Credit for Trying?

Thanks to Jack Stephens for letting me know about this item: a recent Los Angeles Times column by Meghan Daum (link via Patterico):

THE EVENTS at Columbia University on Oct. 4, in which about a dozen students stormed a stage where the founder of an anti-illegal immigration group was speaking, didn't exactly resemble those of April 1968. There were no arrests, no soundtrack by the Grateful Dead, no occupation of the president's office. But considering that most young people are considered to be politically apathetic, you have to credit the Chicano Caucus and the International Socialist Organization for trying.

The speaker, Jim Gilchrist of the Minuteman Project, a citizen's border patrol group, had been invited to campus by the Columbia University College Republicans. Reports in the New York Times said students holding banners reading "No One Is Illegal" jumped on the stage and were soon joined by dozens more protesters as well as supporters of Gilchrist. Protesters later said Gilchrist was knocked backward and his glasses were broken. The student newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, reported that "one student was kicked in the head and bleeding."

(Emphasis added-DD)


So radical thugs essentially stage a riot in order to suppress speech they disagree with, and Ms. Daum believes that they deserve credit for trying?


After soliciting the views of former Weather Underground terrorist Kevin Rudd, Ms. Daum concludes her column as follows:

Still, I'll give them an A (OK, maybe a B+) for trying. So does Rudd.

"I'm not going to point a finger at these kids and say you're a hoodlum fascist," he said. "I'm just going to wait and see what they do." In other words, it's not Columbia's president who has to get his hands around this. It's young activists themselves.


Well, allow me then "to point a finger at these kids and say you're a hoodlum fascist", because that's exactly what they are. They arrogated to themselves the right to violently suppress the free speech rights of others, in a place that is supposed to be committed to the free exchange of ideas.

Unfortunately, that such behavior would occur on a university campus doesn't surprise me. What does surprise me is the reaction of a supposed adult like Ms. Daum, whose reaction is to say "ohhh, look at the cute little activists, you have to give them credit for trying". Had this been right-wing activists disrupting a speech by someone like Kevin Rudd, would Ms. Daum react quite so flippantly? Somehow, I doubt it.