Ben Shapiro's appearance at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Monday sparked a massive protest that forced the administration to call off the event, and the president of the university, William Covino, called it "dyslexic" and threatened to shut it down if it happened again. In response, YAF stepped up to the plate and organized a counter-protest outside of the building, and in response, the administration canceled Ben Shapiro's lecture on the topic of "When Diversity Becoming a Problem." Well, what happens when "diversity" becomes a problem? What happens when people who have a different point of view are blocked from speaking on campus because they don't "discover it"? Is that a problem, or is it just a problem outside of this country where people don't have the right to speak freely and have to be protected by the First Amendment right to free speech? Or is it a problem inside the United States because we don't actually have a free exchange of ideas on America's college campuses? or are we just living in a fantasy world where we live in Stalinist Stalinist utopia where we're supposed to be tolerant and open to everyone's ideas? What's the problem here in America, then? ? Do you have a problem with the idea that we're not allowed to have free speech because we're all supposed to agree with each other? . Or are we can't have it? , or do we have to have it all? in America's First Amendment rights because it's too hard to be free? Or do we're too hard on each other ? Or is that too difficult to be allowed to talk about things we disagree with? and so on and so we can t have it ? or can't we have a say in what we want to have any say in the first place? ... or can we have it at all ? What do you want to hear from the other side? Join the conversation on this episode of The Weekly Standard? Subscribe to our new show, on social media? to let us know your thoughts, opinions, thoughts, and thoughts on the matter? on this and other topics related to this and much more! in the future of the culture we're talking about in the next episode of the podcast? we'll be posting them on the next one! Subscribe on Insta:
00:00:14.000First, I want to thank the Young Americans Foundation chapter here, all the brave kids who went out and risked life and limb.
00:00:21.000I mean, I was just out there listening to the crowds outside, risked life and limb to go out there and put flyers up on behalf of a dissenting message.
00:00:30.000Who risked their academic careers to make themselves publicly available to do these sorts of things.
00:00:43.000And I want to thank also the Fred R. Allen for sponsoring this lecture series.
00:00:47.000I think he's probably getting more than he bargained for.
00:00:50.000So the topic of my talk today is when diversity becomes a problem.
00:00:55.000This is apparently too rough for some of the people who go to this university.
00:00:58.000I'm talking about the rainbow unicorn gumdrop fascists outside who live in their little fantasy world and demand that everyone else participate in this fantasy world or they will shut down free debate.
00:01:10.000I'm talking about the pathetic, cowardly, macho professors who mouth off about physically aggressing against people who disagree.
00:01:18.000I'm talking about the ridiculous, self-aggrandizing president of this university, William Covino, who tried to cancel this event on Monday after weeks of approval and hard work from students at this university.
00:01:31.000I'm glad you were finally able to run the gauntlet.
00:01:35.000Here is what the pathetic president of this university wrote when he canceled this event earlier this week, or tried to cancel it because I wasn't going to go along with his ridiculous notions of what diversity constitutes.
00:01:46.000Diversity means that he gets to approve any speech that happens on this campus, which is precisely what Stalin thought diversity meant.
00:01:53.000Here's what William Covino said, quote, after careful consideration, I have decided, I have decided, that it will be best for our campus community.
00:02:04.000If we reschedule Ben Shapiro's appearance for a later date so that we can arrange for him to appear as part of a group of speakers with differing viewpoints on diversity, such an event will better represent our university's dedication to the free exchange of ideas and the value of considering multiple viewpoints.
00:02:22.000You can hear how well this free exchange of ideas is going when there are people literally standing outside, pushing down reporters like Adele Nazarian of Breitbart, assaulting people outside, threatening acts of violence to prevent people from hearing a dissenting point of view.
00:02:35.000That's free exchange of ideas on America's college campuses.
00:02:38.000That's free exchange of ideas thanks to the American left.
00:02:41.000That's free exchange of ideas thanks to William Covino and his thug rule here.
00:02:46.000The value of considering multiple viewpoints.
00:02:58.000So, in the name of a free exchange of ideas and considering multiple viewpoints, Covino and company tried to shut this event down, of course.
00:03:06.000In the name of diversity, he went full brown shirt.
00:03:09.000Let me explain, for the idiots in this administration.
00:03:30.000We're here for free speech, and we're here for the First Amendment.
00:03:33.000Welcome to America, where you and your jackboots don't get to shut down debate just because you disagree.
00:03:38.000No matter how hard you try, you can all go screw yourselves.
00:03:48.000It's not just William Covino, of course.
