College campus protests erupt over speaker's defense of cops
'War on Cops' author Heather Mac Donald shares her story
Conservative commentator and author Heather Mac Donald said Monday it was an "exercise of brute totalitarian force" when protesters at Claremont McKenna College shut down her speaking event last week.
"This is not just my loss of free speech. These students are exercising brute force against their fellow students to prevent them from hearing me live," Mac Donald said on "Fox & Friends".
Mac Donald, the author of "The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe," said she was scheduled to speak at the college on Thursday when protesters surrounded and blocked the entrance to the Athenaeum, where the event was being held.
"I heard them chanting, '[Expletive] the police, KKK,'" Mac Donald recalled, adding that she was called a "white supremacist."
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Campus officials decided not to forcefully intervene and arrest students over safety concerns for the students, faculty and guests, Claremont McKenna College President Hiram E. Chodosh said in a statement.
Mac Donald's speech was ultimately livestreamed while she spoke to a small crowd in the auditorium. The 30-minute talk was then posted to the college's website, where it was viewed more than 2,300 times as of Monday, according to Livestream's site.
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"In the end, the effort to silence her voice effectively amplified it to a much larger audience," Chodosh said.
Chodosh promised to punish the Claremont McKenna students who were involved in the protest for violating college policy.
Mac Donald told "Fox & Friends" that the Black Lives Matter movement and the student protesters are putting people who want police protection at risk.
"What's happening, thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, is that cops are backing off of proactive policing, leaving those law-abiding residents without any public order," Mac Donald said.
Crime is rising and police are not using the same force in neighborhoods because they are being verbally attacked and harassed when making traffic stops, Mac Donald claimed.
"This is thanks to the false ideology that we're living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings," Mac Donald said, adding that universities are "spewing out an ideology of racial victimhood."
Mac Donald said the protests have not deterred her from hosting events at other universities. Later this month, she's scheduled to speak at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
"We'll see what happens there," Mac Donald said.
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