A college student speaks his mind and offers contrarian views, forcing classmates to examine their own positions on delicate issues.
This could have been the subject of a non-story that occurs on campuses across the country on a daily basis. Instead, it has become a cause célèbre for the right wing National Review and Daily Caller (I refuse to link to either) as the story of a martyr being kicked out of a classful of liberals for truthtelling. The young man, Jeremiah True, has also started a petition on Change.org to force the college to reinstate him in the group discussions even though, in the words of a fellow student, “In response to being respectfully asked to stop, he discussed [his views] more openly and more aggressively, and...continued to argue with people who had expressed to him that they felt unsafe and uncomfortable." Comments that “lower class people didn’t have the ability to create art” and “we shouldn’t blame the people who were responsible for the Holocaust… because they didn’t know any better” were only the beginning of the discomfort, the rest being reserved for the members of the group who had suffered sexual assault. The Daily Caller trivializes the student's reasons for being asked to refrain from participating in the group discussions by framing it as Student Barred From Class For Disputing Rape Statistics. More underneath the squiggle...
NRO frontpages it with the headline Student Banned from Class for Pointing Out That a False Rape Statistic Was False. In his own Change.org petition, he writes "Sexual assaults (such as groping) can be traumatic, but they are not an invalidation of a person's identity. They do not force someone to open themselves up to violent intrusion and brutal, psychological damage. They are not crimes which women feel afraid to report because they fear backlash and victim blaming." One of the confereessaid that True’s behavior started out only “a little bit patronizing” and then escalated from there over the course of the semester.
For some reason, the RW feel that denying the existence of a "rape culture" is so important, that they jumped on this story as soon as it broke on BuzzFeed, placed there by the student himself, who obviously didn't think that the outlet would actually interview others involved. He has since been postering websites from RedAlertPolitics to nutwing threads on 4chan. By framing himself as a victim of a PC movement rather than someone who has been removed from a situation where he was infringing on the other students' rights to a safe learning environment, he becomes the poster boy for a movement that is seeking to downplay the issues of sexual assault and campus rape, while asserting that “Right now, going to college is a terrifying experience if you are male.”
Please comment on his Change.org petition and encourage people to ask questions rather than accepting the student's version of the story as a simple free speech issue where he is the oppressed. It is, in fact, this young man who was oppressing his classmates by all accounts other than his own.
Update: Now being covered by Salon.
and in Reason Magazine ; Reed College professor Pancho Savery says it wasn't Jeremiah True's controversial views that got the kid banned, but rather "a series of disruptive behaviors." 19-year-old True said he'd only be interviewed if the writer agreed to make the N-word the first word of the article.