00:03:50.000It's Professor Robert Wyde, who objected to this lecture taking place on campus, just like a good little intellectually inferior professor should.
00:03:57.000He said that the students who sponsored this event are white supremacists.
00:04:02.000And if you've ever met the students of YAF, you know how untrue this is.
00:04:05.000He has invited those students to fight him at the gym in the USU building at 1 p.m.
00:04:10.000tomorrow, stating, quote, I lift, bro.
00:04:14.000By the way, white supremacists love Orthodox Jews.
00:04:16.000They're famous for having their meetings at our synagogues.
00:04:32.000And again, folks, if you're watching on the live stream, the waves of students that you see entering right now are being sneaked in.
00:04:38.000Because in America in 2016, you have to use the back door if you want to participate in free speech.
00:04:43.000You get to block the front door if you're a member of the left.
00:04:47.000Professor Whyde, by the way, he doesn't want to try it, apparently.
00:04:50.000He doesn't want to try this whole free speech thing.
00:04:52.000When he spotted students putting up flyers for this event, he called in the guys with the guns, the campus security, because he wouldn't want posters microaggressing you, of course.
00:05:00.000He then said that the students putting up these posters were fascists, because putting up posters, that's fascist.
00:05:07.000And then he suggested that the students were responsible for death threats he had received, and he wrote on a sign outside his office, the best response to microaggression is macroaggression.
00:05:15.000In other words, if I'm offended, I get to take physical action against you, I get to be violent with you, and that's what we're watching outside right now.
00:05:23.000For those of you who don't speak low IQ, what Professor Wide means is that the best response to hearing things that you don't like is hurting people who say those things.
00:05:33.000I guarantee you this, I've certainly received more death threats than Professor Wyde.
00:05:37.000Some might be from people in this room, like, for example, certainly from people outside.
00:05:41.000One Reuben Martin, who told another professor at this university, Malina Abdullah, via Facebook, and this is how it's written.
00:06:29.000The reason I'm reading it in this way is because this is exactly how it's written.
00:06:33.000Hoidom is spelled H-O-I-W-T apostrophe E-M.
00:06:37.000Speaking of Professor Abdullah, she posted this on her Facebook wall earlier this week.
00:06:42.000Folks, if you're just joining the live stream, somebody pulled the fire alarm to stop this, because this is how the fascists do it.
00:06:48.000Professor Abdullah posted this on her Facebook wall, quote, when diversity becomes a problem has been scheduled for February 25th at Cal State LA, a campus that is 90% students of color and during black history month.
00:07:18.000By the way, Professor Abdulla teaches a class that fulfills a diversity requirement at this university, a requirement designed to encourage tolerance and acceptance of others.
00:07:28.000You can hear the tolerance and acceptance coming from the speakers in this room as they attempt to evacuate the premises so people don't hear my deeply scary and frightening ideas.
00:07:41.000Where the f- is the administration on this campus?
00:07:44.000Where the hell is the administration on this campus?
00:07:48.000If this sort of language came from the right against the left, you can guarantee the administration would be looking at suspensions or firings.
00:07:55.000If this sort of thing happens or in classes at this university, the kid who pulled the fire alarm would be off this campus so fast it would make your head swim.
00:08:03.000But not you out there, the protesters, those special, magical leftist children protected from the consequences of living in the real world with my taxpayer dollars.
00:08:12.000You get to shut us down for disagreeing with your thug tactics and your nasty, pathetic, evil ideology.
00:08:18.000So, with those preliminaries out of the way, let's talk about when diversity becomes a problem.
00:08:25.000Let's start by defining our terms for a second.
00:08:28.000Diversity can mean a whole host of things.
00:08:32.000If you had a dinner party that was comprised of O.J.
00:08:35.000Simpson and Charles Manson and the Menendez brothers, that's a diverse dinner party in one way.
00:08:39.000In another way, it's not a very diverse dinner party at all.
00:08:43.000If you had a dinner party comprised of Mother Teresa, Gloria Steinem, and Phyllis Schlafly, that would also be a diverse dinner party in one way, and in another way, wouldn't be diverse at all.
00:08:51.000You'd have three women with different points of views.
00:08:53.000In the first case, you'd have three murderers with differing races.
00:08:56.000So what exactly are we talking about here?
00:09:43.000It is an excuse for people of one political perspective to shut people up who don't have that political perspective.
00:09:51.000It's become cliche at this point to cite Martin Luther King.
00:09:54.000and his admonition to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, that doesn't mean that MLK was wrong.
00:11:51.000It's been a nation of Asian men forever.
00:11:53.000Asians face a loss of 50 SAT points on average.
