Disrupting Mike Adams, UMass Shows Its Colors.

Professor Mike Adams was invited to the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, to give a speech on feminism by the Republican Club. Mike is an acerbic and provocative speaker and writer. He is also a tenured professor at the University of North Carolina – Wilmington where he is openly at odds with the administration and, I suppose, a great many of the faculty because Mike is an outspoken Conservative.

His speech at U Mass was interrupted and he was heckled as evidenced by the video which you can access through the links.

Defenders of the denial of Mike’s rights to give a speech and the students to hear him will either claim that Mike's view are so repugnant that he deserves to be shouted down, or will claim that the students who disrupted his speech were not “typical” of students at this campus or of students in general.

The first argument is simply indefensible in a nation that values the rights of free speech. The second argument may be true, but it is irrelevant. Very few radical movements have been represented by by the “typical” member of society. Lenin’s Communists were not a mass movement, but a well organized cadre who were able to highjack a society. At the height of Stalin’s power, member of The Communist party were a small minority of the Russian people, representing at most 10% of the Russian people.

Hitler’s Brown Shirts were no more representative of the German people. But there were enough of them and they were bold enough to intimidate the vast majority, allowing the Nazis to eventually take over.

It is not enough to say that these student don’t represent our community and turn our backs. They have broken the rules of comity and the rules of the University which, I assume does not condone disrupting speakers. There must be some punishment and this must not be allowed to continue.

One other point is worth making. The kind of disruption that the University allows to go on seems to be unidirectional. It is tolerated when the speakers being assaulted at people like Mike Adams or Anne Coulter, not Roger Moore or Professor (“Little Eichmanns”) Churchill. It is telling who the University community protects and who it allows to be disrupted, threatened and attacked.