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Last week, a news story out of Portland Oregon sent the right-wing “anti-PC” brigade into a state of gleeful fury: A student at Reed College was alleging that he’d been banned from class for challenging some commonly cited rape statistics.
“Dissent forbidden at liberal arts college,” a headline at Truth Revolt declared. “Apparently, feelings are more important than facts,” sniffed the National Review.
The New York Post devoted an entire editorial to this alleged outrage, declaring that the “real mistake” of the student in question, freshman Jeremiah True, “was to think Reed College is dedicated to the search for truth,” adding that
it’s time for Congress to start hearings on withholding federal funds from colleges that deny not just basic free-speech rights, but any semblance of intellectual freedom.
These bold defenders of “intellectual freedom” probably should have looked a little closer at True before hoisting him aloft as a free-speech martyr.
Because what he really seems to be is a troll — a real-world equivalent of the garrulous, irritating MRAs who fill any online discussion forum that will have them with bad-faith questions, personal attacks, and endless cut-and-pasted screeds, all the while doing their best to derail any discussion that doesn’t involve them and their pet issues.
As Mary Emily O’Hara reported yesterday in The Daily Beast,
True said he was booted from class because he questioned the concept of “rape culture” as well as the commonly cited “1 in 5” campus rape statistic. But Professor Pancho Savery, who asked True to leave his class, said that True had been disruptive in several ways that were making it hard for other students to continue their studies.
The disruptive behavior escalated, according to the college administration and reports from fellow students, to include yelling loudly in hallways to draw attention to himself, calling everyone who crossed his path a “n**ger” (True himself is biracial and identifies as black), posting inflammatory comments and name-calling online, and writing that he would “stake my life on this” and “I do not want to be a martyr, but I will do that if that is what is necessary to make a statement.”
Meanwhile, Robby Soave at Reason.com — a libertarian publication that’s generally happy to pass along stories of alleged academic intolerance — also reported that True was a bit, well, off.
He declined to answer any of my questions unless I agreed to write the n-word as the first word in my article about him. (I rejected this demand.)
And in a recent interview, as Soave notes, True confessed that he’s deliberately stirring the shit, admitting that he was
disrupting some events on campus, and just walking through the halls and calling people nigger. Because if they are actually going to accuse me of being sexist and racist, then I might as well act as an actual sexist or racist might. To date, I believe I’ve gotten 22 no-contact orders.
We’ve had plenty of these sorts of trolls here. I used to give them fairly free rein in the comments here, but after 5 years the novelty has worn off just a little bit. These days, I ban them when they start to get even a little bit tiresome. It’s really the only way that the commenters here who aren’t trolls can have any kind of real discussion of anything.
In the age of the internet, it’s basically impossible to shut anyone up. True may be banned from the discussion section in one of his classes, but he’s free to rant all he wants online.
And he does, posting long screeds on his Facebook page and on a Change.org petition calling on Reed College to allow him back into the discussion section he’s been booted from. He argues his case on Change.org with a bizarre and often histrionic 3500-word manifesto in which, among other things, he compares himself to Martin Luther King. Though he claims not to be an MRA, he declares his love for an assortment of antifeminist heroines beloved by MRAs:
I am a Freedom Feminist, and I believe in Dr. Christina Hoff Sommer’s message. I believe Karen Straughan. I believe Janice Fiamengo.
He wraps up his petition on a melodramatic note:
I may be a radical, but I prefer to think that I’m radical in the way that Martin believed Jesus was a radical for love. I believe so strongly in equality that I will put my entire life on the line to stop something that I am convinced endangers that equality.
No matter what happens. I love you, mom. I love you, dad I love you my dear, dear sisters. I love you my dearest friends. I love you all, and I will sacrifice everything for you. … I do not think I will make it out of this unscathed and I am sitting here writing this, sobbing uncontrollably. … I do not want to be a martyr, but I will do that if that is what is necessary to make a statement.
