CNN’s Fareed Zakaria said Sunday that “conservative voices and views are being silenced entirely” as he criticized demonstrations against conservative speakers at universities across the country.
Zakaria highlighted the hundred students who turned their backs and walked out of Notre Dame’s graduation ceremony to protest Vice President Pence’s speech.
“A few weeks earlier U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was booed while giving the commencement address at Bethune-Cookman University,” he continued.
{mosads}“American universities these days seem to be committed to every kind of diversity — except intellectual diversity. Conservative voices and views, already a besieged minority, are being silenced entirely.”
Zakaria added that “an attitude of self-righteousness” was leading to “the ideas we find offensive” being drowned out.
“It’s an attitude of self-righteousness that says we are so pure, we’re so morally superior, we cannot bear to hear an idea with which we disagree,” he said.
“Freedom of speech and thought is not just for warm, fuzzy ideas that we find comfortable. It’s for ideas that we find offensive,” Zakaria later added. “Liberals think they are tolerant, but often they aren’t.”
Zakaria, a frequent critic of President Trump, made similar comments as the commencement speaker at Bucknell University on May 22. He referred to the president as a bullshit artist on live television earlier this month.