Until now. One of the groups criticized in the issue was Students for a Democratic Society (“Chapel Hill Hooligans Strike Again”, p. 21). Facebook photos obtained by the Carolina Review show Ben Carroll, the president of Students for a Democratic Society and write-in candidate for Mayor of Chapel Hill, along with Daily Tar Heel columnist Dominic Powell and a third individual, Scott Williams, standing in a pile of destroyed copies of the April 2009 issue of Carolina Review drinking beer and painting their living room. Hundreds of copies of Carolina Review (paid for by your student fee money) were apparently destroyed.

Considering the newsworthiness of this behavior by a candidate for public office, CRdaily is publishing some of the photographs below in order to inform our readers that a mayoral candidate is involved in destroying property, suppressing freedom of the press and censoring dissenting opinions.

These photographs also show how members of Students for a Democratic Society are engaged in a sustained effort to suppress the first amendment rights of those who they disagree with. Last spring, the engaged in violence for political ends against speakers whom they disagreed with. This fall, the Daily Tar Heel was targeted and vandalized with a “special anti-racist issue” placed over their papers. The DTH reacted strongly, even reportedly calling the police and attacked the vandals on their editorial page. Now, we have a staff member from the Daily Tar Heel apparently engaged in even worse behavior.

Update: The students involved have been informed that a complaint has been filed against them in the UNC Honor Court system. The student attorney general will decide by the end of next week whether to file formal charges.

Far Right: Ben Carroll, SDS president and candidate for mayor of Chapel Hill.
Center: Dominic Powell, DTH columnist.

This is just the latest in an ongoing feud between the Obama administration and the cable giant. Some claim the network revolt to be a huge victory for the press and a major embarrassment for the president. Others, however, have pointed to the pool’s contractual agreement in which all members must be invited for the pool to be interviewed.

Whether out of outrage or technicality, the media stood up for their counterpart, even though Fox is largely their nemesis. Whiny rhetoric about Fox News has been spewing from the White House since January, but attempting to keep out a representative of the most-watched news agency in the country is crossing the line.

The major networks put aside their ideological differences and behaved like Americans should on Thursday. Regardless of your views on the state of the nation or the opinions of certain political commentators, we should never wish to see a group of people silenced. Fox may not be as “fair and balanced” as they claim, but they undoubtedly deserve a place at the table.

The media has long been a check on government. This fact may not be supported by the Constitution, yet it is clear every time we turn on the television. It is the job of Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs and Rachel Maddow to be critical. People want to be alerted when their government is out-of-bounds. So when the Treasury tries to prohibit the press from holding them accountable, we should be appalled. Thankfully, other networks saw the injustices of such actions and responded accordingly.

I am reassured by this story; it makes me feel good deep down. This was not a question of the trivialities of health care or troop numbers in Afghanistan, but instead a direct attack on one of our most sacred rights: the ability to be informed. The people of the United States won here. We will not stand for this Nixon-like assault on our freedom. Let’s hope this sends a message all the way to Obama himself. Censorship has no place in America today.

Andrei Sakharov would know. He lived in a country where freedom of thought did not exist, and where the people had been infected by mass myths which were used to prop up a brutal dictatorship. His thoughts and speech were circulated in secret, for they were threatening to the official ideology. For his thoughts and speech, his career was ruined and he was arrested and exiled. Even when he returned from exile, his thoughts and speech were closely monitored and controlled.

According to Liberty University vice president of student affairs Mark Hine, “the Democratic party violates the school’s principles by supporting abortion, socialism and the “‘LGBT’ agenda,” referring to lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people” and that even though the group “may not support the more radical planks of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party is still the parent organization of the club on campus.”

The group’s faculty sponsor has said that she was simply trying to allow alternative views to be heard on a campus where the Republican Party’s agenda is  “preached on every avenue.” The Liberty University College Republicans have a large presence on campus and have not been the target of any action from the administration.

Now, Liberty University is a private institution and as such they can deny recognition to whatever groups they wish. However, just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. If Liberty wants to suppress free speech and intellectual discourse on their campus, they can do that. But they are only hurting themselves.

As I wrote in an earlier post, allowing ideas to engage in free competition with each other will allow the best ideas to win out. Attempts to control the competition of ideas only make it appear that the controllers have something to hide. This only increases interest in whatever it is they are trying to suppress. It also lends less credibility to whatever ideas end up winning in Liberty’s competition of ideas. After all, a victor with no competition is no victor at all. And finally, students who are educated in an environment where only one viewpoint is presented are ill equipped to defend their views once they enter the real world.

Liberty is within its legal rights to ban the College Democrats club from campus, but by limiting the competition of ideas, Liberty is only hurting itself and its students.

When I got here, I found out that a large percentage of the student body at this university profess the Christian religion. There are a multitude of Christian religious groups with membership in the thousands. Most of my professors do not make mention of their religious or political views in class, and more than a few made positive references towards Christianity. Acts of moral depravity of all sorts were more often a product of the rumor mill, rather than something I witnessed firsthand.

It turns out, the rumor mill was what most people back home were going off of. The Sodom and Gomorrah, Bart Ehrman-will-turn-you-into-an-atheist-communist-hedonist mindset was nothing more than the prognostications of people who knew only of twisted second and third hand stories.

I’m proud to report that the University of North Carolina is in fact a place of healthy intellectualism. For every person taking a position on an issue (be it political, social or religious), there is likely to be someone to counter it. In this environment, both sides’ arguments are made better by the existence of opposition.

Rather than avoiding them, we should all listen to people who oppose our views, for the simple reason that competition breeds improvement. When our own ideas are challenged by conflicting ideas, our ideas are refined into something better. In other cases, our ideas are bad and they get tossed out.

