“Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world.”
—JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA
I nervously climbed the winding staircase of the twelfth-century church in the heart of Oxford University. The church turned library was appropriately set in the middle of a graveyard, for as I ascended the narrow, circuitous stairwell, I felt that I was walking to a grave of my own. I clutched my ten-page paper on U.S. foreign policy, knowing that I would have to read it aloud to my international relations tutor. In Oxford’s tutorial system, professors—called “tutors”—systematically dismantle your arguments and writing in an effort to build strength. As a Western-minded, Israel-loving Republican, I was afraid that my esteemed tutor—a former representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization—would attack my views. My fear was justified, because she did just that.
I left my first tutorial with tears running down my face, not because my tutor had critiqued me unfairly or not listened to my arguments with an open mind. In fact, she had, but she presented me with a set of arguments I had never earnestly considered. After dozens of these one-on-one sessions, I grew to have a deep respect for my tutor. She had not changed my views per se—I am still a Western-minded, Israel-loving Republican—but she instilled in me a level of compassion for and openness to hearing the other side. She wrote me a moving letter of recommendation, and to this day she remains one of my favorite in a long line of educators. Through this academic experience, an Israel-loving Westerner and a more Eastern-minded Palestinian met and developed a mutual respect.
The relationship I built with my Palestinian tutor was the academic ideal, but it was far from the academic reality. For far too many conservatives, the academic reality is hostility, marginalization, and sometimes even penalization. But it was during my time in graduate school that an even harsher reality took hold of America’s campuses: the outright criminalization of conservatism.
I gazed out the window of my Harvard Law apartment and onto the famously serene streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Night had fallen on my cozy, quiet community, and its residents were sheltered from the cool November night. I took a seat at my glass table, littered with neon sticky notes and stacked with books, ready to study my dense criminal casebook by candlelight. As I enjoyed the tranquility of the sleepy four-hundred-year-old town, the scene that transpired on my television screen could not have been more distinct.
There were buildings ablaze, their flames reaching far into the sky. Hundreds of bullets and rocks crisscrossed the smoky backdrop. Tactical assault vehicles rolled down the streets while heavily clad armed officers patrolled in gas masks. Looters ravaged local stores. It looked like a combat zone but it was not. The jarring images were not set in the war-torn streets of a far-off land but beneath a “Seasons Greetings” sign adjacent to a McDonald’s in our very own backyard: Ferguson, Missouri.
The Ferguson grand jury had rendered its decision: Officer Darren Wilson would not be charged in the shooting death of Michael Brown. Wilson had acted in lawful self-defense against an aggressor in a situation wrongly characterized as “hands up, don’t shoot,” in which Brown was erroneously portrayed as nonthreatening and compliant. Though the American legal process had delivered justice, Ferguson rioters insisted upon injustice, pillaging and razing their neighbors’ businesses in the dead of night.
While Ferguson was a critical flashpoint for the nation, it was a decision point for law students. The evening’s events were sure to dominate the discussion in my criminal law class. I had a choice: speak my mind in support of the grand jury and suffer the condemnation of my predominantly liberal peers, or stay quiet in the hopes that some brave soul would speak for me. I decided on the latter—at least for now.
The next day the mood on campus was predictably grim. Students wore black shirts in protest and opined about the injustices of the courts, but the true firestorm of anger wasn’t unleashed until after Thanksgiving break, just as our onerous fall exam period approached. Upon arriving back on campus, the signs of impending upheaval at Harvard Law were not just felt: they were seen.
Every morning before class I walked through Harvard’s esteemed Wasserstein Hall past a sea of faces. On the wall were portraits of the world’s greatest legal minds—hundreds of black-and-white pictures of professors at Harvard both past and present who have made valuable contributions to our legal system. I always looked at these faces with a hint of both nervousness and disbelief. Nervous that I might be the victim of one of these instructors’ infamous cold calls, where I would be ruthlessly grilled on a case in front of my peers. Disbelief at the opportunity I had to engage with these great minds. Both emotions were embedded in a deep respect for my elders, with whom I might disagree but would never disrespect.
This December morning I saw that the gallery of faces that typically greeted me had been covered with signs. Written across them were striking words:
“You shot me.”
“I can’t breathe.”
“Please don’t let me die.”
