Writing at Townhall.com, national best-selling author David Limbaugh, a staunch conservative, excoriated DePaul University for banning Daily Wire Editor-In-Chief Ben Shapiro from speaking on its campus. Limbaugh, a longtime friend of Shapiro’s who recommended him for the Supreme Court in 2005 on Hannity and Colmes, three days after columnist Ann Coulter made the same recommendation, wrote approvingly, “Shapiro has been so effective that campus liberals obviously regard him as a threat — a clear and present danger to their Stalinist mindset.”
Limbaugh began his essay by stating, “The discerning have long recognized that the true enemies of free speech are certain leftist progressives who believe their ideas are so superior and their opponents so toxic that protection for the latter isn’t warranted. The left is practiced at painting conservatives as oppressive and intolerant, but their behavior repeatedly undermines their claims and exposes them as the intolerant speech fascists and thought controllers.”
Limbaugh segued to pointing out that the converse is simply not true, as he offered a comprehensive list of ways in which conservatives, not liberals, are the representatives of tolerance:
You won’t see conservatives advocating the muzzling of political opponents or promoting the Fairness Doctrine and campus speech codes. You won’t see Republican administrations excluding reporters or news organizations from press briefings because they don’t parrot the White House’s narrative. You won’t often encounter liberals concealing their opinions on campuses or Hollywood or their places of employment for fear of backlash. You won’t see conservatives ever trying to send kooky leftists to sensitivity training to compel them — “1984”-style — to conform to their worldview. You won’t see conservative professors (excuse the contradiction) overtly indoctrinating students and creating a climate of ridicule toward liberal students. You’ll rarely see a college administration reprimanding a liberal professor (excuse the tautology) for exposing his class to an opposing viewpoint — one certain students find unbearably “offensive.” You won’t see conservatives creating “safe spaces” to protect their delicate adherents from feeling uncomfortable through exposure to “troubling” or “triggering” ideas. You won’t see the right using defamatory catchwords like racist, sexist, homophobe or xenophobe to demonize, ostracize and muzzle leftist expression.
Then Limbaugh trains the crosshairs on DePaul, while delineating why Shapiro is a threat to the left:
And you won’t find conservative groups pressuring universities to ban liberal speakers from their campuses. Which brings me to the primary subject at hand.
My good friend, Ben Shapiro, a one-time child prodigy who has now become a polemical force of nature as an adult, has recently experienced the ubiquitous leftist fascism inhabiting college campuses. Ben, at age 32, has not only written six best-selling books, but has a nationally syndicated column and a very successful radio show.
Despite all that, what initially propelled Ben into national prominence was his delicious television takedown of liberal snob Piers Morgan on Morgan’s former CNN show on the subject of gun control.
More recently, Shapiro has distinguished himself with powerful podcasts on current events and a campus speaking tour wherein he systematically demolishes the left’s tyrannical political correctness and assault on free speech.
Indeed, Shapiro has been so effective that campus liberals obviously regard him as a threat — a clear and present danger to their Stalinist mindset. They have protested his appearances, disrupted his speeches, threatened him and lied about his message.
But the latest predictable outrage is that DePaul University has banned Shapiro from appearing on campus, under the ludicrous and specious pretense of “security concerns.”
If there are security concerns, neither Shapiro nor his admirers are causing them. As Shapiro’s sponsor, Young America’s Foundation said, “Make no mistake, any security concerns we face on campuses are 100 percent incited by the censorious, intolerant left.”
Limbaugh cites numerous statistics illuminating the tremendous bias on college campuses toward leftism before concluding: “Shame on DePaul for betraying academic freedom. This is further proof not just that the left doesn’t practice the tolerance it preaches, but is mortified that its ideas could be exposed to the disinfecting light of truth.”