Blocked Speech Not Free

There is no pending legislation about slavery reparations, and any such legal action is still far off in the future. There is no consensus on the specifics of reparations, let alone on their validity or necessity. It is not a prominent issue on the national agenda, so why would David Horowitz bring it up now?

Maybe Horowitz never really converted to conservatism, and as a lefty in disguise, he wanted to help his brethren in arms define their own ideology. The protesters who trashed thousands of copies of the Brown Daily Herald and the ones who stormed the Daily Californian's office tearing up newspapers definitely need to reevaluate their behavior in light of their politics.

The protesters are not alone, for many of their fellow progressives have endorsed the destruction of newspaper print runs as a legitimate form of civil disobedience. Brown Professor Lewis Gordon told the Washington Post that "if something is free you can take as many copies as you like" and that this was "not a free speech issue" but "a hate speech issue."

How such pernicious misinformation became commonly accepted is a mystery. Stealing, destroying, or removing student newspapers en masse is a crime, and it is most definitely a violation of free speech.

Pamphlets full of detailed legal precedent are available from the Student Press Law Center (www.splc.org) for any doubters about the question of newspaper theft's illegality. One could also ask Allen Rubman, a student at Ocean County College in New Jersey, who pled guilty to a criminal charge of possession of stolen property last April for taking 1,200 copies of the school paper, The Viking News. Or Joe Alfone at Louisiana State University, who was arrested in 1998 for suspicion of misdemeanor theft and criminal mischief after allegedly burning 1,000 copies of the Tiger Weekly. In recent years, student paper theft incidents have been investigated as campus disciplinary issues or local criminal matters at the University of Tennessee, Hofstra, the University of South Carolina, the University of North Texas, Texas A&M, UC Berkeley, and many other campuses.

That these cases don't always result in arrest or conviction is in large part due to the ambiguities resulting from the fact that most student papers are free. As Professor Gordon reminds us, the Brown Daily Herald is free like the Spectator.

Nevertheless, this does not make it either morally or legally acceptable to remove the entire print run so that no one can read the paper. At the SPLC's suggestion, last year the Spectator started putting a note in each issue that says readers are entitled to one copy each. This innocuous little line has actually helped other school papers in getting the police to arrest newspaper thieves.

There can be no free speech when the forums for speech are destroyed. When people's access to information is physically blocked, disobedience is no longer civil. What the Brown protesters have done is the equivalent of blocking students from attending a controversial professor's lecture by destroying the door.

This is anathema to true liberalism, and it undermines the progress being made toward a left-wing revitalization in this country. Radicalism means going to the root of a problem and exposing injustice that society obscures. This requires the free exchange of ideas and untrammeled debate, and when protesters start destroying newspapers and deciding that no one in the community can be exposed to opposing views, these protesters cannot be described as radicals nor as liberals.

An interesting counterpoint is present in some of the words and actions of the man who stands poised to lead a progressive revival in this country. A recent mayoral debate at the UCLA campus was cancelled when protests over affirmative action in the University of California system became too heated. One of the Los Angeles mayoral candidates, former State Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, gave an impassioned speech to student protesters who had occupied a campus building, drawing their wild applause and their support as he negotiated with administrators. Villaraigosa has impeccable progressive credentials, and if he is elected mayor of Los Angeles on the strength of his Latino-labor coalition base, he will become a major national figure.

A recent LA Weekly article on Villaraigosa includes a story about how his transition from youthful far-left firebrand to union organizer and coalition builder was brought about by a trip to Cuba, where he witnessed repression of free speech and expression. "You can only find truth in the battle of ideas; and if you can't engage in that, you can't make change," he told the Weekly.

Not for nothing is Villaraigosa perhaps the most promising figure in the American left-progressive movement today. He is entirely correct about the "battle of ideas," and student radicals would be wise to heed his words.

So do we have Horowitz to thank for helping us define what it really means to be a leftist? Perhaps. But that doesn't mean newspapers were in any way obliged to print his ad, as he has been going around suggesting and as many pundits have naively parroted. It's not censorship for a newspaper to determine its own content, but rather it's exactly the kind of free expression the First Amendment protects. And "X-Ray Specs" fully supports the Spectator's decision not to run the ad. In my humble opinion, it's a matter of getting the facts right, and Horowitz's description of the Civil War and emancipation and his comments on welfare are woefully inaccurate and misleading.