Nearly Half of Americans Favor Censoring Campus Nazis, White Supremacists

Almost half of Americans believe college campuses should prevent Nazis and white supremacists from speaking on campus, according to a poll sponsored by the “No Safe Spaces” documentary.

Radio host and Prager University founder Dennis Prager and comedian Adam Corolla — who are producing the documentary — asked the poll’s respondents to select from a list of 12 groups of viewpoints they believe colleges should bar from campus events.

Although the groups chosen represented incendiary viewpoints, First Amendment advocates warned the poll offered chilling implications for constitutional rights.

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“The whole point of our Constitution, and of America itself, is that all speech — especially hate speech — is protected,” Prager told The Washington Times. “After all, love speech needs no protection. It’s precisely offensive speech that our founders intended to protect and that we are compelled to defend.”

Prager and Corolla found that 48 percent of respondents believed Nazis should be banned from speaking on college campuses — and 40 percent said white supremacists should be excluded. Thirty-two percent concluded that Holocaust deniers shouldn’t be given a platform, while 24 percent said communists should be excluded.

In addition, the poll found that higher percentages of millennials believe colleges should bar groups with controversial viewpoints from addressing campuses when compared with older generations. Meanwhile, millennials were more likely to give communists a pass when it came to speaking on campus.

“Freedom of expression is deeply imperiled on U.S. campuses.”

Six percent of millennials also believed that colleges should bar conservative groups from addressing students on campus.

“I decided to participate in [‘No Safe Spaces’] because if we don’t get this right, we will literally lose our country and our freedoms,” Prager said, as The Times reported. “Sadly, this poll reinforces the need for the film and for us to save our country from tyranny.”

Other surveys after the past several months and years reaped similar results to the one Prager and Corolla spearheaded.

Related: Dennis Prager: YouTube Censors Conservative Content

The Brookings Institution found in a September poll that 44 percent of college students believe that “hate speech” isn’t protected by the First Amendment. Fifty-one percent said that verbally disrupting and shutting down speaking engagements are appropriate responses to speakers considered to be practicing hate speech.

Fifty-three percent agreed that colleges should prohibit “certain speech or expression of viewpoints that are offensive or biased against certain groups of people.”

A troubling 19 percent of respondents said violence is the answer to preventing hate speech, the Brookings Institution found.

“Freedom of expression is deeply imperiled on U.S. campuses,” John Villasenor, a Brookings Institution nonresident senior fellow and author of the report, wrote. “And I would hope that we can do a better job at convincing current and future college students that the best way to respond to offensive speech is with vigorous debate, or peaceful protest — and not, as many seem to believe, with violence.”

PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter here. 

(photo credit, homepage image: Charlottesville Candlelight Vigil at the White House, CC BY-SA 2.0, by Ted Eytan; photo credit, article image: Black Lives Matter Black Friday, CC BY-SA 2.0, by The All-Nite Images)