University of Maryland administrators told its Turning Point USA chapter that it may not be able to host a Daily Wire journalist on Wednesday, unless the chapter pays for extensive additional security.
The event, featuring Daily Wire Senior Editor Cabot Phillips, is virtually identical to the classes that occur every day on college campuses — except with an affable, center-right journalist at the head of the room instead of a cantankerous leftist professor.
That The Daily Wire has exposed not one, but two University of Maryland presidents for plagiarism — including the president of its flagship College Park campus, Darryll Pines, whose capitulation to Hamas supporters this publication has also chronicled — suggests that the college’s motives for the security requirement may be less than honorable.
Turning Point isn’t being charged for security because its members might be unruly. It’s because the university believes that its own students will commit ideologically motivated violence — and, instead of addressing that, it’s punishing their prospective victims. The group’s founder, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated on a college campus six weeks ago, ending a career dedicated to facilitating ideological diversity and open debate at universities.
Maryland has taken the wrong lesson from that assassination.
Conservatives make up the majority of the voting public, as evidenced by the most recent national popular vote. If being exposed to center-right ideas is so unusual for college students that it would trigger violent rage, that’s the issue. Coming across someone like Phillips on campus shouldn’t be cause for violence. It should be just another Wednesday.
The move continues a pattern of selective commitment to free speech for Pines, who vociferously defended an anti-Israel group’s right to mark the first anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, then threatened to call the police on a Jewish woman for complaining about it.
Jewish parents asked Pines, who is Black, to engage in a thought experiment: would he be as supportive if the KKK were burning crosses on campus? The analogy went right over his head, and in a twist of unfathomable irony, Pines banned all events that day because of what he suggested were anti-black threats and the prospect of violence by Jews. Then he paid the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, which proudly says it supports “armed struggle,” a $100,000 settlement when they filed suit over the cancellation.
His latest move suggests that it was a payoff to his allies, not a recognition of the need to preserve free speech.
Campus police told TPUSA that because of an “increase in threats related to Turning Point events,” police would staff the event, while TPUSA would be required to hire a security firm at its own expense to “conduct metal/weapons detection and bags checks upon entry.”
Lawyers from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) told the university that if increased security is required, “the law does not allow public institutions to shift this increased burden to the targeted group.”
“Doing so gives those most willing to engage in political violence the ability to silence or burden their opponents through the agency of the state. Raising costs on TPUSA in the wake of its leader’s assassination is a stark reminder of how literally deadly such a perverse incentive can be.”
In other words, UMD would be carrying water for terrorists.
“With the precedent UMD has set here, any student or community member could announce plans to disrupt a group’s campus event, and encourage others to do so, in the hope that UMD would respond by financially burdening the group,” FIRE wrote.
University of Maryland Associate General Counsel Christopher Lord replied with a denial that the fee was based on viewpoint. He said one of the factors the university uses to determine required security is “the history of similar events and/or of performer/speakers at other locations,” and invoked “the tragic assassination of Mr. Kirk.”
Lord also acknowledged that earlier this month, on October 7, the university bore the cost for hundreds of thousands of dollars for a “Boycott Israel fest,” as well as pro-Israel counter-protesters.
He said the university is more likely to cover costs for outdoor events due to a Fourth Circuit Court ruling deeming outdoor spaces “limited public forums.” That suggests that if the university has a commitment to free speech, it’s to the extent that a court forced it to, and that, ironically, it doesn’t apply in classrooms themselves. If a group like Turning Point wants to avoid fees, it can hold an event outdoors — like the sort at which Kirk was assassinated.
Making the situation all the more outlandish is that the Daily Wire personality at the center of this controversy, Cabot Phillips, is unaccustomed to being the center of controversy. Phillips is not an opinion commentator like Ben Shapiro or Michael Knowles; he is the genial and cheery personality at the center of news broadcasts like Morning Wire.
As Conor Clayton of the Maryland Turning Point chapter told us, Phillips is “not controversial.”
“It’s very strange that they would make this determination that there would be massive protests or threats,” Clayton said. Representatives for the University of Maryland and its parent organization didn’t respond when we asked if they could identify a single inflammatory statement by Phillips.
Given that Clayton told us that his chapter hosted another indoor event at a campus chapel, a vigil for Kirk, without being charged for security, that suggests that the Daily Wire’s involvement may be the critical wrinkle in this already sorry state of affairs.
Pines is currently under investigation for blatant plagiarism, which was exposed by The Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak. It has been more than a year since Pines admitted “recurrent language” in an academic paper after it was unearthed by what he called “a blogger,” and he has faced no accountability.
This month, The Daily Wire exposed a second president of a Maryland campus, University of Maryland Eastern Shore’s Heidi Anderson, for massive plagiarism. All of this suggests a significant moral rot under the leadership of Jay Perman, the chancellor of the state’s public university system.
The security fee in question is minimal, just $150. But as Clayton lays out, that’s not the point.
“It’s really not about the monetary amount, it’s about ensuring that the university commits itself to the First Amendment,” Clayton told us. “This is a prior restraint on our free speech, because if we don’t pay this fee we can’t have the event.”
“It’s really a slap in the face. Charlie Kirk, literally all he did is talk with people and share a conservative message, and they killed him for it. The university sees that and instead of trying to encourage conservative speech, they’re doing everything they can to restrict our speech.”
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