‘A university can serve as the forum to let ideas come out and let everyone think about them, and then make their own decisions…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A discussion at Purdue University on “Democracy, Civility, and Freedom of Expression” featuring a phony Republican and a corrupt ex-attorney general predictably promoted radical leftist talking points.
The public university in West Lafayette, Ind., hosted the dialogue on Wednesday—between former Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and former Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch—in commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The talk was organized by the school’s Orwellian-sounding Division of Diversity and Inclusion.
“We are incredibly excited to focus our semester-long efforts on promoting and exploring what it means to live and behave civilly in our democracy,” said John Gates, vice provost for diversity and inclusion, in a press release prior to the event.
“It’s never been more important that we try to listen to and understand one another and to offer respect to those who may have differing opinions from us,” he said. “That’s what our democracy was built on.”
Those ‘differing opinions’ from two notorious Trump-bashing public figures ranged from whether the recent impeachment of President Donald Trump was great to whether it was just good, reported the Journal & Courier.
“I’m grateful that we have a country where this can happen, and where the executive branch may not like it, but they’re subject to it, and that isn’t the case in other countries,” said Flake, who was present in the Senate gallery for the opening of the trial.
“The institutions by and large are holding up,” Flake claimed. “They’ve been tested like never before in certain areas, but they’re holding, and that’s gratifying to see.”
The two also debated whether GOP supported voter ID laws—designed to maintain election integrity—were racist or whether they were simply voter suppression.
Red-state Indiana is one of many that require such laws, which Democrats have attacked by claiming they violate the ’60s-era Voting Rights Act.
“Sometimes, it can be challenging to think that the issues [Martin Luther King Jr.] fought for then, we are still fighting for now,” Lynch said. “… [W]e can look to how he met those challenges and work on those issues.”
Rather than challenge Lynch’s assertion, Flake—whose Trump attacks ultimately cost him his seat in the Senate—concurred that “the work is never done.”
Republican proponents argue that IDs are readily available to U.S. citizens and the laws are intended as a safeguard to prevent non-citizens from mistakenly voting, as well as discouraging citizens who may act in bad faith from attempting to commit felonious voter fraud.
The Purdue talk came on the same day as neighboring Illinois, a blue-dominated “sanctuary state,” admitted that hundreds of non-citizens had been inadvertently registered by a supposed computer error at the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles.
Another point of agreement between the two ostensibly opposed speakers was that the nation’s institutions of higher education were a fantastic place to get a wide array of diverse viewpoints while engaging in civil discourse.
The Journal & Courier said that, in November, Purdue students staged mass protests after an off-campus CVS requested immigration paperwork from a Puerto Rican student in order to provide a regulated medication.
The outraged students demanded that Purdue President Mitch Daniels denounce the incident, while Gates’s diversity office used the occasion to conduct a “town hall” debating whether Daniels hated all students or just illegal immigrants.
Flake said his own upbringing in the small town of Snowflake, Ariz., was somewhat insular prior to his matriculation at Utah’s Brigham Young University.
“The university experience is great,” he said. “Purdue is certainly taking full advantage of that for its students.”
Lynch agreed, commending the school’s openness to dialogue.
“People here deal in the currency of ideas all the time, and so it can provide a safe space to have some of those conversations that can be challenging, that can be difficult and can be hard to have,” she said.
“A university can serve as the forum to let ideas come out and let everyone think about them, and then make their own decisions,” she added.
Lynch recently has been in the headlines amid the ongoing Justice Department probe into FBI misconduct and allegations that they colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee in an effort to fix the 2016 election.
The DOJ recently rattled leftists at The New York Times after revealing that it was investigating a leaked Russian memo about an exchange between then-DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Leonard Benardo, a top official with leftist mega-donor George Soros‘s Open Society Foundation.
According to the memo—discovered by Dutch intelligence, who relayed it to the FBI under then-Director James Comey—Schultz assured Benardo that Lynch would not allow the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified State Department emails to result in prosecution of the Democratic presidential candidate.
Lynch, overseeing the Justice Department at the time, was later forced to recuse herself from the case after a secretive tarmac meeting with former President Bill Clinton became a public scandal. However, she continued to exert pressure on Comey to drop the investigation.