As I moved closer to get a better look at the signs, I saw the hashtag “#LastWords” and the names of individuals who had died during an interaction with a police officer.
Student activists had covered our faculty’s faces with “last words,” and yet some of these very faculty members had devoted their entire lives to defending individuals who uttered last words just like these. I found the defacement to be both profoundly confusing and deeply disrespectful. These professors had done more for social justice and civil rights than all of these insolent students combined, and yet here their portraits were marred with words of protest. Why tarnish the images of the very people who have tirelessly worked to counter injustice? It made no sense!
The visible signs of protest were accompanied by a flurry of campus activity. Protesters blocked traffic, chanting “No justice, no peace, no racist police” and “Hands up, don’t shoot.”1 Harvard medical students held a “die-in,” where they lay on the ground in their white lab coats.2 And, in an amusing clash, a group of student protesters intentionally held a silent demonstration during a biannual Harvard tradition called “Primal Scream,” where inebriated undergraduates run naked across Harvard Yard in a last act of liberation before exams.3 The protesters’ “White silence is white violence” sign came face-to-face with noisy buck-naked college students. To silence the raucous undergrads, the protesters repeated “Silence, silence” to which the streakers replied, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” One protest organizer told the Harvard Crimson that she was “disgusted” because when the crowd shouted “U.S.A.!” they were “upholding a system that is oppressing black people.”4 Meanwhile, most of the drunken undergrads were blissfully unaware of the silent demonstration intentionally designed to interrupt their event.
Harvard was not alone in its protest activity. Ferguson was a flashpoint, setting off waves of activity on our nation’s campuses. In some cases the school administrators acknowledged it, and in other cases they coddled it. At Columbia Law School, students asked for exam extensions, complaining that “in being asked to prepare for and take our exams in this moment, we are being asked to perform incredible acts of disassociation that have led us to question our place in this school community . . .” Taking exams are an extreme act of disassociation? I was bemused. Our singular requirement as law students over an entire four-month-long semester was to show up for that four-hour block of time to complete an exam. And now, as National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke so eloquently put it, these students were claiming “Social justice ate my homework.”5
Attempting to mimic our Ivy League peers, my classmates implored Harvard Law dean Martha Minow for exam extensions and safe spaces. “Your silence denies humanity to the lives lost and minimizes the gravity of the palpable anguish looming over campus . . . we are traumatized,” they admonished the dean.6 Being forced to take exams denied humanity? How were my peers going to survive in the real world, where a troubling news cycle is no excuse for absence?
Columbia Law caved and permitted exam extensions for “trauma related to recent non-indictments,” in the words of the student senate.7 Harvard did not acquiesce, although they did provide an extraordinary level of support: a space for reflection, one-on-one support, and a session on concentrating amid strong emotions—all deemed unacceptable by the protesting students.
In the month after Ferguson, I remained silent. But that was about to change. Tired of what I saw as the vilification of cops on campus, I approached The O’Reilly Factor about the happenings at Harvard and received an invitation to appear on the show. I traveled from Boston to New York City for the program and, after taking an eight-hour online exam in my hotel room (for which I could have used the grand jury exemption my peers sought!), I joined Bill O’Reilly on The Factor.
I used the platform not just to express disagreement with the exam extension request but also as an opportunity to advocate for law enforcement. Sitting across from Bill, I said, “You know what really disturbs me, Bill? A cop dies every fifty-eight hours. Thirty-nine have died by hostile gunfire [in 2014 alone]. And, in fact, one week before Ferguson, off-duty police officer Justin Winebrenner confronted a gunman and was killed. There were no protests. There was not a peep.” After I mentioned Justin on television, members of his Akron, Ohio, community reached out on Facebook to thank me for bringing attention to his heroism. Officer Justin Winebrenner’s story was, of course, the previous chapter of this book.
What my classmates were missing was this: while there are indeed instances of police brutality that should be addressed and condemned, these incidents are not the norm. The majority of officers are good people working a hard and thankless job, and some are even as heroic as Justin, bravely running into danger and receiving little thanks or appreciation for it.
During my two years at Harvard, I was astounded by the lack of respect for authority—for police and professors alike—on the part of my fellow students. In a profession founded on the principle that everyone receives a defense, the police received none on my law school campus. In a field committed to finding truth, the truth had been buried. The “hands up, don’t shoot” scenario had been proven false—at this point by the Ferguson grand jury—but my fellow students nevertheless continued to chant it on the streets.8 Months later, President Barack Obama’s own Justice Department would corroborate the Ferguson grand jury’s decision.
