The new credo of the American left is: Speech I don’t like is violence; violence I like is speech.
Look no farther for proof than Hunter College adjunct Shellyne Rodriguez, who held a machete to Post reporter Reuven Fenton’s neck Tuesday after he dared seek comment on her earlier attack on a student pro-life-information table.
“Get the f–k away from my door or I’m gonna chop you up with this machete,” shouted the unhinged academic, 46, before chasing Post photographer Robert Miller down the street.
This follows her earlier meltdown in a Hunter hallway.
As now-viral video shows, on May 2 she spotted some pamphlets she disliked and told the students behind the table, “This is violent. You’re triggering my students” — then threw literature off their display.
That’s who’s educating our kids (and on the public dime, to boot).
Actual lunatics who absurdly declare words to be violence while excusing the very real violence they themselves commit, up to and including deadly physical threats.
No dialog.
No exchange of ideas.
Just: F–k you, I’m going to wreck your table.
Followed on Tuesday by, literally: Ask me questions and my machete goes to your throat.
The school’s hard-left faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress, endorsed this maniac, insisting: “Her actions to shut down the tabling were fully justified.”
She’s “part of a long CUNY legacy of activists” confronting “disinformation,” preached the PSC.
By bullying kids?
We’re eager to hear what the PSC has to say about the machete.
A long legacy of confronting the press?
CUNY once produced Nobel-winning physicists, Supreme Court justices and Oscar-worthy screenwriters while providing massive economic and social mobility to generations of New Yorkers.
What a long way to fall.
Rodriguez & Co. are wrecking that legacy — and the ideas once crucial to higher education in America.
Now it’s indoctrination or else, at CUNY and much (most?) of US academia.
Colleges teach kids that controversial ideas can literally hurt them and that violence in response is justified.
That free speech — crucial to learning — should be forbidden.
The damage this does to American students is incalculable: More than 80%, per surveys done for speech-rights outfit FIRE, self-censor while in college.
Not to mention how the insistence that everything is traumatic does clear damage to mental health (Exhibit 1: Shellyne Rodriguez).
Don’t write off Rodriguez as a lone loon, just because Hunter has apparently fired her: Again, the professors’ union enthusiastically endorsed her on-campus bullying.
At the least, Hunter should to mandate a semester-long remedial course on free speech for the entire faculty.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
