Says RBpundit, “See what happens when you give people who call everyone Nazis the license to punch Nazis? They wind up hurting non-Nazis.” Right, but I take it the people who twisted the professor’s neck would say that she became a Nazi by association by defending Murray’s right to speak after being invited. A mob will always justify its violence as righteous.

We’re getting closer to the inevitable moment when someone is literally murdered on an American campus because a right-winger tried to speak.

As [Professor Allison] Stanger, Murray and a college administrator left McCullough Student Center last evening following the event, they were “physically and violently confronted by a group of protestors,” according to Bill Burger, the college’s vice president for communications and marketing. Burger said college public safety officers managed to get Stanger and Murray into the administrator’s car. “The protestors then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on and try to prevent it from leaving campus,” he said. “At one point a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public Safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus. “During this confrontation outside McCullough, one of the demonstrators pulled Prof. Stanger’s hair and twisted her neck,” Burger continued. “She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and (on Friday) is wearing a neck brace.”

The “event” mentioned in the first paragraph was actually the second attempt yesterday afternoon to let Murray speak. The first attempt was with a live audience, but watch the clips below (he appears onstage at 19:00 of the first one) to see how that went. The protest goes on for fully 20 minutes before Murray gives up. Middlebury officials warned the crowd beforehand that they could protest but not disrupt the speech, but “the students ignored those reminders and faced no visible consequences for doing so.” You’ll see Stanger come to the mic at the very end (at 41:00 or so) and, to her credit, refuse to capitulate: Rather than cancel Murray’s speech, they decided to move to a private location and have her interview Murray on closed-circuit TV, with the feed carried live onscreen in the lecture hall. Which makes this image of what followed revealing:

Protests continue as the conversation between Murray and Stranger are streamed into Wilson Hall. pic.twitter.com/lERQtOL1Vj — Middlebury Campus (@middcampus) March 2, 2017

Protesting Murray when he was onstage was an attempt to stop him from speaking. Protesting him when he wasn’t even in the building was an attempt to stop interested students from listening. They went the extra mile to make sure he wasn’t heard by any open-minded observers. It was after the closed-circuit interview ended that Stanger and Murray tried to leave and were attacked. Said Murray afterwards, “The Middlebury administration was exemplary. The students were seriously scary.”

Maybe CCTV is the future of right-wing speech on campus. Fliers could be put up advertising the speaker’s appearance and then he/she would fly into town and be driven to a secret location in disguise to deliver the lecture to a camera in an empty room. Anyone interested could watch online. But that wouldn’t work, would it? The mob would scramble to discover the location and set upon it. Having the speaker dial in via Skype for the lecture/interview from the safety of home would be easier, but without their actual presence on campus, the thrill of transgression would be lost. Charles Murray giving a speech in front of a hostile crowd at Middlebury is an event; Murray giving the same speech from his study via a webcam is really just an extended Fox News segment. Better figure out a solution soon, though, because someone’s going to die.