I chose to speak up, and I incurred the wrath of my peers because of it. Dirty looks in the halls. Private, behind-the-back shaming. In Harvard Law School’s highly publicized annual parody, students planned to include a reference to me despite the long-standing policy of not attacking students. It was removed at the last moment after the Federalist Society president threatened to go to the administration if the joke was not removed.
There was even an anonymous blog post titled “A New Low” in which a faceless colleague labeled my pro-police views “vitriolic” and wrote this concerning my appearance on The O’Reilly Factor: “Going on national television to mock your fellow students for their activism and the pain they’ve endured is a new low . . . and defending state-sanctioned terrorism.”9 State-sanctioned terrorism? The irony is that the very author of this post would most certainly be calling on the so-called state-sanctioned terrorists if suddenly in harm’s way.
My very public career first at CNN and now as national RNC spokesperson puts me in the middle of a storm of criticism—go check my Twitter feed or Facebook page!—but it doesn’t bother me much. What does bother me—intensely—is the vilification of opposing views. Academia is meant to be a bastion of free thought, where your ideas are questioned, countered, and engaged. As a conservative student, liberal academia proved particularly rewarding, since it gave me a meaningful opportunity to challenge and sometimes concede to opinions that are different from my own.
Like the time when my professor of criminal law, Ronald S. Sullivan, presented two cases in an attempt to illustrate racial disparity in the criminal justice system. The cases were from the same place and had similar though not identical fact patterns but the verdicts could not have been more different. In one famous case, a white man shot at four young black men on the subway. The penalty? A conviction for carrying an unlicensed firearm and acquittal on all other charges. In the other, lesser-known case, a black man defended his home by shooting a white teenager who charged at him and allegedly slapped his gun—an action that would ordinarily be protected by the so-called castle doctrine, or the right to defend your home. His penalty? A conviction for manslaughter.
My professor asked the class how these similar cases could have turned out so differently. My answer echoed that of the black defendant’s attorney, who said: “Race has so much to do with this case . . . that it’s painful.”10 As a conservative student, I was fortunate to have a professor like Sullivan who engaged me in the friendly manner of a wise educator shepherding his green student. He opened my eyes to disparities in the law. I was enriched by the fair-minded alternative views academia offered, but my effort to add a conservative viewpoint was disparaged by some of my peers. Sure, they had every right to falsely caricature me, but the coming months would show their intent was not just to bully but to silence.
The criticism I encountered on campus, while far-reaching, was mild compared to what Bill Barlow, the emerging conservative hero on campus, had to face. His exposure of our snowflake counterparts earned him baseless and unfair labels like “white supremacist” and “serial killer.” In my eyes, and in the view of many others, though, he was a rock star, and his ability to out-argue our radical peers was nothing short of epic.
Before I tell you Bill’s story, a little background. Following Ferguson, Harvard experienced a deluge of snowflakes—literally. Yes, 2015 was indeed a year of record snowfall. But that is not the snow to which I refer. Rather, I am referring to liberal snowflakes: the individuals who dare not hear dissenting thought lest they melt.
A group called the Students for Inclusion began an anonymous blog called Socratic Shortcomings with the apparent aim of giving slighted Harvard Law School students a place to whine about instances in which they felt victimized.11 Purporting to be open to all points of view, the site claims to give voice to “students of all identities and backgrounds, named or anonymously.”12 However, we would later find that the group allegedly censored a variety of posts that they did not agree with.13
On Socratic Shortcomings, the topics vary: most center on race or gender, but there is the occasional slighted conservative. For instance, one student said she felt “disheartened” to see some of her liberal friends “celebrate the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.”14 How can they claim to support human rights by opposing the death penalty but rejoice at the passing of a man who left a wife and nine children? A fair point to which I think any rational human being would agree.
