Former Colorado congressman Tom Tancredo was recently invited to the University of North Carolina to share his views on U.S. immigration policy and tuition subsidies. Even before he began his talk in a UNC classroom on April 14, protesters stood with signs and banners, shouted obscenities and otherwise behaved rudely.
Just a few minutes into his speech, when Tancredo made a reference to illegal immigrants, demonstrators moved to the front of the room, blocking the audience’s view of Tancredo with a banner that read: “No one is illegal.” Seconds later, one of the protesters broke a window. University security officers, standing by, shut down the event.
That was it. The speech was vetoed by uncivil, violent dissenters intent on denying Tancredo’s willing audience their right to hear his message.
An angry, chanting mob at UNC labeled Tancredo a racist and a radical. He’s most certainly neither. He’s opposed to illegal immigration, regardless of race. And there’s hardly anything radical about securing our borders and enforcing our immigration laws. What is radical in this instance is the behavior of these student demonstrators and their implicit notion that the U.S. should have open borders.
Their beef that “no one is illegal” is an offense to liberal, politically correct phraseology. So let’s rephrase it. The immigration status of people who cross our borders or remain in this country without the permission of our government is illegal. There, is that better?
If you treasure our Constitution’s guarantee of your individual right to freedom of speech, you must necessarily extend that protection to others — including those with whom you disagree. You must also take the risk that other people will listen to them, just as you want people to listen to you. If you refuse to make such allowances, your hypocrisy undermines the fundamental principle of free speech and endangers its very existence.
The First Amendment is not absolute in any of its applications, from speech to religion to assembly. Libelous speech is not protected; religious freedom does not extend to human sacrifice; and freedom of assembly doesn’t give you license to trespass on someone else’s property. But one’s free speech cannot legally be muzzled simply because someone else disapproves of it.
How ironic that left-wing college activism was launched at the University of California- Berkeley in the 1960s as the “Free Speech Movement.”
For today’s college lefties, free speech is a one-way street. They justify this double standard with an arrogant, self-absorbed, self- righteous belief that the ends justify the means, that they alone have a monopoly on truth, and that heretics cannot be tolerated. The broken glass that halted Tancredo’s speech is a symbolic flashback to the forebears of these UNC student thugs: the SS and Hitler Youth gangs that terrorized Jews. The violence is only different in degree. Student lefties have pushed pies in the faces of conservative speakers on campus. On principle, that is no less an affront to the First Amendment than clubs or guns.
These militant brats childishly call others “fascists” without understanding the meaning of the term while behaving like fascists themselves. But even more inexcusable is the complicity of grownups, those feckless university administrators responsible for protecting dialog and inquiry at centers of higher learning who allow students to stifle free speech.
E-mail Mike Rosen at mikerosen@850koa.com.
