White Supremacy Crushed in Colorado

So the media would have you think.

“When alleged white nationalist Jared Taylor took to the podium, . . . before him sat nearly 40 attendees . . . . Also sitting before Taylor were nearly 40 empty seats.” So begins the article in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel about a talk I gave on March 27. Perhaps the author didn’t know that the event had been elbowed into a room with only 80 seats, that the tickets had been quickly snapped up, and that many people had deliberately taken tickets they would not use to make the attendance look meager.

The Sentinel went on: While I spoke, a campus-wide outdoor party “in response to Taylor’s rhetoric” was in full swing, with “three food trucks . . . a mechanical bull, volleyball and football activities on the grass, students cooking burgers on the grill, and a stage with a DJ set loudly blasting songs like Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’.” The Sentinel forgot to mention the moon bounce — yes, a moon bounce — along with the beanbag toss, with which students eloquently refuted my arguments. Nor did it mention that the food and rides were free, and that the “unity party” was deliberately timed to draw students away from my talk.

After I spoke — full video here — local television interviewed a young man from the audience who said he had wanted to ask a question but that men had threatened to kick him out of the room “as soon as I opened my mouth.” In fact, I answered three of his questions, but he bobbed up and down, hogged the mic, and was such an ass, campus security threatened to eject him.

I have spoken at many colleges, but never have I sent an entire campus into hysterics.

It was in January that I heard from Max Applebaugh, president of the Western Culture Club at Colorado Mesa University. He asked me to come speak, and we set the date for March 27. The first students heard about it was on March 7, when university president John Marshall sent an 800-word statement to the entire campus. He agonized over “the most difficult and important test CMU has faced when it comes to free speech,” but explained that the First Amendment is “sacred,” adding that “our task is to empower you to pursue truth.” He called my views “vile” and “abhorrent,” but told students, “[I]t’s the opportunity of your life . . . to carefully deconstruct his dehumanizing ideas.”

Just three days later, 200 outraged students met in a campus ballroom to plan how to counter the menace of “white supremacy” about to invade the campus. “People were super emotional about it,” explained one of the planners. The CMU vice president for student services began the meeting by saying that if there was a plan for a reaction of some kind, the priority should be physical safety. She was booed, and people left the room. Students were reportedly very angry I was allowed on campus at all, and reportedly thought she wasn’t concerned enough about student mental health and safety.

Two days later, on March 12, the student-body president sent a message to the campus to say that the thought of my coming “makes many of us if not all of us feel unsafe, unheard, and unwelcome.” She urged students to join in the plan to fight off my “hateful ideas.”

There followed “many long days, hours-long meetings,” and the result was the festival of beanbags and burgers. As organizer Alex Austin explained, “When something so ridiculous and egregious happens, it’s on you as people who view themselves in the morally right position to respond in the correct way.”

President Marshall gave an interview to the Denver ABC affiliate and claimed my ideas are “easy to defeat . . . with just a little bit of discussion,” so I emailed him an invitation to take the stage after my talk and explain why I am wrong. I reminded him that he lists courage as one of the defining virtues of the “human scale university” he says he is building. I copied several people on the email, including the student-body president, who wrote back to say Mr. Marshall could not join me because he would be with the moon-bouncers. She said he had “accepted a better invitation to attend a better event focused on love, dignity, and TRUE courage.”

I made a video ridiculing Mr. Marshall’s climbdown. Instead of encouraging students to expand their minds by grappling with unfamiliar ideas, he was joining the show meant to draw students away from my talk and keep them ignorant. I suggested that the campus retire its campus mascot, the maverick — a maverick is a rebel or a dissenter — and switch to the “herd-animal moo-cow.”

Meanwhile, flyers were going up around campus denouncing me, denouncing the club that invited me, and advertising the “campus unity party.”

Mr. Applebaugh, the student who invited me, got a front-page dox in the school paper, and had to face down a hostile takeover of the Western Culture Club. Twenty new members tried to join, but failed in their plan to vote him out, dissolve the club, and cancel my talk. The group’s faculty advisor faced widespread scorn.

A student set up a Change.org petition to pressure President Marshall to cancel my speech. It accused me of white supremacy and fascism, and said I made “many of our students feel unsafe and threatened.” It got 1,221 signatures, and comments such as: “Fuck white supremacists.” “President John Marshall should be removed from his position, immediately.” “When has history ever been on the side of people who just rolled over to nazi fucks?” “Fuck Nazis.”

A CMU student published an open letter to President Marshall, accusing him of “spineless cowardice,” first, for letting me speak and, second, for refusing personally to “demonstrate the virtues of meeting hate speech with better speech.”

Another student wrote that allowing me to speak was not a free-speech issue because: “Taylor is a fascist. He edits a fascist publication, he is friends with fascists, he has hosted fascist conferences and events, and he regularly uses fascist talking points. The only sensible conclusion to come to is that Taylor is a fascist.”

On March 17, 10 days before my talk, the campus was vandalized with graffiti, which the police initially said were “anti-government and racist.” Eight days later, they conceded that “upon further investigation it was determined that” “No Nazis @ CMU,” “CMU Loves everyone Mashall Loves Nazis,” and “Fuck ICE Elon Trump” were “not racially motivated.”

Police arrested the vandals, a white woman, and a white man with a bun.

I flew into Grand Junction the day before my talk and found the downtown festooned with stickers announcing a Democratic Socialists of America demonstration.

The next day, I visited the campus and ran into someone who had flown all the way from Florida to hear my talk. We were sitting at an outdoor table — the one in the right foreground — when a young white man on a bicycle rode by and shouted, “Fuck you. You’re a piece of shit.”

The unity festival started before my talk, and I wanted to eat tacos and ride the mechanical bull, but campus security implored me not to. Officers escorted me into the speaking venue, checked IDs of everyone attending my talk, and put everyone though a metal detector. Five uniformed policemen stood guard while I spoke, and officers ensured a safe and unobtrusive exit. They could not have been more courteous, professional, and efficient.

The local paper made much of the campus lovefest, but dismissed my talk in a few sentences.

The school’s event was deliberately non-political, but the Democratic Socialists of America were pure politics: “Silence is complicity,” “Eugenics is quack ‘science’,” “Fuck off, Nazi,” “Campus is safer for Nazis than minorities,” “Nazis need therapy, not microphones,” “Hate speech costs lives,” “Make racism wrong again,” and my favorite, “dump your white supremacist boyfriend.”

As you will see from press photos, the students and demonstrations were overwhelmingly white. Grand Junction is 81 percent white, 16 percent Hispanic, 1 percent Asian, with hardly any blacks. Only 4.3 percent of its 65,560 people are foreign-born, far less than the national figure of 15.8 percent. The city has good weather, a pleasant downtown, and bicycling is so popular, there are several sculptures of riders.

It is surrounded by natural beauty; Colorado National Monument is just outside the city limits. It would not be an exaggeration to call the city a whiteopia.

My reception in Grand Junction reminded me of the only time I was ever violently prevented from giving a talk — in Halifax, Canada in 2007. Halifax is still nearly 90 percent white, with a sprinkling of blacks and Asians. Whites who live with very little diversity and know the least about it are the ones who claim to love it most. So many fail to appreciate what they have until they lose it.