When I was in my 20s and living in Northern California, a ragtag group of Nazis staged a march in San Jose.
It was a pathetic affair, according to an account in San Jose State’s student newspaper: Protesters outnumbered marchers by about 1,000 to 8.
The city’s parks and rec department had issued the permit for the march. The San Jose City Council wanted to revoke it.
As director of the Northern California affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, my friend David Fishlow was asked to weigh in. At a meeting of irate citizens, he tried to explain that under the First Amendment, we don’t get to pick and choose who gets to speak.
It was, to say the least, an awkward moment: Fishlow was Jewish. The crowd knew it and, he recalled (when I got in touch with him Tuesday after 40-plus years) “called me all kinds of names.”
A few days later, one of the National Socialist White Workers Party members called him. “Listen,” Fishlow told him, “I’m trying to help you get your permit because my beliefs require me to do so, but dealing with perverted schmucks like you makes me want to puke.”
I thought of this story on Monday when I looked in on the protesters outside the Thomas Building, where Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes and self-described professional troll (??) Alex Stein were about to offer a “politically provocative comedy night.”
Penn State administrators had disavowed the event in the strongest possible terms, but defended letting it take place on the same grounds that my ACLU buddy defended the Nazis’ right to march in San Jose.
Not surprisingly, things got a little rowdy: Somebody spit on the professional troll, somebody dressed all in black – by most accounts a supporter of the McInnes/Stein event — started pepper spraying, and the campus cops pulled the plug on the event “in the interest of campus safety.”
It could have been worse. Protest organizers urged the crowd to get away from the Thomas Building. “The Proud Boys are going to come out of that room and they’re going to be pissed,” I heard one yell. “Do not leave alone,” I heard another say. “It is not safe.”
I left alone and unmolested, but I don’t think the advice was meant for the likes of me, an old white guy. A lot of folks on the right like to mock campus “snowflakes” who fret about not feeling safe. But it’s hard to ignore the words of one of the protesters who was quoted in StateCollege.com:
“Being Black, I should have a right to feel safe on my campus. If they are willingly paying a white supremacy group to come out here and speak, that does not make me feel safe. That does not make me want to be here. I should not feel this way if I’m going to school and paying to come here to get an education, and they should not be making other students, just like myself and my friends, feel this sort of way. It’s not right.”
I’m glad she mentioned the money aspect of the thing: Students on the University Park Allocation Committee agreed to fund the event to the tune of $7,500 worth of student fees.
So how can a public university better balance safety and free speech concerns in the future?
One of my colleagues thinks it best to ignore such odious visitors altogether. McInnes and Stein are provocateurs. Goading their enemies into trying to shut them down and drown them out is part of their shtick: It proves their point about the intolerant, “free speech for me but not for thee” lefties who supposedly have a stranglehold on higher education in this country. That’s why Stein waded into the crowd of protesters on Monday night.
FIRE – the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education – thinks the answer is better policing:
“Penn State must respond to isolated incidents of violence by removing lawbreakers and allowing peaceful protests and scheduled events to continue. Allowing threats of violence to shut down an expressive event capitulates to the ‘heckler’s veto.’ It also provides cover for administrators who might wish to shut down events for political reasons, pointing to vague, unsubstantiated ‘threats’ as their rationale.”
The organization wrote to Penn State administrators on Tuesday, urging them to “detail the ‘threat’ that led to cancellation of the controversial event and why police allegedly failed to intervene after witnessing several assaults amongst the hundreds gathered to protest.”
As for me, after reading about the Proud Boys on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website, I wonder, trepidatiously, whether it’s possible to craft oh-so-careful language that will allow the university to draw the line at organizations that traffic in hate speech and have a history of inciting violence.
Because one of these days, somebody’s going to get hurt.
