Virginia Universities Battling Free Speech

Three universities in Virginia associated with our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia, James Madison University, and George Mason University, are embroiled in free speech battles over what faculty, students, and employees can or cannot say.

Last week, UVa faculty released a letter to President Sullivan wherein they requested that she stop quoting Thomas Jefferson in mass emails to faculty, students, and employees.

Ostensibly, the rationale had something to do with the idea that Jefferson owned slaves when he wrote that “All men are created equal,” and that Jefferson’s writings do not convey a message of “diversity and inclusion.”

What’s going on here? This is a case of the left eating its own. The University of Virginia is a far left globalist institution. Some faculty are upset that President Sullivan is not far left enough, and that she still pays lip service to those who revere Jefferson.

Here is the reality. In an address to gathered alumni in June 2016, President Sullivan laid bare a globalist agenda for the university. Here are some of the phrases from her address:

I wonder if they have removed Henry Mann’s portrait from the Library at UVA. My great grandfather to the 11 - 14th generation back (I don’t remember what my mom told me) would be so disgusted with the idea that any human should be subordinate to any government.

It saddens me that people think the liberties we have here in the USA are so trivial they would forfeit them for Globalism.

The USA should have been filtering immigrants for a long time...and the basic two questions should have been 1) are you respectful of the beliefs of others and would you protect them and their beliefs as long as your beliefs did not subordinate any other persons and 2) can you provide answers to why people should not be subordinate to their government and should hold their government accountable for wrong doing?

That would have weeded out the illiterate and fundamentalist of all religions, the two groups causing most harm at this time.

When the tide is running against the left they drop their mask of classical liberalism and move to suppress speech.

It is not by accident that we see the movement on America's campuses, of all places, toward Orwellian control of speech evidencing itself at the same time that we see our failed president conferring with the discredited chancellor of Germany, both advocating censorship of the Internet. The left lost its election at home and the left lost the Brixet vote in Europe, the left now strikes back and moves to survive.

In their utopian worldview it is inconceivable that their version of government could be wrong, they must assume that the electorate is wrong, or better, deceived by the propaganda of the right which must be censored for the people's own good.

Living in Germany, I have often felt that the Germans have taken precisely the wrong lesson from the Holocaust. They believe that Hitler came to power through propaganda and the remedy for that is to forbid malicious propaganda and as a consequence we see laws forbidding denial of the Holocaust, for example. We see throughout Europe and increasingly in Canada and on the American campuses criminalization of "hate" speech. This is precisely the wrong lesson, the Germans should turn toward the Enlightenment and fight propaganda with free speech. We believe this in our bones and that is why we have New York Times versus Sullivan which frees political speech and unshackles its from the chilling effect of libel suits. This reaction is so common to our American understanding as to be but a banal observation but, believe me, it's is a doctrine foreign to the soul of this part of Europe.

The great danger of the German approach is, of course, that the government gets on the wrong side of the definition of propaganda, as we see they are now doing respecting Islamic terrorism, Christian proselytizing, and "hate speech" wherever the government finds it inconvenient.

How often do we see one leftist threat after another marching across Europe and at the same time popping up like weeds in America? Just as progressivism leapt over the Atlantic Ocean at the turn of the last century and countless examples thereafter, so now censorship is being imported.

Great cartoon, thanks!

Great article with many interesting examples of leftist hypocrisy.

1. Sullivan speech: “global”, “global”, “global”, ....

Speech Analysis: tediously repetitious, sophomoric, propaganda.

2. Note that the lecturer who was fired for posting the truth (or at the very least a mainstream conservative opinion backed by a lot of evidence and facts) was from the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Logic has no place in the liberal world view. I’m surprised that liberal schools don’t completely abolish engineering departments. There is too much danger of logical thought and logical students don’t march in lockstep with the liberal propaganda.

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