Charlie Kirk - Campus Battlefield: How Conservatives Can WIN the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

Campus Battlefield:

How Conservatives Can WIN the Battle on Campus and Why It Matters

2018 by Charlie Kirk

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-64293-094-8

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-095-5

Cover art by Rebecca Wiley

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

Safe Spaces Suck

For liberals, the entire college campus is a safe space. They can call conservatives anything they want. Without criticism. Without penalty. Without rebuke, official or otherwise. Fascist! Bigot! Homophobe! Racist! Birther! Misogynist! Wingnut! Oh, and lets not forget: Deplorable!

So, why arent conservatives falling in line with put-upon liberals to demand safe spaces to relieve themselves from the stresses of being an intellectual and political minority on campus? After all, if theres a frenzied drive to provide safe spaces for liberals, why not for conservatives, too?

I could think of a lot of reasons. Such as, conservatives dont live in a liberal fantasy world where they are taken care of by cadres of compassionate folks who feel their hurt. Or this: The need for safe spaces reflects and is a part of the politics of identitysomething that conservatives find so abhorrent. Or that the mission of so many universities has been sidetracked from education to social activism, of which safe spaces is a part.

Ask a liberal why conservatives arent demanding their own safe spaces and youll be told that conservatives arent a historically marginalized group. As if marginalizing conservatives now is perfectly okay.

No matter. Were here to analyze why safe spaces have become such an imperative for true believers. And why they pose a danger.

Defining a safe space can be difficult because there seem to be as many versions as there are colleges that have bent to the demands to create them. Generally, were talking about physical places where the victimized can go to be walled off from any form of harassment, including hurt feelings. Their goal is to stomp out any profound feelings of discomfort on the part of target groups. Safe spaces are a favored tool for bringing social justice and positive learning environments to the campus. They are based on the unrealistic assumption that the best way to learn about social justice is to reject diverse viewpoints, namely ones that you dont agree with. That true solutions can be best found in an atmosphere free from criticism and conflict, or anything that even hints of disagreements.

For some, it is an autonomous area with codes of conduct, not necessarily written, that proscribe certain speech or any other actions that would make someone feel unwelcome. They provide an inclusive environment for members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) community. For women too. And African Americans. Also for a Trans*gressive genderqueer Latinx according to one person who embraces living on the border of fe/male and the constant crossing over and disruption of normative masculinity. (Latinx is a gender-neutral alternative to Latino and Latina.)

UC Irvine Black Students at the University of California-Irvine demanded the creation of a Black Scholars Halla safe space where Black history, culture, and intellectual thought is celebrated.

Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota aims to make its entire campus a safe space. At Claremont Colleges in Claremont, California, a student newspaper is setting aside some of its columns for unfiltered safe space where people of color can voice their experiences. The University of California at Berkeley has something called an Ace Space program that provides comfort for, among others, South Asian LGBTQIA students, staff, and faculty. (I is for intersex and A is for asexual or ally.)

Allies of LGBTQ youth can show their support by ordering a Safe Space Kit that lets them assess the schools climate and strategize change. The package includes stickers and posters so the victimized will know when theyre in a
safe space.

At Texas A&M University-San Antonio, a safe space is not a place, nor an office or a department. Its a person who provides a safe space that is highly visible and easily identifiable to the LGBTQ+ community. A Safe Space is where support and understanding are key and bigotry and discrimination are not tolerated. You become a safe space by attending workshops, after which you get a Safe Space certificate to show, I suppose, that you are a trained, compassionate person.

Some activists want to expand safe spaces to dormitories, creating, for example, all-black buildings. For people who lived through the fight for civil rights, its a stunning regression back to Jim Crow and legal racial segregation. It should be the same for inclusion activists today, but for some reason they arent bothered by this kind of exclusion.

How this leftist escapism took root is lost in the fog of time. One school of thought is that it began with 1960s and 1970s feminism, when women sought to create a community of people with shared interests who were fighting for their rights. It was a gender-based movement that morphed through gay liberation activism and into the current contentious atmosphere of gender identification. Another school of thought argues that it began decades before in corporate sensitivity training, in which employees were allowed to speak honestly without fear of ridicule or retaliation.

All with good motives, to be sure. But the safe spaces vogue creates a quandary that doesnt bode well for the preservation of vibrant universities or for those who are supposed to benefit. Or, ultimately, for America.

In a Washington Post op-ed, Morton Schapiro, president of Northwestern University, touched on the quandary as he sympathized with students wanting a safe place. He illustrated his point with this story:

A group of black students were having lunch together in a campus dining hall. There were a couple of empty seats, and two white students asked if they could join them. One of the black students asked why, in light of empty tables nearby. The reply was that these students wanted to stretch themselves by engaging in the kind of uncomfortable learning the college encourages. The black students politely said no. Is this really so scandalous?...

We all deserve safe spaces. Those black students had every right to enjoy their lunches in peace. There are plenty of times and places to engage in uncomfortable learning, but that wasnt one of them. The white students, while well meaning, didnt have the right to unilaterally decide when uncomfortable learning would take place.

More to my point, Schapiro poses one of the great ironies of the safe space movement:

[E]xperts tell me that students dont fully embrace uncomfortable learning unless they are themselves comfortable. Safe spaces provide that comfort. The irony, it seems, is that the best hope we have of creating an inclusive community is to first create spaces where members of each group feel safe. [Emphasis added.]

Well yes, we all seek places of comfort where we can find like-minded people and familiar surroundings. But what we have in the safe space frenzy is a fundamental change in the value that used to be called integration. It turns on its head the idea that we learn by living together, working together, worshipping together, partying together, and raising our children together. Among old time liberals, integration was an article of faith. Now that very idea is under attack by liberals themselves. That we can learn to be inclusive by first becoming exclusive is an idea that is at war with itself.