Campus leftists protested gay conservative journalist Chadwick Moore at Portland State. One even threatened him. https://t.co/uOYLTIjvDj— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) May 10, 2017
Heat Street
written by Ian Miles Cheong
Wednesday May 10, 2017
Gay conservative journalist Chadwick Moore has become the latest subject of the ire of the progressive left for daring to voice his disagreement with leftist orthodoxy. His recent appearance at Portland State University drew a protest from campus activists, one of whom even threatened to assault him. Moore was at the university to speak about the right to free speech.
The College Fix reports that protesters carried signs and placards like “No sympathy for alt-right trash” and “Destroy your local fascist,” and disrupted Moore throughout his speech, which was organized by the Freethinkers of PSU—a nonpartisan student group. In the days leading up to his “The Joys of Being an Infidel: Orthodoxy in America” speech, campus leftists covered the display case advertising his events with messages like “No Hate at PSU” and “Fascist Defenders Fuck Off.”
The lifelong liberal and gay speaker came out as a conservative earlier in February after he published an op-ed in the New York Post to talk about his highly controversial profile of former Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos in Out Magazine. Despite remaining neutral on Yiannopoulos’ politics, Moore was pilloried for his refusal to condemn the conservative firebrand. He explained to the Post how being disowned by his fellow liberals drove him towards the right.
“After the story posted online in the early hours of Sept. 21, I woke up to more than 100 Twitter notifications on my iPhone. Trolls were calling me a Nazi, death threats rolled in and a joke photo that I posed for in a burka served as “proof” that I am an Islamophobe,” he wrote in the column. “I’m not.”
Moore says that more than a dozen of his close friends cut their association with him because of the article. “I felt alienated and frightened,” he wrote.
Moore has since embraced his newfound infamy as a defender of free speech. He began his talk by criticizing the university’s Queer Resource Center for its political bias and refusal to allow the Freethinkers to place a flyer advertising his speech in their space, which carries a lot of socialist promotional material.
“Here I am, a public gay person who was working for the two largest gay magazines in the world as their top investigative journalist, and they can’t put that up there because they don’t like my politics,” Moore said. “Maybe the Queer Resource Center should rebrand itself as something less misleading.”
He joked that the Center could rebrand itself as the “Ministry of Propaganda” or the “I’m With Her Memorial Museum and Gift Shop.”
Moore later addressed the issue of “power and privilege,” referring to a training document he received from a PSU student. The material described white people, heterosexuals and English-speakers as “agents of oppression” who possessed privileges unavailable to anyone else. The speaker picked apart each of the arguments and tore up the piece of leftist pamphlet afterwards.
“Anyone who gets this in a future class, this is what you have to do to it,” Moore said. “Sign up for a new class.”
It was at this point that offended protesters attempted to disrupt his speech. Moore called on them to wait for the Q&A section of his event and to be more respectful towards other attendees.
In a video provided to the Fix by the student group, an attendee who called herself “black, disabled, and a woman” stormed out of the room and pounded on the window with her fists after he invited her to address her complaints to him on stage. Another female student then threatened to punch him when he mocked the first student’s behavior. The protester then claimed it was “not a threat” after the audience expressed their shock at what she said.
Moore concluded his speech by reading a letter he received from a gay man who thanked him for daring to “come out” as a conservative in his New York Post article.
“If you decide to shun a huge percentage of your community simply because they might not agree with your political views, you’re denying people a chance to true happiness of living authentically,” said Moore.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.
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