The College Fix reports that MIT’s “student government president has been removed from his position and faces a recall election due to his role in perpetrating two campus hate-crime hoaxes” in opposition to new campus policies supporting free speech.
What a juicy pile of interlocking contradictions.
Undergraduate Association President David Spicer helped hang the offensive posters and chalk the quad once in February and then again in mid-April during Campus Preview Weekend, infuriating his peers — even progressive ones who once championed him as a leader in campus diversity and inclusion.
The Gay student president was mad that MIT was trying to defend constitutionally protected speech. Hence, he decided to test the boundaries by postering and chalking the campus with hate to see how far things could go.
Yet another case of a marginalized community member frustrated by the absence of actual ‘hate crimes’ perpetrating one to make a point about what wasn’t happening until they did it. Sorry, two. Spicer is alleged to have committed two hate crimes.
As regular readers know, I’m not all-in on the idea of hate crimes or even hate speech. These are made-up ideas by people who traditionally get their panties in a bunch about overcharging by police and district attorneys.
People who insist you accept them for who they are, but when you do, get frustrated by the lack of extra attention they think their marginalized status deserves and commit hate hoaxes to get more. But Spicer took it to a whole new level. He didn’t perpetrate the garden variety hate hoax against himself – he hated on the whole community.
“My decision to participate in the postering campaign was not one made lightly. I decided to join in the effort because I wanted, and still want, an MIT that supports students on the margin,” Spicer wrote in an April 27 op-ed in the student newspaper The Tech. …
“While I know that President [Sally] Kornbluth probably has not had to deal with homophobia in her life, I have and probably will for the rest of my life. I want the MIT administration to know the tax they impose on marginalized communities.”
Spicer engaged in what he viewed as a necessary exercise. Free speech can harm you like this. But the risk presented by restrictions on speech is far more dangerous. True liberty in any community is rare, and free expression is essential to freedom. If feelings get a say, whose feelings and where does that end?
The guardrails Spicer favors to protect those he claims are marginalized would inevitably marginalize everyone. The government doesn’t give back power. If you let them limit speech beyond the few exceptions in place, they’ll find reasons to limit it further. It is a path to compelled speech which is a restriction on thought itself, and the suppression will not be limited to people you’ve pre-segregated as outside your community.
You have to stop thinking like that. Your community is America, an increasingly marginalized political idea that has made freedom a reality and lifted more people out of poverty than any other in human history—an exceptional exercise whose success has made it the object of hate from outside and within.
One of my biggest gripes about the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion illusion which marches hand and hand toward utopia with many in the LGBT*** movement, is that its goal is (as always) not what they advertise. The same can be said for notions about hate speech or hate crimes. There is speech, and there is crime. And there are speech crimes—libel and slander, incitement, and fighting words, among a few rare others, all with high hurdles to keep speech free. But their goal is to make you hate free speech and to see its exercise as a crime. And while there’s no crime against being an asshole, it might cost you your gig as a student president, even if you think you had the best intentions.
HT | The College Fix