Most of the posts, however, are far less logical and give you a window into the mind of a snowflake. Here is a preview:
• “Chalk Offensive”—“On my morning walk to campus, I saw a TRUMP 2016 chalk message . . . This is an unacceptable affront to all POC [people of color] at HLS.”15
• “Holy Cow”—“I very much dislike the way that op-eds . . . repeatedly make use of the ‘holy cow’ idiom to refer to free speech . . . If the goal is to resist white supremacist, please don’t use idioms that were invented by white people to disparage a certain kind of brown person.”16
• “The Jail Bird”—“I cringe every time I have to order a chicken sandwich at the grill at the HLS dining hall. The reason for this is that the grill menu apparently has an incarceration ‘theme’: the french fries are called ‘Felony Fries,’ the onion rings are called ‘Crime Rings’ and the chicken sandwich is called ‘The Jail Bird.’ Incarceration is not a joke . . .”17
• “The Framers”—“I don’t want to interpret the documents that house my most basic rights as . . . American by reflecting on what ‘The Founders,’ in all their infinite racism, sexism, and elitism, thought hundreds of years ago. The continuous validation of this historical perspective in our classrooms and the opinions we read is offensive and oppressive.”18
• “Legal Profession”—“The number of times the old white guys teaching our Legal Profession class (which, I underline, is an ethics class) have used racist terms like ‘off the reservation’ . . . is just unacceptable. ETHICS CLASS. You can’t write this irony.”19
The snowflake complaints were also coupled with attacks on certain groups of students. I’ll never forget receiving an e-mail sent from the official student government account “on behalf of the Affinity Group Coalition.” The e-mail was addressed to “white allies” of the minority student affinity groups, and its aim was to teach “white allies” how to be a “good ally.” One recommendation in particular stood out: “continue acknowledging your privilege.”
The demand seemed stereotypical and tone-deaf. There are many white people who grew up as victims of poverty, crime, or sickness. Summing up a group as homogeneously “privileged” was off base. This was the same broad categorization of a group that we oppose in the fight against prejudice!
Indeed, the snowflakes were out in full force, but they met their match in a fierce conservative fighter who would be silent no longer. I first heard about Bill Barlow from my roommate. “You have to get a copy of the Harvard Law Record, Kayleigh. There is a bombshell op-ed you will love,” she said. I grabbed a copy of the Record and found an op-ed titled “Fascism at Yale.” It had gone viral, and a quick perusal of the article revealed why.20
The article concerned an incident at Yale, our school’s Ivy League rival. Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee sent an e-mail cautioning students against wearing offensive Halloween costumes. A professor questioned the email, arguing that “American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition.”21 When the professor’s argument was met with protest, she personally went to engage with the protesters.
Here is how the students responded to her willingness to have a dialogue. In a manic, screaming voice, a student shouted at the professor, “Why the f*** did you accept the position?! Who the f*** hired you?! You should step down! . . . You should not sleep at night. You are disgusting.”22
Barlow’s op-ed pairs this disturbing Yale incident with another that occurred just days later. At an event held by the William F. Buckley, Jr., Program—a conservative group at Yale—dissenting opinions escalated to physical assault when activists literally spit on attendees. Speaking of the protesters, Barlow lamented, “The problem is that no one is willing to stand up to them. If we are going to begin anywhere, we are going to begin by calling them by their rightful name. They are fascists. They are fascists. They are fascists.”23
With this article, Barlow began the process of doing just that: standing up to them. His article gained so much traction that he was asked to appear on Lou Dobbs’s show on Fox Business Network. Just as my O’Reilly Factor appearance had been met with mockery and belittlement a year earlier, so too was Barlow’s. Soon after Barlow appeared on Fox, a Facebook thread developed with Harvard students maligning him and falsely labeling him a “white supremacist.”
Students further criticized Barlow not for his words but for his appearance, saying he looked like a serial killer. Barlow said he laughed it off, wisely noting that “as long as they’re expressing their opinion in the shadows, it doesn’t do anything,” but at this point he realized that he was enemy number one on campus when it came to politics—a status that he readily embraced.
The liberal forces on campus—ignited and emboldened by Ferguson—organized, and as their movement gained momentum, their protest tactics grew increasingly more childish. Activist students formed a group called “Reclaim” that aimed at ridding Harvard of a variety of alleged racial and gender disparities. In one member’s words, “I #ReclaimHarvardLaw because HLS perpetuates the white supremacist patriarchy . . .”24
Harvard Law—a “white supremacist patriarchy”? Give me a break! Harvard, the alma mater of W. E. B. Du Bois and more recently Attorney General Loretta Lynch is a bastion of diversity and inclusion, not a place where white supremacists lurk around every corner. The accusation was ludicrous!
