Here’s something to get excited about. Flemming Rose, internationally renowned free-speech defender, and Dave Rubin, of the acclaimed The Rubin Report, will join ARI’s Steve Simpson for a free-speech panel at OCON 2017.
Last week, ARI hosted a free-speech event at University of Southern California. The panelists Colin Moriarty, Dave Rubin and Steve Simpson discussed the importance of free speech on campus. More than 150 people, many of them students, were in attendance. This short video is a recap of the event.
You’ve heard the stories. Charles Murray was attacked by a mob after giving a talk at Middlebury College. Not long after that, a riot broke out at U.C. Berkeley over a scheduled appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos. Berkeley’s student newspaper later published a series of essays justifying the violence as “self-defense.”
College used to be grounded in the inviolate principle that each of us should confront new ideas, speak our minds and learn. Has that time passed? This year alone we have seen a riot at U.C. Berkeley and violence at Middlebury College over controversial speakers. Instead of “express yourself,” a new view seems to be taking hold: “Suppress yourself — or I’ll do it for you.”
Why do so many college students believe that free speech amounts to “sticks and stones”? And that it’s morally justified to use force to silence people?
For those in the Orange County, California area, join the Ayn Rand Institute Saturday, February 25 at Avenue of the Arts Hotel in Costa Mesa for a discussion on the state of the culture and of the Objectivist movement in light of the new administration in Washington, D.C.
Freedom of speech is indispensable to a free and civilized society, yet this precious right is increasingly under attack today. Ayn Rand Institute director of Legal Studies Steve Simpson is in Chicago today to speak at The Heartland Institute on defending free speech.
Two weeks ago, some students and the administration at UCLA School of Law tried to ban my book Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism from being displayed at a free-speech panel. (The event was co-sponsored by the Ayn Rand Institute and The Federalist Society; you can read a detailed account in my editorial at The Hill.) Appalled by that incident, I wondered whether this was typical of UCLA, whether the university would explain its actions, whether it cared at all about intellectual freedom.