Image via Mashable
Most of Sanders’ speech focused on wealth inequality, his core issue, but unlike other speeches this one was full of appeals to Christian morals and quotes from Bible passages, as reported by Politico.
Politico has excerpts from Sanders’ speech:
“Let me be very frank. I understand that issues such as abortion and gay marriage are very important to you and that we disagree on those issues. I get that,” Sanders said at the beginning of his speech. “But I came here today because I believe from the bottom of my heart that it is vitally important for those of us who hold different views to be able to engage in a civil discourse.”
…
“You have got to think about the morality of that, the justice of that, and whether or not that is what we want to see in our country,” Sanders said. “In my view, there is no justice when, in recent years, we have seen a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires while at the same time the United States of America has the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on earth.”
You can view the speech here.
The most notable moment occurred during the Q&A session when Sanders said the country was founded in many ways on “racist principles” but that there had been much progress since then to the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. This response was an attempt to answer a question about addressing racism and racial tensions in the U.S.
However, glaring aspects absent from any reporting of the event were antecedent student, faculty, and administrative protests, outrage, and demands for trigger warnings and safe spaces for those mentally vulnerable to what Sanders might say about sensitive issues like abortion and gay marriage.
That’s because there wasn’t any.
As was Senator Sanders, the 12,000 students in attendance were respectful and acted like adults, despite the underlying tension each side must have felt.
There was no petition to rebuke Sanders’ invitation to campus, as happened to Condoleeza Rice when it was announced she would be the convocation speaker at Rutgers last year. There was no cabal of planted students asking purposely disrespectful and obscene remarks during the Q&A, as happened to Rick Perry during his visit to Dartmouth last year. There was no call for safe spaces due to the mental trauma and violence some students might experience listening to Sanders’ speech, as happened in preparation for Christina Hoff Sommers’ speech at Oberlin earlier this year.
In each of the three cases above, a non-liberal was treated extremely poorly, or even outright turned down and silenced in Rice’s case, for coming or wanting to come speak at a liberal campus. At Oberlin, the ultra-feminists and social justice warriors went completely haywire with their trigger warnings and organization of safe-space sanctuaries wherein students advocated self-love rather than hearing out someone who dares to challenge their paradigm. These same students went so far as to also attack their fellow students responsible for bringing the Sommers to their campus.
The demise of freedom of expression and the spirit of debate at college campuses across the country has been the work of a fringe element on campus composed mostly of mentally unstable and erratic leftists. Cowardly faculty and administrators have played a big role in this demise too by appeasing these loud-mouths, and, by legitimizing and often by aiding them in their crusades and witch hunts, have allowed this fringe to rapidly grow and begin to consume even the mild-mannered liberals.
Despite its active community of social justice warriors, Cornell, thankfully, has mostly refrained from the embarrassing and shameful antics found at many other as-liberal campuses when it comes to invited speakers. When it comes to other instances, well, just read a few Review articles from semesters past.
Nobody threw pies at him either, like what happened to Ann Coulter:
http://wc.arizona.edu/papers/98/236/01_4.html