Reclaim had a list of demands to remedy this perceived white supremacy overtaking Harvard Law School—among them, mandatory implicit bias training for incoming students and the addition of a section on student evaluations to report professor bias. As Barlow wisely countered, implicit bias training “would be taught in a highly partisan fashion” as it was at University of California, where students are cautioned not to say offensive statements like “Everyone can succeed in society if they work hard enough.”25 Seriously? And as far as professor biases go, there was only one bias I encountered among faculty: liberal.
In pursuit of their demands, Reclaim showed a deep aversion to alternative thought, a militant demeanor, and an uncalled-for irreverence toward authority. For instance, when Dean Martha Minow received the Gittler Prize for “mak[ing] a lasting contribution to racial, ethnic or religious relations,” Reclaim students traveled to Brandeis University to shout her down during her acceptance speech.26 Minow, a candidate on President Obama’s shortlist for the Supreme Court, had worked tirelessly on behalf of refugees and desegregation, but here were her own students rudely heckling their elder and ally at a ceremony in her honor.
In defense of Dean Minow, Professor Randall Kennedy—a professor at Harvard Law for more than thirty years and a renowned advocate for racial justice—said, “It seems to me that it is altogether fitting that she [Dean Minow] should get this prize at this moment.”27 Ironically, Kennedy—who has dedicated his entire life to promoting racial equality—became the target of Reclaim’s ire when he wrote in the New York Times that two tendencies worried him on campus: “exaggerating the scope of the racism that the activists oppose and fear” and “minimizing their own strength and victories that they and their forebears have already achieved.”28 After acknowledging several of the activists’ concerns that racism does still exist, he concluded in saying, “Reformers harm themselves by nurturing an inflated sense of victimization.”
It was nothing short of remarkable: here was a professor who was an activist himself pointing out the “inflated sense of victimization” among activists on campus. These were the wise observations of a civil rights icon to a younger generation of activists who would have none of it. Incensed by his gentle guidance, dissenters—some of whom belonged to Reclaim—scoffed at Kennedy and accused him of being out of touch, confronting him angrily as he tried to communicate his point of view during a class discussion. As a southerner who grew up in a home where “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir” were mandatory, I was taught that disagreement was acceptable but never disrespect. My Reclaim counterparts had crossed that line in a big way.
Irreverent toward authority and dissatisfied that Harvard was not yielding to their every demand, Reclaim resolved to occupy Caspersen Student Center, a warm and inviting student common area with fireplaces and grand light fixtures.29 Covering the wall in signs promoting their cause and the floor with sleeping bags and air mattresses, Reclaim dictatorially declared ownership of half the room, creating their own sort of safe space right in the heart of campus, directly in the path most students take to class. It couldn’t be missed.
Barlow grew increasingly frustrated as he walked to class. Every day he dealt with liberal professors and liberal classmates, but now on the way to class he had to “see a literal wall of propaganda,” in his words. He got an idea: Why not show Reclaim just how annoying it was to walk through a common area plastered in signs you disagree with? Let them see what it was like to have “a daily barrage of disagreement,” in his words. If Reclaim could put up signs, why couldn’t he?
Besides, he believed that Reclaim was “authoritarian at heart,” intolerant of contrary opinions. Many students mildly agreed with Reclaim. Who cares if they’re occupying a space and proffering a list of demands? They aren’t acting authoritarian, many students thought. So Barlow devised a plan: fill the other half of Caspersen Student Center with signs of his own and put Reclaim in a position where they would be forced to choose between tolerance and intolerance.
For his first sign, Barlow wanted to make a strong point that was sure to get noticed. It was the heat of the 2016 primaries, and while Donald Trump was exceedingly popular among Republican primary voters, he wasn’t exactly the top choice on a liberal law school campus in the heart of the so-called People’s Republic of Cambridge. With this in mind, Barlow made a provocative statement on his first batch of signs, alleging that Trump and Reclaim were alike in censoring dissent. It wasn’t that Barlow believed Trump was anything like Reclaim; rather, he knew a Donald Trump analogy would have the biggest impact in challenging the liberal activists. Moreover, he said, “The only way that you could get a Trump sign into Harvard’s halls without getting murdered was to have it in a negative light.”
