A few months ago a BLM group on a College campus shut down a well respected ACLU speaker who was supposed to give a talk on the importance of free speech rights. This event was intended to start with Claire Gastañaga - the Executive Director of the ACLU of Virginia - giving a speech about "College Students and the First Amendment", which would then be followed up by allowing any students in attendance to ask whatever questions they want.
Rather than listening to whatever points Mrs. Gastañaga might have made, BLM activists on campus decided to storm the stage and shout down the speaker.
Here is the school paper article on what happened:
http://flathatnews.com/2017/10/02/black-lives-matter-protests-american-civil-liberties-union/
Interestingly, the group hosting the event at the university and the ACLU speaker actually backed down and allowed the BLM group to have the microphone and make a statement. So this turned out, even if just by luck, to be a great victory for BLM right? Well...no. They chose to us this opportunity to assert a radical and dubious message. They also continued to shut down the event even after they could speak. I guess compromising with them is worthless since they will simply continue to shut down the event. Interestingly, they even surrounded and shouted down the speaker when she left the stage and simply tried to speak with a small number of students who gathered with her to hear what she had to say. These BLM activists went so far as to take away the right of those students, some of whom were people of colors by the way, to speak with who they wanted to on an individual basis. Violating somebody's Constitutional right to freedom of assembly and speech is rarely a good look.
The BLM members further derailed their own discussion by throwing pragmatism to the wind and coming out with the most extreme positions they possible could have. Their chants included "liberalism is white supremacy!" and "the revolution will not uphold the constitution!". Yes, I am serious. If you don't believe me check out the video they uploaded to their own page: https://www.facebook.com/builtonourbacks/videos/1734551936840965/
It is hard to believe how stupid it was for them to go with such a radical message. Keep in mind that they were so proud of how this went they wanted to upload it to their page. If they employed any common sense whatsoever, they would have realized that they were already going to catch a lot of controversy by using such tactics, so they should therefore come out with a more mainstream message at least so that once their protest caught people's attention they would be open to their arguments. Not to mention how bonkers that message is anyway. Between shutting down the ACLU and telling liberals that they might as well be Nazis, they alienated everybody who is to the right of the radical left. I hope I do not need to explain how people who are largely in favor of affirmative action, diversity, and pluralism are not Nazis. As for "the Revolution will not uphold the Constitution"...when will these people move on from this idea that a violent revolution to overthrow capitalism is a good idea? I don't even identify as a capitalist, but come on! How many generations of radicals and leftists have been smashing their heads into the wall hoping for this utopian pipe-dream? Also, threatening to violently overthrow a document that has, at least in recent years, often been used or amended to protect your rights is incredibly stupid. Unsurprisingly, most of those involved self-identify as anarchists and/or communists. Between their methods and their message they alienated everybody who was not already a hardcore supporter of theirs...so what was the point?
A much better plan would have been to use the question and answer session to challenge the ideas that the ACLU promotes. This could have also been live streamed and would have created a discussion about Mrs. Gastañaga's statements, rather than a discussion about how stupid of a method of protest this was and how the statements made by BLM members
The top rated comment on the Flat Hat (the school newspaper) article makes a great point about how little these students understand the foolishness of their actions: "Irony seems totally lost on these students. Part of their statement reads 'When is the free speech of the oppressed protected?' The answer to that is literally as you were reading your statement out loud during a protest. That is the definition of your free speech being protected. How do you not stop for a second and realize you are getting a platform because of your protest, and you are not being arrested or in any other way prohibited from making that statement, and therefore you have free speech?"
These students were literally protesting a right that they were exercising during that very protest.
So how did this end up working out? The short answer: The BLM activists utterly failed.
The long answer:
The ACLU talk was rescheduled for a few months later and went off without a hitch. It also hardly generated any discussion. It seems that if the BLM activists had just let the event happen almost nobody would have heard the speaker anyway. Ironically the protest only encouraged people to look into the ACLU speaker and their following statement more.
Many of the leaders of BLM on campus were brought up on conduct code charges, although it is not publicly known what punishments they faced.
Probably related to the above - The BLM group, which had been active on campus for several years and hosted multiple well attended events each year, went totally silent until late April. Basically the group died for the entire rest of the school year. Imagine if instead they had continued having their normal events like marches, non-violent symbolic protests like holding a "die-in", handing out information, and using their Facebook page to spread their message. So many more people would have heard their case and would have been open to it. They could have convinced so many more people!
Pretty much every liberal/moderate group on campus hates them now and can not afford to be seen working with or supporting them. They have basically no allies left.
The group has now had to change its name to "William & Mary 'Concerned Students'" (Yes, they actually put Concerned Students in quotes themselves as if they are not really concerned students). Basically they lost so hard they had to change their name to avoiding being associated with themselves.
That is the most epic fail I have ever seen. I understand that "Respectability politics" can easily go too far and be an excuse to shut down dissenting voices, but that doesn't mean that all pragmatism is bad.
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