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Wellesley Editors: If You Don’t Say What We Want, ‘Hostility May Be Warranted’

   DailyWire.com

The editors of Wellesley College’s student newspaper, The Wellesley News, wrote an editorial protesting that free speech is not violated at the high-ranking all-women’s college. The editorial started by attempting to debunk the notion that Wellesley is not a free speech-friendly campus, stating:

However, we fundamentally disagree with that characterization, and we disagree with the idea that free speech is infringed upon at Wellesley. Rather, our Wellesley community will not stand for hate speech, and will call it out when possible.

Automatically, this verbiage shows cognitive dissonance. “Hate speech” is in the eye of the beholder; as has been noted many times, the First Amendment does not have a “hate speech” exception. By insinuating the existence of so-called “hate speech,” the door is opened to a rational expectation that certain types of speech are not acceptable. That is exactly what the editorial does:

Wellesley students are generally correct in their attempts to differentiate what is viable discourse from what is just hate speech. Wellesley is certainly not a place for racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia or any other type of discriminatory speech. Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech. The founding fathers put free speech in the Constitution as a way to protect the disenfranchised and to protect individual citizens from the power of the government. The spirit of free speech is to protect the suppressed, not to protect a free-for-all where anything is acceptable, no matter how hateful and damaging.

Not only do these student editors demonstrate their lack of commitment to free speech by excluding the “hateful” expression, they deliberately mischaracterize the Framers’ intent of incorporating the Bill of Rights in the first place. Back when the British controlled the colonies, the Americans could not freely publish their grievances against the tyrannical British monarchy and they could not freely express them in a public forum. The Framers understood that the government created for “We The People” had to be limited in scope to ensure that the right to free speech endowed by our Creator would not be infringed. It never solely protected speech just for the “suppressed,” as the Left tends to claim.

The students use the middle part of their editorial to talk about the status of discourse on Wellesley’s campus, insinuating that students have been exposed to viewpoints that they find problematic and hateful. In their view, “these questionable claims should be mitigated by education as opposed to personal attacks.” Ironically, as soon as they claim it is wiser to use their education and ideas to challenge other viewpoints, they rationalize the use of violence in the event that speech becomes too hostile.

This being said, if people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted. If people continue to support racist politicians or pay for speakers that prop up speech that will lead to the harm of others, then it is critical to take the appropriate measures to hold them accountable for their actions.

This is the same fascistic logic that justified Antifa trashing buildings at UC Berkeley during a Milo Yiannopoulos appearance, led to students at Middlebury battering a professor who interviewed Dr. Charles Murray, and caused Black Lives Matter thugs at Claremont McKenna to censor Heather MacDonald last week. In other words, if the campus Left believes that someone spews hate speech, then they have every right to act with hostility by any means necessary to show their righteous indignation over views they strongly disagree with. This statement completely contradicts everything that these students claim to support, especially free speech and the First Amendment of the Constitution.

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