Conservative activist and podcast host Charlie Kirk’s speaking engagements on college campuses have generated some loaded headlines recently.
Sacramento Bee: “Another far-right speaker is coming to UC Davis. How should the community respond?”
Chicago Tribune: “UIC Students Will Protest Far-Right Speakers Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens Thursday.”
Nebraska Examiner: “Provocateur Charlie Kirk’s visit to Lincoln brings protesters, alleged vandalism.”
The titles and implication are right there for readers to see: Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens aren’t merely dubbed conservatives or podcast hosts. Instead, they’re placed into the “far-right” category. And the third headline is also obvious in its bias: Kirk isn’t named as the founder and president of Turning Point USA, a conservative student organization. No, instead he’s a “provocateur” while actual vandalism is “alleged vandalism.”
Let’s compare the headlines Kirk and Owens received to the benign headlines written for liberal speakers on campus:
The Diamondback (University of Maryland): “UMD progressive student group hosts Our Revolution President Nina Turner.”
CBS News: “Kamala Harris to deliver keynote address during Coast Guard commencement.”
Well, that’sodd. There’s no label attached to Nina Turner, a self-described Democratic socialist and staunch Bernie Sanders supporter, as being “far-left.”
Or are any labels applied to Kamala Harris, who was the most liberal U.S. senator before becoming vice president, according to a 2019 ideology score by the non-partisan GovTrack.
Consistency is obviously at a premium in much of the political media, while bias is becoming more blatant. And campuses have become downright hostile to those on the right, with attempts to squash certain perspectives and opinions. As an example, Kirk’s visit to UC Davis resulted in a 100-person brawl, arrests, property damage and a police officer injured after he was allegedly jumped from behind and taken to the ground by activists led by antifa.
And it’s not just student activists engaging in this anti-First Amendment behavior; academia is leading by (bad) example.
To underscore this, according to an analysis by the Washington Examiner, only three of the 100 top ranked American universities hosted a conservative speaker to deliver their respective commencement addresses: Gov. Glenn Youngkin at Virginia Tech, former Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow at his alma mater, the University of Florida, and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis at Boston College.
With 97 out of 100 colleges avoiding conservative leaders and figures, what kind of message does that send to students?
Universities didn’t always shun conservatives. President Reagan delivered nine commencement speeches during his presidency on campuses ranging from Tuskegee University to Notre Dame, with little to no uproar. Fast forward to the Trump era, when then-Vice President Mike Pence, the former governor of Indiana, was met with protests and student walk outs when he spoke in 2017.
The beef with Pence seems laughable now. There were signs welcoming “election conspirators” written in Russian and English directed at Pence, a reference to the conspiracy theory among many Democrats at the time that Russia “hacked” the 2016 presidential election and inserted Donald Trump into the White House.
Overall, 67 percent of Democratic voters at the time believed that the Kremlin tampered with vote tallies to get Trump into office, per a 2018 YouGov poll, which was not true, per U.S. intelligence and a Senate investigation.. The perception of a stolen 2016 election, pushed by most media outlets, became real in the eyes of some.
But things really came to a ridiculous head when Condoleezza Rice, the first Black woman to serve as U.S. secretary of state, drew large protests on campus from uninformed students and some faculty over her commencement speech at Rutgers in 2014.
“I think the commitment to having her speak has been made, and she lacks the dignity to withdraw. And so her commencement speech will go ahead,” argued Rudolph Bell, a history professor who led student protests against Rice.
After a media frenzy, Rice withdrew, saying she didn’t want her presence to be a distraction from what should be a joyous day for graduates. Then-President Barack Obama warned that this would not set a good precedent.
“The notion that this community or this country would be better served by not hearing a former secretary of state or not hearing what she had to say — I believe that’s misguided. I don’t think that’s how democracyworks best, when we’re not even willing to listen to each other,” he soberly said in 2016.
Many of Obama’s fellow Democrats disagree. A 2017 survey found that 62 percent of college students who identify as Democrats believed it is acceptable to shout down a speaker they disagree with on campus. (Just 39 percent of Republican students felt the same way.) Nearly one in five students (19 percent) overall said violence is justified to shut down a speaker.
This is dangerous. Democrats have always stressed the importance of diversity when it comes to race, sexual orientation and many other features. But when it comes to civil debate and encountering thoughts, ideas and opinions that differ from one’s own – that is, the entire point of higher education – the solution among many younger adults (and some older ones) appears to be censorship. Shouting down speakers. Even violence.
And with social and traditional media fanning the flames, it’s only going to get worse.
Joe Concha is a media and politics columnist.