Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have been shaken to the core recently by a series of flyers and chalked graffiti messages that contained anti-gay slurs. Cambridge, Mass., after all, is MAGA country, and the racist, redneck yahoos have had Leftist students of all 73 genders anxiously looking over their shoulders for the red-hatted men with the nooses practically every time they ventured out.
But then the whole thing came crashing down upon the students’ green and blue heads: the people who were distributing the flyers and chalking the slurs turned out to be fellow Leftists who are enraged at the university’s recently adopted policies defending the freedom of speech and who wanted to give MIT and the world a vivid warning of just what could happen if you let the proles actually say what they thought.
It all started back in December, when MIT’s faculty dared to adopt, by a 98-to-52 vote, a resolution that stated: “We cannot prohibit speech that some experience as offensive or injurious.” Some MIT Leftists apparently then decided to give the campus a lesson in what happens when you give human beings too much freedom. The College Fix reported Thursday that MIT administrators distributed a memo on Feb. 23 warning that flyers that had been posted around campus and “some chalking outside a school entrance” actually “contained slurs directly targeting the LBGTQ+ community.” The ever-vigilant MIT bias response team was called in to investigate, so jittery MIT wokesters could take comfort in the fact that the long arm of the law was on the trail of the MAGA miscreants.
As it turned out, however, the investigation went where no one expected. According to a message to MIT students from Dean for Student Life Suzy Nelson and Institute Community and Equity Officer John Dozier, the university’s crack bias response team found that “the messages were put up by students choosing to use extreme speech to call attention to and protest what they see as the implications” of the university’s policies in defense of the freedom of speech. The slur-slingers apparently wanted to give the university a full and vivid demonstration of why authoritarian controls on speech are needed and why MIT students should support the Left’s increasingly open practice of forcibly silencing opposing points of view.
Peter Bonilla of the MIT Free Speech Alliance added that “whatever the content of the messages, whatever was being said, the point they seem to be making was that they should not have the right to say it.” Nelson and Dozier confirmed that view, stating that “the chalking and flyers that carried slurs were put up as part of a much larger set of flyers, expressing a wide range of views, many framed in provocative terms. We have been told that these flyers were intended to probe the boundaries of MIT’s commitment to freedom of expression and to determine how this commitment comports with MIT policies, including those on harassment.”
Related: The Left Doesn’t Value Free Speech, and That’s a Problem
After daring to say something that diverges so far from Leftist orthodoxy, the two administrators felt it necessary to reaffirm their zeal for the other dogmas of the Left’s religion: “As we address these specific incidents, we want to underscore now, on behalf of President Kornbluth and all of MIT’s senior leaders, our staunch support for the members of our LBGTQ+ community, many of whom reported to us their shock and alarm, feelings that we share.” Thus they tried to stave off being denounced for their inexcusable heresy of affirming the freedom of speech. Will it work? Only time will tell.
The people who are behind the flyers and chalkings will not be punished or disciplined in any way. They were, after all, only exercising the freedom of speech that they so despise. Authoritarianism is all the rage among Leftists today, but it’s still jarring to encounter slaves not only choosing slavery but trying to argue that others should happily accept it as well.
These sinister little mini-Goebbels types never seem to envision a scenario in which their opinions are not acceptable to those in power, and thus they are silenced just as they silenced others. And indeed, these people may be determined, consciously or unconsciously, to conform their views to those of the dominant culture no matter what. They’re certainly succeeding in doing that now.
