Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, a self-proclaimed “reporter” with Inside Higher Ed, demonstrates that that publication is in lockstep with what is going on at colleges and universities nationwide: the demonization and forcible suppression of dissenting views. In this hit piece, he tries to make an issue of my responding to attacks upon me and my work that were published in the Stanford Daily and the Stanford Review. Apparently he thinks that I should have no right to respond, or that the attackers’ student status should give them immunity from being called out for their defamation and false statements.
Bauer-Wolf’s implication, of course, is that I endangered these students by responding to them, as it is a staple of Leftist fantasy that racist redneck MAGA-hat wearing right-wingers are brutalizing little Leftist snowflakes wantonly all over the country, when in reality the violent ones are the Leftist groups such as Antifa. In any case, it isn’t as if the people to whom I responded wrote anonymously, and then I found out who they were and named them — they signed their names to their hit pieces, and the fellow who was ripping down the posters advertising my event put up the video of himself doing so, so if they didn’t want to go public with their positions, they have no one to blame but themselves. And if Bauer-Wolf is claiming that I am endangering them simply by criticizing them, then one could never write critically of anyone, for one would be endangering them, and he would be endangering me by writing this hit piece.
More below.
“A Different Kind of Speech Debate,” by Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, Inside Higher Ed, November 15, 2017:
In building up to speech by anti-Muslim activist at Stanford, some questioned the appropriateness of hosting someone who has attacked students by name on his blog. Students stage walkout at event.
I am no more “anti-Muslim” than foes of the Nazis were anti-German.
In a digital war of words, Robert Spencer, widely considered to be an anti-Islam extremist, mocked Stanford University students who criticized him before his talk at the elite institution Tuesday night.
Widely — i.e., by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which Bauer-Wolf presents as a reliable guide to what constitutes “extremism.” He doesn’t bother to inform his hapless readers that the SPLC itself has been widely criticized for the obvious bias and sinister agenda of its “hate group” listings.
On his blog Spencer named students, posted photos and videos of them, and referred to them as “fascists.”
Bauer-Wolf here again misleads his readers, by not explaining that the people I named had already come out publicly denouncing me, and I was just responding to their attacks. And are they fascists? Yes. In The Coming of the Third Reich, historian Richard J. Evans explains how, in the early days of National Socialist Germany, Stormtroopers (Brownshirts) “organized campaigns against unwanted professors in the local newspapers [and] staged mass disruptions of their lectures.” If you behave the same way fascists did, maybe you are one.
Student organizations and faculty members publicly expressed deep concerns with both Spencer’s invitation to the campus (extended by the Stanford College Republicans) and his continuous “harassment” of students online.
My response to that hysterical and baseless attack is here.
Stanford administrators remained silent on specific blog posts by Spencer, but released multiple more general statements. One statement from President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Persis Drell did not reference Spencer, but promised an inclusive campus environment. They also at length defended the need for free speech in higher education.
But they were not really committed to free speech in higher education. Stanford officials orchestrated the walkout by allowing in students they knew to be opposed to my event, while keeping out those who were sympathetic. Even some members of the sponsoring group, the College Republicans, were not allowed in. Then after the walkout, they refused repeated requests to allow in students who wanted to attend but had been unable to get in. If Stanford were still a university in any valid sense, Tessier-Lavigne and Drell would be resigning in disgrace today.
On Tuesday night, hundreds protested Spencer’s speech outside the venue. More than 100 students opposed to Spencer entered the auditorium and took seats. Then shortly after he started to speak, they stood and walked out. They did so silently and did not attempt to disrupt the speech. Students posted photos to social media (at right) suggesting that only a small number of people remained in the room after the walkout.
As a private institution, Stanford has no constitutional obligation to allow Spencer on campus — it is governed by its own policies.
The Constitution is not at issue. What is at issue is the very mission and idea of a university, which is supposed to be a place where ideas are evaluated on their merits, and free inquiry is not just allowed, but encouraged.
The most recent announcement last Thursday, by Susie Brubaker-Cole, the vice provost for student affairs, and Jane Shaw, Stanford’s dean of religious life, acknowledged “the emotional impact” of Spencer’s visit, but said that nothing could “undercut the fact that Muslim students are an integral part of our community.”
“Significantly, in relation to the talk next week, the president and provost underscore our university’s commitment to freedom of expression, which allows groups in our community to host speakers of their choice provided university policies are followed and imparts upon each of us a responsibility to ensure that speech can proceed without disruption.
However, the president and provost also emphasize that this commitment empowers each of us to exercise our own free speech, “to call out hate when we see it,” and to speak forcefully and peacefully against injustice. These are values we know Stanford community members — of all faiths and none — feel deeply about.