This Darwinist competition of ideas breaks down when outside factors intervene to try and stop the competition. By and large, Carolina has been free of this. There have been some exceptions where one faction has attempted to shut down the voice of another. However, such examples as the controversy over Carolina Students for Life, SDS/YWC, or the Board of Election’s abuse of campaign laws have been the exceptions rather than the rule. By and large, the competition of ideas flows freely each day on campus. And I am thankful for that.

Now, many would say the state of morality in the United States is far below an acceptable standard. However, this has been true of every civilization throughout history. The fact is, people are less than perfect no matter where they are.  Human progress is an illusion. Hence, I am not going to single out the University as a place of exceptional immorality, because it does not appear to me that this university is any more or less moral that American society as a whole. The problem is not with this university’s administration or its student organizations, but with American society at large. America’s institutions are a reflection of its people. Any attempt to reform public morals by reforming university administration is like trying dam half a river. The current will still flow, it will just be re-directed slightly for a while and it will eventually erode the dam.

In short, our University is not an intellectual wasteland. Rather, it is a hotbead of intellectual discussion, which is exactly what a university should be. This competition of ideas can only benefit our society. If ideas are allowed to be expressed and evaluated freely, truth will come out on top. Like economic markets, this competition stops working when interlopers begin to fiddle with stuff in an attempt to engineer their own desired result. Attempts to control the competition of ideas usually backfire on whoever is attempting the controlling. People begin to wonder: What are they trying to hide? What are they afraid of?

Be they conservative Christians or anti-”hate speech” liberals, interlopers who attempt to control the competition of ideas not only produce unintended consequences, but they betray their own ideas. If they have faith in the truth of what they believe, the superiority of their ideas should be self-evident and they should not need to seek other means to ensure that their ideas are adopted.

Fortunately, although the competition of ideas is not flowing freely in many parts of the world, it is flowing much better at UNC than at most places. We have an atmosphere of exceptional intellectual vitality, and we should strive to keep it that way.

The complaint, which can be read in full here, alleges that campus police violently assaulted protesters, using physical force, tasers and pepper spray.

The incidents in question have been caught on videotape by a number of sources. In this ABC news clip, you can see protesters fighting with police while trying to break into the room in which Tancredo was speaking. No one was tased, and pepper spray was sprayed in the air. Police officers who were pepper sprayed as part of their training have informed me that anyone who was sprayed directly in the face with pepper spray would not have been getting up and walking out of the building.

In their complaint, SDS alleges that the police action was politically motivated. They argue that police action on Franklin Street after the national championship and the flash rave in Davis was far more lenient. Considering that no police officers were being attacked and no one was trying to disrupt a hosted speaker at these incidents, it is not surprising that more force was used in the protests.

Now let’s review what happened here. Students for a Democratic Society decided that some people did not have the right to free speech. They then decided to stop them from speaking. In the process, they assaulted police officers, disrupted a University function and smashed a window. As a result, one member of SDS, Haley Koch, was arrested for disorderly conduct. She is a Morehead-Cain scholar. She should be an outstanding example for all Carolina students. Instead, she has spent her time at UNC compiling a criminal record for a number of protests going back to last year’s sit-in at Chancellor Moeser’s office. As a result, she could lose her scholarship.

SDS was completely unapologetic about this. They proudly took credit for driving Tancredo off campus, and blamed campus police for “escalating the violence of the situation.”

The next week, unknown individuals aligned with the protesters defaced campus property with a number of obscene signs. Then, protesters tried to disrupt another speaker, former congressman Virgil Goode. Campus Police were more prepared this time, and as a result, six people were arrested. None of them were UNC students, however, SDS has stepped up to the plate to defend them, saying that the arrests were unwarranted. Campus police should pursue further investigations to try and discover if these individuals coordinated their activities with SDS.

Now, SDS has leveled unfounded claims of brutality at campus police. SDS is the organization which has organized the violent intimidation of speakers with whom they disagree. This alone should be enough to call into question the propriety of their continued existence as a recognized student organization. While claiming to defend tolerance, SDS showed themselves to be the most intolerant of all the actors in this cast of intolerant individuals. Youth for Western Civilization and SDS are both intolerant of people that are different than them, but SDS has taken this a step further to engaging in acts of violence against those with whom they disagree. By attacking free speech they have assaulted the very foundations of democracy. There is room for free speech on our campus. What we do not have room for is the violent suppression of alternative opinions.

What are they afraid of?

The Employee Free Choice Act is a labor union bill currently being considered by Congress. In this post, I don’t want to discuss the merits of labor unions. I don’t even want to discuss most of the provisions of the bill. I just want to discuss one specific provision: The bill will remove the requirement for a secret ballot in union elections. Instead, it will allow a labor union to be formed when the majority of employees sign cards saying that they want a union.

Now, I cannot for the life of me fathom why any freedom-loving individual committed to the idea of democracy would want to do away with something as elemental to open and transparent democracy as the secret ballot.

Secret ballots exist in free elections all around the world for a reason. It doesn’t matter what anyone has said to you or threatened to do to you, once you step into that voting booth what you select on that ballot is between you and God. They can’t punish you after the fact because they have no way of knowing who you really voted for.

With a petition card, anyone can see if you are voting yes or no, and all this goes out the window. The only people that benefit from making elections less free and open are those who would seek to undermine the integrity of an election. Without the protection of the secret ballot, workers don’t have any protection from coercion by advocates of one side or another. Our unionization process will become like elections in a corrupt third world country.

In short, this bill is a threat to free and open democracy, and I truly hope that the US Senate and President Obama have the wisdom to kill this piece of anti-democratic legislation.