Universities pay left-wing speakers to come to their campuses and advocate the abolition of capitalism, the police, and prisons — including speakers who support genocidal communist regimes, and speakers convicted of awful crimes like torture and murder. These speakers get paid thousands of dollars per speech. Angela Davis, who advocates both the abolition of prisons and capitalism, and the jailing of dissenters by communist regimes, typically gets paid between $25,000 and $38,000 per speech. The left-wing feminist Donna Hylton, who pitches herself as a “criminal justice reformer,” charges between $30,000 and $50,000 per speech. As Wikipedia notes, Hylton “was convicted at age 20 of murder in the second degree and two counts of kidnapping in the first degree for her role in the kidnapping, rape] torture, and murder of New York businessman Thomas Vigliarolo in 1985.”
But when a conservative group spends its own money to bring a speaker to campus, universities won’t even protect the speaker from being driven off campus.
“Students at the University of Memphis blocked individuals from leaving a Turning Point USA event on Wednesday night featuring Kyle Rittenhouse,” reports Campus Reform:
According to FOX 13, a room on campus was booked for the event from 7-9 p.m., but security escorted Rittenhouse off the stage just before 8 p.m.
Video taken by Julio Rosas shows protesters in a campus parking garage blocking people from leaving the event. Police had to move the protesters away from the parking garage’s exit so cars could leave.
Rosas also said some protesters spat on cars leaving the event.
A separate video taken by Rosas shows police escorting TPUSA members out of the event, attempting to prevent protesters from attacking the individuals.
Video obtained by Campus Reform shows a large group of protesters outside of the event chanting “No justice, No peace!”
Hundreds of protesters were seen outside the event….Protesters held signs reading “Put Rittenhouse behind bars not a podium,” “Murderers don’t belong here.” and “No one should be open to: Racism, Christo-Fascism, Murderous Little S–ts,” according to the Commercial Appeal.
Meanwhile, it was reported that Arizona State University paid $35,000 to left-wing DEI demagogue Ibram Kendi for a one-hour speech. Kendi claims that “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism….Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist.” Progressive publications like Slate love Kendi’s demagoguery and think his writings should be assigned to your child in school. Arizona State University loves him, too:
$30,000 for a one-hour speech. And $5,000 for the one-night trip.
That’s what Arizona State University’s (ASU) College of Liberal Arts and Sciences paid the divisive “anti-racist” demagogue Ibram X. Kendi to come indoctrinate college students at the 2023 A. Wade Smith and Elsie Moore Memorial Lecture on Race Relations, public records obtained by the Goldwater Institute reveal.
Of course, Kendi is entitled to his misguided opinion that “[t]he only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” But that doesn’t mean that Arizona’s largest public university should be sending him bloated checks or foisting his discriminatory ideology onto students.
And it shouldn’t have taken nearly a year for ASU to provide this information in response to a public records request submitted by the Goldwater Institute shortly after the event last April. But it took repeated follow-ups with the university, including sending a legal demand letter, to uncover the documents revealing the university’s fat paycheck to the fallen hero of the far left.
Records finally received last month show that the university paid a $30,000 speaking fee for the one-hour “conversation” with Kendi. He also received a $5,000 “Travel Buyout” to cover his apparently extravagant travel expenses (he could spend that money however he chose). And the university also forked out an additional $4,840.99 for other event-related expenses. The most significant of those were $2,160 in radio advertising and $2,063.45 in security costs, including payments for uniformed security, plain-clothes security, and metal detectors.
Other leftists get paid similarly large amounts of money to attack capitalism and America on campus. Speaker Angela Davis, who is typically paid $25,000 to $38,000 to speak on campus, is a a big supporter of communist attacks on free speech and political dissent. While she advocates abolishing America’s prisons, she condemned jailed Jewish dissidents in the Soviet Union as “Zionist fascists and opponents of socialism” who should “be kept in prison.” These dissidents were trapped in the world’s largest prison system, the Gulag, in which tens of millions of people perished during imprisonment or forced labor. Davis had no problem with the Gulag at all.
Yet Davis called for abolishing prisons in America, where prisons are used to incarcerate murderers and thieves, rather than dissidents. “Abolish prisons, says Angela Davis,” is the title of a glowing portrait of Davis in the Harvard Gazette, an official publication of Harvard University. “In a lecture at the Kennedy School of Government’s ARCO Forum Friday (March 7), activist and intellectual Angela Davis advocated for the abolition of prisons, casting the issue in human rights terms and urging a broader vision of justice,” wrote the Gazette.
But Davis did not care about human rights in communist countries, where human rights could not be permitted to slow the pace of communism and its total transformation of society. Vast numbers of people were incarcerated and killed by the Soviet Union’s communist government in the Gulag, without any criticism from Davis. The Los Angeles Times described the vast suffering in the Gulag camps in just a single region of Siberia, where 3 million people died.
A Jewish Harvard law professor noted “that he appealed to Davis, with her very close relationship with the USSR, to intercede on behalf of imprisoned Soviet Jewry activists…. ‘Several days later, I received a call back from Ms. Davis’ secretary informing me that Davis had looked into the people on my list…. “They are all Zionist fascists and opponents of socialism.” Davis would urge that they be kept in prison where they belonged.’”
