POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

This post is a response to an article written by Susan Svriuga for the Washington Post. Titled “’Antifa Is Winning’: Richard Spencer Rethinks His College Tour after Violent Protests,” the article is a report on the protests that prevented Spencer from speaking at Michigan State University. A group called “Stop Spencer from Speaking at Michigan State” succeeded in getting such a large crowd out to the event that Spencer and his immediate retinue had difficulty getting to the venue and many of those who wished to hear him speak were prevented from entering the venue. After the event, Spencer posted a video to YouTube in which he announced that he was rethinking his strategy for speaking at university campuses—in particular, his holding pre-announced events at university campuses.

I accept unequivocally that free speech should be protected on all of our campuses—that anyone who is invited to speak should be allowed to speak and that common courtesy, including the basic courtesy of allowing a speaker to speak, should be exercised.

But I also believe that Spencer and others have largely created their own problems and that it is not the responsibility of our public colleges and universities–or anyone else, for that matter–to find ways of resolving those problems. Most fundamentally, it seems absurd that someone who has so determinedly set out to provoke outrage should be surprised that those whom he has provoked are unwilling then to exercise polite restraint. In his video, Spencer states: “The idea behind the ‘college tour was not to inspire pitched battles between our side and the Antifa.’ . . . The intent was to go ‘into the belly of the beast,’ ‘academic Marxist- controlled territory’ and introduce ‘alt-right” ideas to an intellectual debate. . . . What happened at Michigan State was ‘a near riot’ outside the venue. . . . ‘When they become violent clashes and pitched battles, they aren’t fun.’”

“They aren’t fun”? That seems like a pretty snowflakey thing for a stormtrooper-wanna-be to say. Likewise, I think that Spencer’s assumption that he has ever engaged in an “intellectual debate” about his ideas is evidence of just how delusional he has become in presuming that most of his core ideas are either intellectually or morally defensible. There is an old truism about putting lipstick on a pig. Well, you can’t put an academic robe on racism and authoritarianism and thereby legitimize it (though Spencer isn’t the first and won’t be the last to try to do so).

Spencer, of course, would like to blame Antifa, because extremists always need a bogeyman. The Nazis provoked pitched street battles with German communists, and then, after they had suppressed their political opposition, focused all of their bile on Germany’s and then Europe’s Jews. But I don’t think that “Stop Spencer from Speaking at Michigan State” is an off-shoot of Antifa (whose impact has been exaggerated, I think, by the alt-right more than anyone else, including Antifa), and in fact, I somewhat object to Svriuga’s describing the protesters as “anti-fascists.” For, although describing Spencer as a fascist is warranted, describing the protesters as anti-fascists suggests–to invert Trump’s equivocation after Charlottesville–that there are “bad people,” or at least extremists, on both sides. I would argue that protesting fascism in America is not so much the expression of a political position as the exercise of common decency. If we have gotten to the point where objecting to raised fists and swastikas is simply a political position, then any discussion of fundamental American values has become absolutely pointless.

Let’s face it, Spencer got small groups on campuses to sponsor his speaking engagements, knowing that they would provoke outrage and media attention—and that the media attention would be magnified by the cost of the security that the colleges and universities would be forced to provide. Indeed, given that Spencer has sued to be allowed to speak at campuses where he has repeatedly not bothered to speak, his “college tour” probably deserves to be treated less as a determined exercise of free speech than as an extended media stunt. I don’t know how much funding he is attracting for his efforts, but it is costing our colleges and universities a great deal of money—amounts all out of proportion to Richard Spencer’s significance.

Moreover, it is ironic, if not outrageous, that the ideologues insisting on the free-speech rights of the alt-right are largely the biggest critics of higher education and defunders of public higher education. They ought to be ashamed to demonstrate values that have become so skewed, but, like Spencer, many are defiantly proud to declare that an ideology that, not so long ago, more than a million Americans were killed and wounded to defeat deserves to be protected at any cost because it has somehow become the last bastion of fundamental American values. One of my uncles, who received several purple hearts fighting in France and Germany, refused to watch Hogan’s Heroes because he thought that it made a mockery of the lives sacrificed in defeating the Nazis. I am pretty certain that if he were alive today to hear Richard Spencer speaking, he would wish more serious physical harm on him than any member of Antifa ever has wished on him. And, just be clear, I feel very comfortable saying that if my uncle was a progressive politically, no one ever disguised his politics more thoroughly or convincingly.

At Michigan State, the “near-riot” that Spencer has described involved about 20 people being arrested, and Svriuga reports that “most of them [were] people protesting Spencer.” But at least one of the protesters who was arrested had simply laid down in the street in front of an oncoming police car in order to prevent it from moving toward the crowd. Although in Tiananmen Square a broadly similar action was unequivocally heroic, here it probably amounted to a stupid or pointless thing for which to be arrested. But it was hardly violent. Likewise, I suspect that some of the people “shoved to the ground” may simply have lost their balance in the crush of the crowd. But it would not be news if Spencer simply became intimidated by the size of the crowd.

Susan Svriuga’s complete article is available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2018/03/12/antifa-is-winning-richard-spencer-rethinks-his-college-tour-after-violent-protests/?utm_term=.d921fbfa7cdd.