This is hardly the first time there have been threats to shut us down, but the totalitarian mind-set of these traducers of the civil rights movement on campuses around the country is worth more attention than has been paid by the mainstream press. In the March 26 Columbia University Spectator , Dan Laidman, a senior majoring in history, noted that in Berkeley, California home of the free speech movement in 1964 the Daily Californian 's office was stormed and many copies of the paper were stolen after it ran the Horowitz ad. Dan Laidman went on to get at the core of this epidemic of Stalinism, which has been going on since the late 1980s on college campuses. There can be no free speech when the forums for speech are destroyed. When people's access to information is physically blocked, disobedience is no longer civil. . . .
Radicalism means going to the root of the problem and exposing injustice that society obscures.
This requires the free exercise of ideas and untrammeled debate. When protesters start destroying newspapers and deciding that no one in the community can be exposed to opposing views, these protesters cannot be described as radicals nor as liberals. To reject the idea of free speech is to decide what people must think, what they must say. That is authoritarian. . . . Anybody in the opposition was by definition for a long time in Russia .