As Barlow put up the signs in empty wall space, members of Reclaim approached him and a “tense but civil” thirty-minute conversation ensued during which Barlow explained his right to dissenting speech. But it seemed to him that “people were angry at the fact that I was even talking.” One student pointedly said, “The fact that we are having this conversation is a reinforcement of white supremacy.”
About an hour after the conversation, Barlow received word that the Trump portion of his signs had been taken down. He had posted several sheets of paper on the wall, and the one that specifically mentioned the presidential candidate was detached but the others remained. Barlow also received an e-mail from the dean of students’ office asking to meet. In their meeting, an administrator pressed Barlow about whether his signs were placed on the wall as a deliberate attack on Muslim students, apparently because of its reference to Trump. The assertion was as outrageous as it was nonsensical, and a very distant stretch from Barlow’s motive of promoting free speech. According to Barlow, the administrator’s line of inquiry was prompted by Reclaim students, who had approached the dean of students to complain about the signs and ascribe to them an anti-Muslim bias. The administrator then explained that the Trump sign might offend some students and run afoul of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) status, a claim Barlow argued was inaccurate. The dean of students confirmed to him that non-campaign signs were permitted, and she also verified that students, not the administration, had removed the signs.
Bill affixes signs to Caspersen Student Center. Courtesy of Jim An, The Harvard Law School Record Corporation
Despite the fact that the administration approved the signs that did not mention Trump, Barlow received a text from a friend informing him that all of his signs had been taken down. Intent on getting his message across, Barlow returned to post a second round of signs. This time the message read, “Censored by Reclaim Harvard Law.” As he attached the signs, a Reclaim member curtly warned in what Barlow describes as a faux nice voice: “All signs must be approved by the plenary committee. You can place an application, but you’re not permitted to just put up signs.”
What was this so-called plenary committee, you ask? It wasn’t composed of faculty or recognized by the administration. In fact, the administration had already explicitly given Barlow permission to hang his signs. The plenary committee was a group of hard-core Reclaim students who had appointed themselves the authority for deciding what type of speech was permissible in Harvard’s student center.
Barlow told the student that their group had no right to do that and he continued to put up his signs. The student replied, “This is our territory, our property. You can put those up, but we will tear them down.” Their property? This was a common space for all students, funded by every student’s tuition, that Reclaim was unilaterally claiming as its own. As Barlow put up his signs, Reclaim began to take them down right in front of him. Barlow’s friend asked the students why they were doing that, and they replied, “Because it’s offensive.” My activist classmates could not tolerate Barlow’s harmless but accurate assertion that “Reclaim is against free speech,” and so they removed it. In doing so, they were proving Barlow’s very point: they were censoring speech!
Barlow’s friend explained to Reclaim that several of their signs were an affront to him but he nonetheless let them remain. Reclaim’s response? “Oh, the eggshell-white male! You are overly sensitive and can’t take criticism,” Barlow remembered them stating as they removed all of his fliers. Here was a group whose purported purpose was racial equality blatantly insulting a student because of his race. The off-the-cuff comment wasn’t Reclaim’s only race invocation. They also tweeted: “White man desecrates #BelindaHall!”30
At this point, thirty-six of Barlow’s signs had been removed, and he said it was the angriest he had ever been, because it was a blatant infringement on his rights. Barlow was nevertheless undeterred. He returned—for a third time—with a new batch of signs whose message read “Reclaim Harvard Law = Suppression of Free Speech.” What came next was to be expected, but this time the irony could not be more blatant. After Barlow posted the sign on the wall, Reclaim removed it—and his friend got it all on tape.
After three attempts to post his signs, Barlow approached the administration, who said they would speak to Reclaim. Barlow returned to the Caspersen Student Center with a fourth batch of posters: “56,” they stated, with the explanation that Reclaim had removed fifty-six of Barlow’s signs up to this point. Once more Reclaim removed the signs, bringing the total to sixty-eight.