The problem isn’t that True is demanding free speech — he’s got plenty of freedom to say what he wants. It’s that he’s demanding a captive audience for his speech. Discussion sections in college classes are supposed give everyone in them a chance to make themselves heard. That can’t happen when one person in the room takes up all the oxygen.
I’ve been in discussion sections as a student and as a teacher. Part of the job of the instructor is to gently encourage those who are quiet to talk — and, as diplomatically as possible, to get those who talk too much to shut their trap once in a while.
Alas, some students, like True, don’t really respond to diplomacy; their instructors then have to resort to sanctions.
I never had a class with anyone as disruptive as True evidently is. But my time at Cornell University overlapped with that of a certain Ann Coulter — you may have heard of her — and one semester I ended up in an American history discussion section with her. And, as you might imagine, she would not shut up.
The professor, a gentle liberal fellow, was too diplomatic to really rein her in. So we ended up devoting a considerable amount of the semester to listening her drone on about her hobbyhorses — like her belief, which as far as I know she still holds, that Martin Luther King was essentially a Communist puppet.
But if she was blabby she wasn’t completely disruptive, and the experience for me was as amusing as it was irritating. That doesn’t seem to have been the case with True, who evidently went out of his way to antagonize virtually everyone in his class. That’s not free speech. That’s being an asshole.
This kind of behavior is using free speech to undermine the principle of free speech, taking the rhetoric and trappings of free thought and use it to silence others. This is happening a lot lately. The Internet makes it easy to spread disinformation and shout down people engaged in honest discussion.
We need to build the rhetorical tools to shut this bullshit trolling down. It’s doing a lot of damage.
Also, unlike Ann, he wasn’t talking about general, outside the room topics like politics and history, but deeply personal and oft-times too traumatic to want to discuss topics like rape.
I’m tired of even bother to pretend I care about assholes being able to speak anywhere anytime they want.
What about victims right not to be forced to be subjected to BS like this? Free speech comes with the freedom to walk away.
Freeze peach strikes again.
Hilarious that he pulls the “I’m not an MRA, but…” argument. I was president of a group where WD had one of these types being hugely disrespectful. He was also the vice pres. When I eventually asked him to tone it down, he pulled a half-baked “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you…” exit. So surreal. He was of course a huge homophobe too obsessed with anal rape. It all made sense when his ex revealed shit he would try to pull in bed. I imagine he is an MRA out there somewhere.
Too often when people argue about freedom of speech, they’re just arguing for their right to be an arsehole. Which is funny, because they’re more free to be a complete arsehole right now than at any time in recent Western history.
It wasn’t that long ago when public swearing would get people fined or arrested under public decency laws.
Stop, I’ve heard this one before.
Seriously, how many times have I heard stories of a student claiming to be banned for XYZ (usually challenging some belief or wanting to pray or something), the right-wing media pouncing on it with joy, and then it turning out that the student was really just being disruptive?
Many times.
Doesn’t help that this is nearly a pet peeve of mine; someone claiming to be criticized for some innocuous thing when that innocuous thing was buried in a heap of other shit, and that shit is what they’re actually being criticized for.
Dave, I just noticed the blob known as “Matt Forney” included you in his latest podcast
Mitchel,
Did you mean blight? I think he’s more of a blight.
Haha, either or. I don’t know what men see in Roosh or Forney. The only thing I find weird about this site is that he lists “sluthate” as a bad site. I find the “bash the scene” section is hilarious lol.
So basically, he’s a bully. He wants the college to reinstate him and then he’s going to drop out. And he’s using threats to do it.
Wasn’t he also asked by the students themselves to stop bringing up the rape stuff and going on and on and on about it because it made them uncomfortable?
But then he continued to do it anyways because now he knew it bothered people? Not to mention his Facebook page says he’s studying “how to annoy people” or some such sophomoric bullshit. The guy’s a walking example of “PAY ATTENTION TO MEEEEEE!” syndrome.