00:11:57.000And this is out of a 1600 point scale.
00:12:00.000So let's take a look at your current admission stats and throw out all these terrible beneficiaries of Asian privilege who overpopulate your campus by statistics.
00:12:18.000But you do if you're on America's campuses.
00:12:21.000The reason that people on this campus feel good about using discriminatory racial language, calling for students to be indoctrinated in the value of diversity of skin color, is because it gives them a feeling of unearned moral superiority.
00:12:33.000Well, they're not superior, and they're certainly not moral.
00:12:37.000Facts that hurt your feelings, it turns out, are still facts, regardless of your race, and as I am deeply fond of saying, facts do not give one good damn about your feelings.
00:12:47.000Correct arguments are correct, regardless of who's arguing.
00:12:50.000Bad arguments are bad, no matter how much melanin you have in your skin.
00:12:54.000The focus on skin color diversity makes people empty-headed, close-minded at the same time.
00:12:59.000Any problem people have can be blamed on your skin color or somebody else's skin color.
00:13:03.000You're so focused on retreating like a turtle into some ridiculous, arbitrary group identity based on skin color, you blame all of life's problems on somebody else.
00:13:12.000That's what this term white privilege is all about.
00:13:14.000A way of blaming somebody else for your problems in purely racist fashion based on the color of their skin.
00:13:19.000The higher poverty rate in minority communities is not a result of white privilege or any other magical racist ether out there.
00:13:27.000It is a result of educational and lifestyle decisions about childbearing and childrearing.
00:13:31.000The higher criminality rate in the black community is not the result of evil white cops.
00:13:36.000And thank you to the cops who are doing their jobs under heavy threat here.
00:13:46.000And under pressure from this administration to make room for people to do things that are blatantly violated of First Amendment principles.
00:13:55.000You don't want to go to jail for murder, it turns out, or for any crime.
00:14:00.000Here's the fact about that supposedly evil justice system.
00:14:03.000It under-prosecutes murder in minority communities because minority communities are under police.
00:14:07.000There aren't enough cops in minority communities.
00:14:10.000When the police do come into contact with black people, like, for example, the Lying Black Lives Matter movement says, police are less likely to kill black people than white people in the same circumstances, according to John Jay College professor Peter Moskos.
00:14:24.000As early as 1994, the DOJ surveyed felony cases
00:14:28.000in the country's 75 largest urban areas and found lower felony prosecution rates for blacks than for whites.
00:14:35.000In New York City, minorities keep running into cops because minorities keep committing an outstanding number of crimes.
00:14:40.000From January to June of 2008, 98% of all gun assailants in New York City were Hispanic or black.
00:14:46.000Stop and Frisk in that city, the supposedly racist Stop and Frisk, under-targeted minorities by about 15%.
00:14:52.000So, you can bitch and you can moan about these white skin privilege and the need for diversity of skin color.
00:14:58.000Let's go out and arrest, I guess, some innocent white people so that we can make up for this statistical imbalance.
00:15:03.000Or, you can fix the problem by leading a responsible life and not getting involved in negative activities.
00:15:08.000It appears that at this university, the professors prefer to bitch and moan.
00:15:16.000She says the police ought to be abolished, because nothing will be better for the high-crime areas of the country, particularly in ethnic minority communities, than the police completely moving out.
00:15:25.000It's working beautifully in cities like Detroit and Washington, D.C.
00:16:07.000Including values of blocking people from hearing dissenting speech.
00:16:11.000Diversity means accepting fundamental value systems that overthrow good values like the ones that the United States is based on.
00:16:18.000So, for example, after 130 Parisians were killed by radical Muslims in Paris, President Obama said, quote,
00:16:30.000In the aftermath of Paris, nobody in the mainstream political conversation or close to it was talking about expelling Muslim citizens from the United States, which would be horrifying and violative of an actual basic principle, freedom of religion.
00:16:43.000So what exactly was Obama talking about?
00:16:46.000Presumably he meant that we shouldn't use our head and elevate our security concerns based on statistical probability.
00:16:52.000Police and our national security apparatus should pretend that Swedish Unitarian grandmothers pose as much of a security risk as young Muslim males immigrating from Middle Eastern countries.
00:17:02.000After the Fort Hood Islamic terrorist attacks, killing 13 American soldiers, Obama's Chief Army Officer, General George Casey, said, quote, Our diversity, not only in our army, but in our country, is a strength.
00:17:13.000And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse.
00:17:21.000Again, the implication seems to be that if we treat all value systems, including those with a higher probability of terrorist involvement or violence, equally beneficial and benevolent, that's a good thing.
