY Post Editorial Board Commentary by John Velisek USN (Ret), CiR Staff Writer “Move over, trigger warnings, and make way for full-blown censorship. Students and staff at Wesleyan University are demanding the school cut funding to its own newspaper, The Wesleyan Argus, for publishing a column questioning the Black Lives Matter movement. What’s in this piece of blasphemy? The op-ed asks BLMers to ‘rethink how’ they’re approaching the problem of racial injustice and recommends they distance themselves from the ‘vilification and denigration of the police.’ Sounds pretty reasonable to us. Not to some in the ever-outraged Wesleyan community. Until...

Invoking Hitler usually is done by an over-the-top left-wing politician about something a Republican did which has nothing to do with the actual situation. Using the name of Hitler for a Jew in any other context than historical debates or reminiscing about Mel Brooks’ The Producers should always be done with great caution. But the stifling of free speech permeating our society warrants this deviation from my long-standing policy. To me there remains nothing as sacrosanct as protecting rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution. As I often repeat, there is a reason it is the First Amendment. My...

Back in the day, when bosses and CEOs got a little too attentive to detail, we would wryly note that they were “micromanaging.” Today, students actually want university administrators to micromanage free speech, putting the First Amendment at risk. “Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt write in the latest issue of The Atlantic. “Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a...

".....There are good reasons why society admires courage and despises cowardice. Fear is one of the primary subjects taught in primary and secondary schools both public and private. Teaching fear to young people is a kind of collective child abuse. We are raising a generation of paranoid neurotics. Our children are being taught, erroneously, that individuals and the environment are delicate and fragile. ....Those who are the most paranoid seem to know the least about the objects of their anxieties. For example, fear of genetically modified foods, glutens, and hydraulic fracturing are based almost solely on complete ignorance of these...

Guy Benson: In “End of Discussion” we have a really fun, very short portion of a chapter that deals with this whole nomenclature on college campuses of “trigger warnings” and “privilege” — there’s a whole list of them. “Microaggressions” is a big one. And towards the end of this chapter on academia we examine the very interesting case of Elizabeth Warren, who is a white woman. That is – the science is in, and she is a white woman. Yet for years, she identified, self-identified wrongly based on family folklore that she was a Native American. And she benefited tremendously...

Every time we seem to have reached peak insanity when it comes to the intellectually constipated and socially stultifying atmosphere on today’s college campuses, some new story manages to reveal vast new and untapped reservoirs of ridiculousness. In a world of trigger warnings, microaggressions, and official apologies featuring misgendered pronouns that start a whole new round of accusations, wonders never cease. So when ’60s-radical-turned-Reagan-fanboy David Horowitz shows up at University of North Carolina to equate Islam with terrorism for the thousandth time, the student body gets the vapors, tries to shut him down, and creates the hashtag #notsafeUNC. When a...