Ben Shapiro: The Protests on College Campuses

From The New York Post:

Western civilization, including our modern notions of values and reason and science, was built on deep foundations. And we’re tossing away what’s best about our civilization because we’ve forgotten that those foundations even exist. This realization hit me on a precise date: Feb. 25, 2016.

I was scheduled to give a speech to the Young America’s Foundation group at California State University at Los Angeles. My speech posited that all people of good heart wanted to fight racism, but that vague charges of institutional racism and white privilege obscured individual evil — and slandered the country more broadly. Two weeks in advance of the speech, we began hearing rumblings about protests; the week before the speech, the president of the university announced that the event had been canceled outright. I refused to accede to that clear breach of First Amendment rights, and I announced that I would show up anyway.

My business partner insisted I bring a security team, but I was pretty skeptical. This wasn’t Fallujah. This was a major college campus in the middle of my home city. Just to be safe, he hired security anyway. Thank God I listened. As we approached the campus, we could see helicopters swirling overhead. Dozens of armed, uniformed police quickly formed a cordon and rushed me through the back door. A few rioters were physically assaulting students who wanted to enter; the police set up a back-door route but could only sneak students in two at a time. I put my ear to the auditorium door; it sounded like a zombie apocalypse outside.

We decided to go ahead, despite the mostly empty auditorium. As the speech progressed, students pulled the fire alarm; the lights went out, and the alarm began beeping loudly. Students continued pounding the doors outside. I spoke through the discord, announcing that the disrupters wouldn’t stop us from exercising our free-speech rights. (Read more.)

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