00:17:41.000Certain values are better than other values.
00:17:44.000But by pretending that all fundamental value systems are equal, the left gets rid of any relationship between cause and effect, because all the left truly cares about is fairness of outcome, not fairness of opportunity.
00:17:54.000So if you are a criminal and you end up in jail, that's unfair, according to the left, because you ended up in jail.
00:18:13.000If you want to have a successful life, you want to be successful, stop blaming other people for your own mistakes.
00:18:19.000The greatest predictor for intergenerational poverty in America is single motherhood.
00:18:23.000The white man isn't responsible, the white system isn't responsible for any person, unless it's rape, and that's a rare occurrence, isn't responsible for you getting your girlfriend pregnant and then ditching her.
00:18:36.000That's a result of you being a piece of garbage.
00:18:39.000Your inability to hold down a job isn't the result of some racist white system unless you can show that your employer is actually doing things for racial reasons.
00:18:47.000It's either the result of an individual racist, which is still not the result of a system, so we should move to get him fired.
00:18:53.000Because racist firings are illegal, you'll be prosecuted.
00:18:57.000Or it's not racism, it could be your lack of skills.
00:18:59.000Your inability to get a proper education isn't white racism either.
00:19:03.000It's a government system that sucks for everybody.
00:19:06.000I mean, for people who went to LAUSD like I did, we all know this.
00:19:16.000Being a decent human being is a worthwhile value.
00:19:19.000Being indecent and then saying that diversity makes it all okay is an indecent value.
00:19:24.000And by the way, it tears communities apart.
00:19:25.000Robert Putnam, who is not a conservative, he's a leftist, he wrote a book called Bowling Alone, and he believed in the mantra, diversity is our strength, when he started investigating.
00:19:34.000Then he started doing experiments regarding communities.
00:19:38.000Was that diversity in communities, racial, ethnic diversity, which these days comes along with diversity of fundamental values thanks to the left, it didn't lead to better or more cohesive or more tolerant communities.
00:19:50.000He said, this is what he wrote, quote, the only two things that go up as the diversity of your census track goes up are protest marches and television watching.
00:20:00.000Putnam concluded, the only way to create social capital, that's all the good stuff that allows us to trust our next door neighbor, leave your door unlocked at night, have somebody babysit for your kid, it comes from shared values.
00:20:45.000How about that as a fundamental value?
00:20:57.000How about freedom of religion and of the press, assembly and petition?
00:21:00.000How about freedom to come to lectures you want to come to without jackasses blocking the doors to prevent people from hearing differing points of view?
00:21:11.000And how about some basic civic values too?
00:21:13.000How about don't have babies without being married?
00:21:18.000President Obama says we can't define liberty in exactly the same way, but we should, otherwise your liberty is my tyranny, and your tyranny is my liberty.
00:21:26.000Those people out front who are protesting right now, blocking people from engaging in their First Amendment rights, those people, those people, they think they are standing up for liberty, when what they are really standing up for is tyranny.
00:21:38.000Finally, the third type of diversity, and the only one that really matters, diversity of viewpoint.
00:21:43.000That's the only one that's really useful.
00:21:45.000You know the kinds of viewpoint that your professors want to shut down when they call me a racist without evidence?
00:21:50.000Or when they suggest that you're a white supremacist because you sponsored this lecture and wanted to come?
00:21:55.000Science actually demonstrates diversity of viewpoint is a highly useful thing.
00:21:59.000New takes on old subjects are a good thing.
00:22:02.000When we all have the same goals and the same fundamental values of freedom, liberty, and consent, magic happens.
00:22:11.000That's how the free political debate works.
00:22:13.000We argue about the best solutions, and then we meet, and sometimes we disagree, and somebody wins, and somebody loses, and we try it out, and we see what works.
00:22:20.000A diversity of viewpoints makes stuff better.
00:22:23.000That's why you have nice phones, because there is a diversity of viewpoint on what a nice phone constitutes, and so there is competition in the marketplace, and you end up with a really nice phone that has a camera on it, so you can go outside, be a reporter, and take pictures of all of the terrible people doing terrible things and assaulting people out front.
00:22:38.000In the wisdom of crowds, a reporter named James Surowiecki, and he writes, quote, Diversity and independence are important, because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.
00:25:08.000The left just ignores the only type of diversity that actually matters.
00:25:11.000And until they stop, America will only become a more pinched, bitter, divided country, divided by tyrants, like some of those who are standing outside this hall, at the front of your classrooms, and in the halls of your administration.
00:25:25.000Thank you so much, and thank you for standing for free speech.