Surely Ms. Chong was just kidding about free speech at colleges?

To The Daily Sun,

After reading her recent letter to the editor, I was just wondering if perhaps Lynn Rudmin Chong should broaden her knowledge regarding the burgeoning attacks on free speech on college campuses. She asserts that these claims are probably just made up to support President Trump. Please let me enlighten Ms. Chong, and others who are blindly uninformed, if I may.

I would recommend that Lynn check out the Campus Reform website or Turning Point USA with Candace Owens and Charlies Kirk. Regarding many universities, Charlie states, "these campuses have become islands of totalitarianism, it's intellectual tyranny." Cultural Marxism has seeped into much of the 21st century academic landscape. Campus Reform was created out of an intense desire to expose the liberal bias and abuse against conservatives in American universities.

A recent Gallup poll found that "70 percent of students wished for a learning environment open to all speech viewpoints". An increasing number of college graduates are saying that they just graduated from a campus climate that prevented them from openly expressing their beliefs.

I would hope that Lynn has heard of FIRE (Freedom for Individual Rights in Education). It's focus is to "defend freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty and sanctity of conscience." Now which college campuses do you supposed they have had to focus on? The small number of conservative and Christian universities, or the vast majority that lean to the left?

Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, Janet Mock, Nicolas Dirks, Charlie Kirk, Ann Coulter, Jordan Peterson, Michelle Malkin, Milo Yiannopoulos, Candace Owens, David Horowitz, Anita Alvarez, Bassem Eid, Action Bronson, Nir Barkat, Jason Riley, John Derbyshire and so many others are either disinvited to college campuses, shouted off the stage while being pelted with tomatoes and f-bombs, and otherwise not allowed to give their speech. Some speakers have had to bring their own body guards. For others, the university has had to bulk up it's own security details.

By the way, these are not all conservative speakers. Physician Emily Wong, of Mass General hospital, was told she could not give the commencement speech at Hampshire College because the students said, "she could not directly address student concerns regarding racial issues and transphobia". The "snowflakes" intimidate the college deans. Super cool irony!

Here is just the tip of the iceberg of some of the worst colleges for free speech: DePaul, RPI, Drexel, Harvard, Brown, Chicago U., George Washington, Trinity, Virginia Tech, Fordham, Evergreen State, Northwestern, Berkeley and Texas State. Go to the FIRE website and businessinsider.com, to find out just how egregious were their free speech violations. Perhaps Lynn forgot about the violent student mob that erupted at nearby Middlebury College in Vermont a couple years ago. Author Charles Murray and one of the college professors were injured as they left a campus building following an "attempt" at a lecture.

Bruce Deitrick Price notes how K-12 public schools have been defining education down. Teaching of the three R's, the true history of this country, and the teaching of our Constitution have lessened in importance, in favor of progressive, socialist indoctrination. "I'll get you my pretty, and your little brain too" growls the wicked witch of the Marxist left!

Who talks in favor of leftist, Marxist indoctrination? Well actually, lots of Democrats talk and think like good little statist, Marxists. Remember way back in 2013 when Tulane professor of political science and MSNBC host, Melissa Harris-Perry, tutored us with the following declaration? "We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents." There is more, but that is the gist of her "break a few eggs to get everyone into the collective" mentality.

I haven't even touched on the violence that has erupted over the growing anti-Semitism on college campuses. Check out, mindingthecampus.org for examples of this form of hate on campuses. I wonder what Lynn thinks about Representative Ilhan Omar and her anti-Semitic remarks? Believe it or not, she still serves on our House Foreign Affairs Committee. Google, "how campus bullies pulled off the Anti-Israel BDS movement". Leftist free speech is just fine, don't you know. Perhaps that is what has Lynn confused and inquiring.

Anyone remember when back in 2014, Brandeis University rescinded an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, apparently capitulating to CAIR and student and faculty protests. CAIR is of course the un-indicted co-conspirator in a terrorism funding case involving HAMAS. What happened to Brandeis, which was founded in 1948, just after the horrors of the Holocaust? It being the university that used to be the bastion of free speech and inclusion for Jewish people, during a time when universities were imposing rigid admission quotas on Jewish students. No acceptance speech for this women's rights advocate.

I am just getting started, and yet I must end this letter, bewitched, bothered and bewildered by the lack of objective, liberal-minded thinkers in today's Democrat Party. "Where is the evidence of campus attacks on free speech?", wonders Lynn Rudmin Chong. Surely you jest!

Russ Wiles

Tilton