Stanford University is a prime example of the fascism that has taken hold on our nation’s campuses, and this piece is an excellent example of it. Student Eliane Mitchell argues for the forcible suppression of certain unwelcome ideas, a quintessentially fascist act, and their banning from being aired and discussed on campuses such as Stanford, on the basis of the spurious and wholly unsubstantiated claim that discussion of such ideas endangers groups of students: Charles Murray’s ideas supposed endanger “students of color,” and mine supposedly endanger Muslim students, and therefore we should be allowed no platform.
If Ms. Mitchell wants to investigate a place where unwelcome ideas really do place people in danger, she can talk to atheists in Tunisia, or Christians in Nigeria. Or she can talk to me; I was poisoned by one of her fellow Left-fascists last year in Iceland because he didn’t like my stand against jihad mass murder and Sharia oppression.
In the course of making her case, Mitchell says that I make “empirically unsubstantiated claims.” Her link on that phrase below goes to an earlier Stanford Daily hit piece on Murray, who can, of course, take care of himself. But the unsubstantiated nature of Mitchell’s claim that I make unsubstantiated claims recalls the uproar at Stanford when I actually answered the many hit pieces that the Daily published about me in advance of my appearance there last November; some people who are actually Stanford professors even accused me of “harassing” the student writers by answering their attacks point-by-point — a chilling illustration of how little free thought and free inquiry are valued today at Stanford.
Stanford University clearly has lost all idea of what a professor should be, and what a university should be. In reality, instead of being an indoctrination center for a certain set of ideas (labeled “diverse” but actually quite monochromatic), a university should be a place where, as Mitchell puts it, students are exposed “to a wide range of ideas” so as to “help them clarify their own views.” This is nothing to be afraid of; it’s actually the basis of becoming informed citizens of a free republic who can make their own choices and guide their own destinies. Professors should be facilitating and encouraging, not trying to block (as in the case of the drearily doctrinaire fascist Stanford prof David Palumbo-Liu) students’ exposure to ideas that may be unpopular or that they have not considered before.
And when students such as Eliane Mitchell make empirically unsubstantiated claims, professors should challenge them to provide evidence for them, and to formulate and present that evidence cogently in the face of intellectual challenge from others with differing views. So despite the fact that Stanford administrators and students made sure that I would be heard by as few students as possible when I was there, by engineering a walkout of the hall and then forbidding students who wanted to enter from coming in, I am hereby offering to take upon myself the task that Stanford’s President Marc Tessier-Levigne and Provost Persis Drell, as well as other Stanford administrators and faculty, are so abysmally failing to do: provide Stanford students an education.
I respectfully challenge Ms. Mitchell or anyone else at the Stanford Daily, or anyone else at Stanford at all, to substantiate her claim that I make “empirically unsubstantiated claims.” I will meet anyone of Stanford’s choosing in free and open debate to discuss these supposedly unsubstantiated claims. I will travel to Stanford at my own expense, and hire my own security against the student fascists there, for this debate.
I look forward to hearing from you, Stanford. But let’s just say I won’t be waiting by the phone.
“The (reckless) wind of freedom blows,” by Eliane Mitchell, Stanford Daily, March 6, 2018:
…Let me be clear before continuing on: I agree with the practical thrust of the sentiment that has defended Murray’s invitation (and those of speakers like him) to campus at its core – exposing students to a wide range of ideas at university might help them clarify their own views. But in the university’s insistence in maintaining this “ideal” – that is, a marketplace of ideas where all speakers are equally respected – it often forgets how coded this ideal has become.
This coding is exemplified in its asymmetrical impacts, whereby students of color (and Muslim students in the case of Robert Spencer’s appearance) shoulder the burden of opposing the empirically unsubstantiated claims that controversial speakers hold. Students take on that burden, while the university’s administrators remain complacent, confident that they have done their job. But as Professor David Palumbo-Liu so aptly put it at the protest, the students who attended the protest against Charles Murray paid an emotional tax to be there, in an effort to clear the gaslight and myths about race-determined cognitive capacities that he perpetuates. I highly doubt that Malcolm Gladwell’s appearance on campus, who too has been known to dole out contested research, would have inspired the same intellectual opposition, let alone as much fear….