Group decries Antifa’s ‘heckler’s veto’
It’s not us — it’s them. That’s the argument being used in a federal lawsuit filed Sunday by a white supremacist group asking a judge to force Michigan State University into giving them space on campus to speak.
Last month, MSU said no to the National Policy Institute, run by Richard Spencer, citing safety concerns if the group showed up on campus.
“After consultation with law enforcement officials, Michigan State University has decided to deny the National Policy Institute’s request to rent space on campus to accommodate a speaker,” the university said in a statement at the time. “This decision was made due to significant concerns about public safety in the wake of the tragic violence in Charlottesville.”
But there’s no threat from the NPI, the lawsuit claims, instead pinning the blame on the left for well-publicized violence around their appearances.
“Radical leftists affiliated with the Antifa political movement have previously violently attacked Spencer and Spencer’s supporters at venues which Spencer and Spencer’s supporters peacefully assembled,” the lawsuit, filed by Michigan attorney Kyle Bristow on behalf of Cameron Padgett, the organizer of Spencer’s speeches says. “Usually clothed in black and wearing masks to cowardly conceal their identities, Antifa activists routinely show up to politically right-of-center events with baseball bats, knives, sticks, pepper spray and other weapons to attack their political opponents. Antifa activists often throw water balloons filled with urine and other harmful objects at politically right-of-center people without lawful justification.”
Bristow is a graduate of MSU, where he was the president of the Young Americans for Freedom chapter. During his time there, the Southern Poverty Law Center listed his chapter of YAF as a hate group. Grant Strobl, the current national chairman of YAF and a University of Michigan student said Bristow’s YAF chapter wasn’t authorized.
The lawsuit goes on to claim that the MSU decision “constitutes unconstitutional discrimination in the form of a heckler’s veto” because MSU doesn’t support the group’s views, which it outlines in the lawsuit.