So a lot of the argument about how "right wing commenters" are unfairly, well, whatevered, is based on some very serious anecdotes. And you know what we say to those - not today.
A few things:
- Protests are valid free speech expressions.
- Holding an entire protest as invalid due to a small number of individual's actions is unfair.
- Many of those conservative speakers aren't trying to spread discourse, but trying to create an outrage and play off of that (evidence exists of the malignant intent). While perhaps being protected by the 1st amendment, that's academic dishonesty. And we should not accept prima facie the arguments they're being oppressed.
- The portland professor was being brought up based on academic dishonesty, human experimentation, process, and ethics. We're going to need better evidence not to take the disciplinary board at face value.
Basically "I hear about this frequently" and "there have been..." is pretty weak evidence. It's mainly relying upon the recency bias, availability cascade, base rate neglect, and our inability to assess large events.
For example, the Berkeley campus protest is constantly referred to. The problem is this is a splashy example which distorts people's thinking. People rarely talk about the thousands and thousands of conservative speakers that hold events without a hitch. We cannot talk about a systematic risk by only referring to events that are so rare that we keep on referring to the same one for the last several years! That is _by definition_ the opposite of a systematic bias/risk.
Basically I call serious BS. Lack of data, cherrypicking stark examples, and the reuse of the same events over and over again while appealing to the impression that there should be more events like this, when there are not, is garbage.