Also, the phrase “Freedom Feminist” really raises my hackles. I wonder why.
Dude, please. If you believe any of those people, you’re not into freedom, much less feminism. You’re an idiot, and no one is under any obligation to keep their ears (and classroom) open to your incessant drivel. Sit down, shut up, and maybe you’ll learn something.
While I fully agree that left-wing, PC, multi-culty wankers have done a LOT to stifle dialogue in higher education, and in life in general, fuck this guy. It’s one thing when people complain their talks were shut down because they refused to say, “Trigger warning: stuff happens here,” or kick entire organizations out of school for saying something horrible including members of that organization who never participated in the awful stuff, or debates being completely cancelled because some people didn’t like the subject matter or banning words including banning important historical documents and works of literature containing those words. It’s quite another when you get kicked out for actively and admittedly running around harassing people and actually trying to disrupt classes just to make people mad and ruin the very expensive learning experience that everyone else is likely going to be paying for the rest of their lives. You nailed it in saying this is a real world manifestaion of a typical troll.
Also, need I question how if people te someone to stop harassing them, it’s an attempt to silence them and take away their free speech but trying to threaten, harass, and shame someone into silence is ok? Oh, I forgot….in ALL cases man right, woman wrong.
Make no mistake, freedom of speech IS under attack at universities. This is NOT an example of thise artacks!
You know, I’m smelling some serious mental health issues here. Under the obnoxious behavior seems to be a young man who doesn’t see a future for himself and in his desperation to make his mark on the world around him and anger at the perceived opportunities denied to him, decides the only way to do this is to die for a cause so his name is remembered.
If I was an adult in his life, I would be pretty concerned about him. This is implosion talk. And when someone displaying this kind of histrionics implodes, they either just take out themselves or worse still, take others out before themselves.
This kid is one to watch, and if possible, get help for.
Seriously? Didn’t we just have this conversation, like, five seconds ago?
@ktrantingredhead:
Uhh… what now?
You mean the SAE frat chapter that was shut down by SAE, not the college? The one where only two students were actually expelled from the university over the incident?
@katz:
And we’ll be having it again five seconds from now, apparently.
@Katz – huh? What am I missing?
@greyskye:
Don’t diagnose over the internet. Mental illness is not the only explanation for bad behavior in the universe, and it doesn’t lie on some 1-dimensional spectrum of explanations that can be brought out whenever the behavior is bad enough.
Maybe because it’s just some made-up bullshit? That would be my educated guess.
Your ableism, greyskye. That’s what you missed. Don’t be that way. If you don’t know what you did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ableism
People are fatigued from this conversation and I am one of them.
Judging by the list of names, it’s probably part of CHS’s whole thing with calling feminists “gender feminists,” and introducing arbitrary classifications so she can co-opt the work of past feminists while holding retrograde views.
Oh good grief.
@greyskye:
If you’ve been here for any length of time, you should know by now that that’s the way this community operates, especially for the frequency this shit comes up. Just don’t do it, ok? I’m sure you’re clever enough to come up with some commentary better than “he must be crazy.”
The problem is that, whether you mean to or not, you’re excusing their bad conduct. There’s a massive tendency, especially in internet stories about awful people, to immediately reach for the explanation that the person is suffering from some sort of diagnosable mental illness. Doing so suggests that they can’t help it, that their conduct is beyond their ability to control.
While this is doubtlessly true in some cases, in others it’s just as patently wrong. And in the vast, vast majority of situations, you’re not going to get enough information about the person from a news story or a single blog post to be able to come up with any sort of certain diagnosis.
I do think many of these asshats would benefit from counseling. Much of their behavior is definitely self-harming, even if they can’t see it. Their thinking, in general, is borked. But this is due to a willful embrace of bad ideas, not because of any sort of specific ailment.
Shorter form: “Asshole” is not a diagnosis.