At this point, students around campus began to take notice of Reclaim’s totalitarian tactics. The Harvard Law Record published an article detailing Barlow’s efforts, and other students also began to place signs around campus that were critical of Reclaim.31 These signs were of course removed. Dean Martha Minow, to her credit, sent an e-mail to all students noting that “when a shared space is made open . . . for protest and discussion . . . the values of free exchange that define an academic community require that every member of the community has the right to use that shared space to express views, to express differences, to engage in debate. That freedom to disagree makes us stronger and better.” It is simply bewildering that Harvard Law School’s administration had to remind the nation’s top law students about the importance of free speech and the First Amendment, but they did.
With the power of the administration behind him and the support of many classmates, Barlow entered the lounge in Wasserstein Hall to make a fifth effort at posting his messages. Reclaim, evidently angered by Barlow’s efforts, had sectioned off the lounge into two areas: the “silenced” area and the “privileged” area. A stark red line ran down the center of the wall. On the left it read “Silenced” in black. On the right, “Privileged” in red. Oddly, Reclaim posted its own signs in the “silenced” space—even though they themselves were the ones doing the silencing! They insisted that alternate thought be posted on the “privileged” side. Any signs that Barlow placed on the “silenced” side were moved over to the “privileged” portion of the wall. Never mind that Barlow was in fact the one being silenced!
The paradoxes were twofold. As Barlow noted, by having two separate silenced and privileged areas, Reclaim—the group that seeks racial equality—was engaging in its own form of segregation. Students recognized this, as signs reading “Tear Down This Separate-but-Equal ‘Free Speech Zone’ ” dotted the so-called privileged zone.
Reclaim even went so far as to move a Harvard Law School veteran’s sign to the “privileged” zone. The sign read, “I fought for your freedom. Don’t take away mine. HLS Vets for Free Speech.” Imagine that: privileged Harvard Law millennials with the audacity to label themselves “silenced” while labeling our veterans—military men and women who put their lives on the line to defend our freedom—“privileged”!
Silenced/Privileged Zone enforced by Reclaim. Courtesy of author’s collection
Reclaim continually proved Barlow’s contention: the far-left students were engaging in authoritarian behavior. Barlow noticed, “Reclaim’s Twitter feed taking an odd, Orwellian turn.” The group retweeted, “Free Speech is nothing but a shield used to protect ideas that contribute to the harming of the oppressed.”32 What? Unrelenting, they continued: “What is it [free speech] doing to eliminate prejudice except protecting the rights of the bigoted to spread hate speech.”33 Excuse me? Free speech is the bedrock of a democratic society! Barlow notes that the group even retweeted an article that argued for abridging the freedom of speech.34 My fellow students in Reclaim clearly had not been paying attention in class. Speech—even speech that is repugnant to America’s core values—is nevertheless protected. To make matters worse, these Reclaim students were not even objecting to repugnant speech but completely innocent, harmless speech that challenged their methods and censorship.
Through it all, and despite Reclaim’s vicious attacks on him, Barlow remained intellectually honest and even-handed. Upon learning that someone had defaced Reclaim’s signs with the message “Stop censorship,” Barlow wrote: “We don’t know who did this, but acts of defacement are never acceptable, even if the victims don’t abide by the same standards.” He had been maligned as a serial killer, a white supremacist, a racist, and a bully, among other things, but here he was defending the very people who had tried to intimidate him.
Bill fought valiantly against the militant far left on Harvard Law’s campus, and in doing so he showed them to be enemies of freedom of expression. He exposed the culture of victimization, which was evident in the grievance-filled blog Socratic Shortcomings and the Reclaim movement. Barlow saw the Reclaim movement as a reflection of what liberals at large do. He noted, “If you want to understand [the] left, it’s not an ideology, it’s a social hierarchy. Victimization gives you status and identity. It gives you currency within their social system.” Barlow had exposed the so-called victims and, in doing so, showed himself to be the real victim—the victim of an intolerant ideology that wishes to deprive him of speech. He, of course, would never describe himself that way, for victimhood isn’t in the conservative DNA.
Barlow became a conservative icon on campus, one whom many—including myself—silently applauded. When I asked if he got quiet confessions of support along the way, he replied, “All the time.” Much like the silent Trump voter, college students dare not profess conservatism. For if they do, they risk belittlement by a professor, lower grades, or condemnation from peers. One student put it this way on Socratic Shortcomings, in one of the rare conservative posts the site did not censor: “I think HLS is one of the only places in the world where I am judged more for being a member of FedSoc [the conservative student society] than I am for being gay.”35 It was a sobering reminder of the status of conservatives on college campuses.
