Conservatives on college campuses need to have a real Come to Jesus meeting, and it needs to happen quickly.
It is one thing for universities in decidedly liberal states to censor free speech on what should be the freest place in the state. This is the backwards behavior that we expect from far-left thugs in places like New York, Los Angeles, Austin and Atlanta. When you read articles that Milo Yiannopoulus has been denied entry at Berkeley or at UCLA, you should not bat an eye.
The problem occurs when unapologetic conservative speakers cannot even find their way onto a college campus in a conservative state. Virginia. Wyoming. Alabama. Mississippi. When this starts to happen, and it is, all of us must sit up and take note.
Conservatives on liberal campuses are facing an incredible amount of discrimination and censorship. Read about Troy Worden, a former College Republicans president on the Berkeley campus who had to sue Antifa leader Yvette Felarca for $100,000 in damages. Yvette imposed a restraining order on Worden, which made it virtually impossible for him to attend classes. However, the larger question is this – why are conservatives forced to do battle on liberal battlegrounds? Why don’t conservatives have their own colleges and universities that are enticing enough to attract top conservative minds?
The answer is simple. Conservatives on campuse are not doing enough to welcome elite students with a decidedly right-of-center mindset. It can be difficult to determine political affiliation from the average college application form. However, now that discrimination has risen to the point of actively destroying a student’s right to education, it may be time to draw the line in the sand.
No one came to the political defense of young Worden within the ranks of the university. He was simply ordered to stay away from Yvette by the court. He was bound to miss class at some point. This is a waste of tuition as well as a mockery of what a restraining order is meant to accomplish. They are meant to protect people from physical harm, not a dissenting political opinion.
What’s worse, Yvette was not even a student on the Berkeley campus. She is a 47-year-old middle school teacher who has been arrested for battery and resisting arrest. To our knowledge, Worden has not been arrested for doing any physical harm to anyone. To our knowledge, he has not been arrested at all for anything.
What do conservatives need to do to shore up educational strongholds in traditionally red states? We do have some opportunities that we may not be making best use of.
For one, many conservative states have public universities with excellent sports programs. Perhaps it would be best for our political life to lobby for some of these football funds to be redirected into political protection for students. This would be an excellent move in the region of the SEC. Not only does this region have the best and highest grossing sports programs, but they also have the ability to serve as a conservative stronghold.
Conservatives in the South and Southeast must also make a concerted effort to donate more of their time and money to community colleges. Although we can lobby the SEC to pay more attention to the political upheaval in the world, they may have to limit their direct participation. It can be difficult to politicize sports, especially if the effort is not met with a groundswell that comes from the bottom up.
However, we must admit that we have not done enough to bring a place where a conservative political viewpoint can really be celebrated. There is no campus in the United States in which liberals are receiving the same kind of discrimination that conservatives are in places like Berkeley. Why? There is no campus space where conservatives are really seen as a political force.
The fight is on, and it is taking our children. If we do not face the fact that professional politics starts to affect our lives way before we think it does, we will be swept under the liberal college current.
~ Conservative Zone