My response is here.
Robert Spencer — who is unrelated to the white nationalist Richard Spencer, who has dominated headlines in recent months for his speeches at public colleges and universities — has been deemed by civil rights organization the Southern Poverty Law Center one of the country’s most “prolific and vociferous anti-Muslim propagandists.”
More info here on that so-called “civil rights organization.”
He was barred from the United Kingdom, where he and Pamela Geller, co-founders of the Stop Islamization of America group, were due to speak at a rally by another fringe conservative organization, in 2013 because his presence would “not be conducive to the public good,” according to statements from the U.K. government.
“Fringe” is a pejorative term that has no place in what is supposed to be a “news story.” In any case, the UK Home Office actually said that I was banned for saying: “[Islam] is a religion and is a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers,” yet that is an obvious and readily demonstrable fact that I’ve documented extensively on numerous occasions, and which many Muslim clerics themselves affirm.
Spencer has detailed his credentials deeply on his website — he has authored 17 books and delivered seminars on Islam to the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force. Fundamentally, he believes that Islam is a violent religion.
Spencer has disputed the SPLC’s characterization of him and questioned the center’s validity. In an email to Inside Higher Ed, Spencer wrote that SPLC has tried to destroy “legitimate organizations” and “stigmatize legitimate positions.” He wrote that his opposition to “jihad terror” has been lumped in with the likes of neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
Bauer-Wolf doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, that numerous organizations are noting this about the SPLC.
For at least a week, Spencer has responded on his blog Jihad Watch to multiple opinion writers in Stanford’s student press, at times dissecting the students’ and professors’ grievances with him line by line.
This is called “intellectual exchange.” That a “reporter” for Inside Higher Ed would think it something heinous shows the low state of the academic establishment today.
He has also criticized and identified students who have simply openly disagreed with his views or the event.
No. They identified themselves. I just responded.
In one post Monday, Spencer wrote about and identified one student, and linked to a 2016 article in the student newspaper The Stanford Daily, in which the student was quoted.
I had to hunt for this, since Bauer-Wolf doesn’t link to Jihad Watch, perhaps knowing how his scenario will be exploded if he does. I looked at all the posts about Stanford put up Monday, and there was nothing from 2016. I just responded to the attacks that the Stanford student press published that day. He is trying to give the impression that I went digging in order to defame and endanger students.
After a Muslim student published an essay titled “I Will Never Belong in the Stanford Community,” detailing her discomfort with Spencer, in the political student magazine The Stanford Review, Spencer sardonically picked apart nearly every sentence of it.
“Her piece here wringing her hands and claiming victim status over my scheduled appearance at Stanford next week is a masterpiece of self-dramatization, featuring outlandish claims that would have moved me to laughter were it not, hang it all, for the pathos of this poor girl’s plight. I shed a few tears in solidarity with her, while giggling behind my hat,” Spencer wrote.
She wrote it. It was a silly farrago of victimhood posturing, so I mocked it. She is above mockery and ridicule? Why? Here is my full response. Are we already living under Sharia now, such that Muslims are not to be criticized?
Spencer ridiculed in several posts made by another student — whom he referred to as a “fascist.” In the video, posted to Snapchat, someone purported to be the student is shown tearing down posters advertising Spencer’s event. The video was first flagged and written about by national right-wing group Young America’s Foundation, which orchestrates with campus conservative groups to schedule appearances by controversial speakers like Spencer.
Bauer-Wolf doesn’t tell you that the student himself posted the video. If he didn’t want to be known, he should have thought twice.
Then Bauer-Wolf goes into the funding for the event, obviously intending to prevent such funding in the future, and then:
…Asked if the university felt Spencer was inappropriate in naming students on his blog or whether it was grounds to refuse to host him, Miranda wrote in an email, “The university will be reviewing various issues related to this event after it has concluded.”
What are you going to do, Miranda? Prevent me from speaking? Persecute the College Republicans even more?
At least eight professors and others on Monday wrote in The Stanford Daily that Spencer’s blog has opened students and faculty members to harm.
Remember: he is saying I exposed them to harm by responding to their attacks. This is the bizarre world of Leftist academia, in which apparently one must suffer defamation in silence or be accused of further atrocities.
They said that while they respect free speech, Spencer’s actions need to be addressed by the university — they called on the institution to take “ethical action” as determined by its code of conduct. It is unclear if they were asking for Spencer’s invitation to be revoked….
Too late, but the fascists took care of business anyway.
Poor Jeremy Bauer-Wolf! When he sees this post he will be requesting a police escort to his safe space. But if this post, or my posts responding to Stanford students, faculty and administrators, are endangering them, how is his article not endangering me?