Trump Jr: Universities are ‘captive to political hatreds’
Donald Trump, Jr. blasted America’s universities for condemning “hate speech” while failing to “teach civility or intellectual openness” during a speech in Texas on Tuesday.
“A lot of other universities don’t teach civility or intellectual openness anymore,” Trump said during a speech at the AT&T Stadium in Dallas that was sponsored by the University of North Texas, as reported by The Star-Telegram. “They’ve become captive to political hatreds. That’s how innocent questions become verbal assaults.”
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Trump argued that those who oppose “hate speech” actually seek to stifle conservative viewpoints by portraying them as hateful and extremist.
“Hate speech is anything that says America is a good country and our founders were great people, that we need borders,” Trump said. “Hate speech is anything faithful to the moral teaching of the Bible.”
Echoing Republican concerns about the value of higher education, President Trump’s son further berated universities for straying from their educational mission, stressing that parents often get a bad deal when spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a college diploma.
“We’ll take $200,000 of your money; in exchange we’ll train your children to hate our country,” Trump said, speaking from what he considers the perspective of a typical American university.
”We’ll indoctrinate them and punish them if they disagree with us. We’ll make them unemployable by teaching them courses in zombie studies, underwater basket weaving, and, my personal favorite, tree climbing—but that’s only because it’s deer season,” he added.
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Trump also defended American nationalism, arguing that the ideological position is often misinterpreted and misunderstood.
“We have a leader who will no longer see 200 years of hegemony because everyone else wants a participation medal,” Trump explained. “We won’t feel guilty for our successes and dominance globally, and we’ll fight to preserve it. We will intervene in other countries to protect Americans and American interests, and not to export our values or impress our traditions upon them. That’s simple nationalism.”
Acknowledging that many people “don’t like the idea of nationalism,” he speculated that perhaps “there’s some confusion perhaps as to what it actually means,” saying that “some think it means a willingness to make war. But it’s actually just the opposite.”
Part of a scholarship fundraising series, Trump’s talk was rigorously opposed by some university officials, including the school’s president, who reportedly said in internal emails that he was “trying to stop” the $100,000 event from taking place on campus.
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“I am trying to stop it, but it isn’t an easy thing,” president Neal Smatresk told a concerned professor in an August email, later admitting in a separate memo that “untangling this donor advised talk is more difficult than I expected.”
According to the report, Trump was introduced by Smatresk who quipped that “there’s been a lot of news, or maybe I should say ‘fake news,’ surrounding today’s lecture.”
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