Editor,
In regards to the impending visit of Milo Yiannopoulos, poster boy of the alt-right and editor for the website Breitbart, I implore the UNM faculty, as well as the student body, to consider the implications and potential consequences of his visit.
I assume that there is already concern on behalf of safety, otherwise they would not have been prepared to staff it so heavily with security. To whom does this concern vest itself in? Is it in Milo himself, or in the marginalized persons of which he is so fond of antagonizing?
At his event in UW, he went so far as to publicly shame a woman in the audience for being transgender, commencing then to project some of her private information before the entire audience and make a lewd remark to the extent of describing a violent act upon her. Does this behavior not violate a standard of conduct which we as a scholastic institution do not seek to uphold?
Contenders of Milo’s right to free speech fail to overlook the implications of this man’s potential to do harm, and passively wish to allow him a platform to spew forth hatred and bigotry. They claim that protesting the event bears the stamp of ‘hypocrisy,' while ignoring the principled stipulations in our University’s policy forbidding ‘unlawful discrimination and/or harassment on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, physical or mental disability, age, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity, ancestry, spousal affiliation, medical condition, or veteran status’, such discrimination without which Milo Yiannopoulos would not have a career.
Were he a student, he would be promptly reprimanded for his contemptible behavior and penalized, but because he wields power under the influence of the news media and support from lofty political figures, he is exempt from the repercussions of his actions.
It is not, then, a question of whether it is right to allow this event to take place on our school grounds, but a question of how we should stop it.
Sidney Abernathy
UNM student