Barlow said that throughout his undergraduate experience at Duke University, he pretended to be liberal to get good grades. I too felt pressure to stay neutral or echo left-wing points during my time at Georgetown University and Oxford University, and during my two years at Harvard Law School. Some liberal professors were open-minded and encouraged—sometimes even rewarded—thoughtful dissent. But as a conservative student, one proceeds at one’s own peril, never quite sure how to distinguish between the tolerant and the intolerant. Barlow strategically chose to speak out in his second year at Harvard Law after he had gotten his job offer. He wanted to make a real, tangible difference, and there’s no doubt that he left his mark on the campus of Harvard Law School. He will remain a legend, whispered about from one generation of conservative students to the next.
The fear of speaking out on campus seemed to closely mirror the position of many Trump voters, who were afraid to express support for Trump lest they be accused of being racist, xenophobic, or misogynistic, among other horrible things. I asked Bill Barlow whether he thought the militant suppression of conservative thought on the Harvard Law School campus paralleled what happened nationwide in the 2016 election. Bill replied, “I absolutely think [so].” He noted that when he goes on Reddit and looks at Donald Trump–related posts, nothing gets people more fired up than when a conservative speaker gets canceled from campus. “For younger voters, rebellion against [the] political correctness environment was one of the top issues, if not the one,” he observed.
Academic silencing of conservative voices is indeed pervasive. Using data from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), I discovered that 83 percent of canceled speakers were disinvited in 2016 because of a challenge from the left, while a minute 4.2 percent were silenced because of a push from the right.36 As I wrote previously in The Hill, “There is just one recorded incident in 2016 of a university canceling a left-wing speaker.”37 My piece went on to note several distinguished and mainstream voices that incurred the wrath of the left. Liberal students took aim at distinguished Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L. Riley, a black conservative, because of his book Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed. In 2013, students shouted down former New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly for a full thirty minutes, forcing a cancellation of his speech. And in 2017 student protests led to the cancellation of Republican senator John Cornyn’s commencement speech at a historically black college.38 In each of these cases, usually left-leaning administrators seemed to recognize the absurdity of their liberal students. Virginia Tech issued an apology to Jason Riley and re-invited him to speak; a Brown University administrator noted to the crowd screaming down Ray Kelly, “I have never seen in my 15 years at Brown the inability to have a dialogue”; and Texas Southern University invited Senator Cornyn to speak at a later date.39
Indeed, an atmosphere of politically correct suppression has led many to embrace the unadulterated realspeak of Donald Trump. Voters were exasperated by the eloquent poll-tested prose robotically read off a teleprompter by a scripted politician. Instead, they preferred Trump’s off-the-cuff realism. When Trump declared his candidacy, I was drawn to his bold, anti–politically correct style. I wondered whether America was ready for unfiltered straight talk.40 But witnessing suppression on my campus made me realize this was exactly what America needed and pushed me forcefully into Trump’s corner very early in the primaries, where I later became a daily advocate for the president on CNN.
In explaining my early conversion to Team Trump, I wrote: “During my time in academia, it became increasingly clear that prisons of political correctness with peer-engendered public shaming are now the academic reality . . . It was this kind of mindset—the hostile advocacy of platitudes over polite dissent, dictatorial silencing over thoughtful engagement and censorship over free interchange—that took me from reticent acceptance of Trump’s approach to passionate advocacy . . . Trump has set the politically correct walls aflame.”41 A flame he rode all the way to the presidency.
Thanks to Barlow, the politically correct walls at Harvard were aflame as well. Barlow remembers attending one of the two campus-wide meetings that Dean Minow held to give students a platform to speak during a time of activism and protest on campus. The room was filled with mostly Reclaim students, taking to the mic and listing their grievances before their mostly applauding peers. Barlow felt afraid, but he knew he had to say something in a room full of people who seemed to despise him. Grabbing the microphone, he briefly said, “I think we are being far too angry. This administration is handling this well.” He feared making such a simple statement, knowing other students would disparage him for it, but once he did it, he felt liberated. Asking him how he overcame the fear, he told me quite confidently: “Once you’ve done it, you’re free of all of it. You don’t have the oppressive feeling anymore. You are liberated.”
The silence was broken.