Education

Sessions To Deliver Address On Free Speech ‘Under Attack’ In Statement Against Political Correctness

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Ian Miles Cheong Contributor
Font Size:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is set to deliver a speech on how freedom of speech is “under attack” in American colleges and universities on Tuesday. The address takes aim at the rise of political correctness and safe spaces.

Sessions’ statements will come following an almost year-long series of confrontations started by leftist student activists against right-wing speakers throughout colleges in the United States. According to an advance provided to Fox News, Sessions plans to highlight the suppression of free speech and the prevalence of ideological “echo chambers.”

“Freedom of thought and speech on the American campus are under attack,” Sessions plans to say in his speech, which he will deliver at Georgetown University Law Center. “Whereas the American University was once the center of academic freedom — a place of robust debate, a forum for the competition of ideas — it is transforming into an echo chamber of political correctness and homogenous thought, a shelter for fragile egos.”

His remarks come amid an increasingly tense climate across American campuses, which has only been exacerbated by Trump’s inauguration into the White House. This February, antifa riots at the University of California, Berkeley prompted the university to cancel a speaking engagement by Milo Yiannopoulos. In April, Ann Coulter was forced to cancel her speech after losing her backing, also at UC Berkeley. American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray and the professor who hosted his speech at Middlebury College, Allison Stanger, were both assaulted by left-wing protesters.

Speaking to Fox News, a Justice Department official said that Sessions will also question who decides what is “offensive” and what is “acceptable” as part of his address.

“The university is supposed to be about the search for truth, not the imposition of truth by a government censor,” he says in excerpts.

He plans to rebuke school administrators for allowing campus culture to dictate the bounds of acceptable speech and shut down those with whom they disagree.

“This has allowed a cottage industry of protestors to crop up who understand school administrators will capitulate to their demands and are now routinely shutting down speeches and debates across the country in an effort to silence voices that are insufficiently orthodox on their pet issues,” he says. “The right of free speech does not exist to protect the speech we all want to agree on. It exists to protect the very speech that we don’t want to hear.”

ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS COMMITS TO UPHOLDING RULE OF LAW DURING DACA RESCINDING SPEECH:

Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.