Civil Rights for Real

Accuracy in Academia summer conference attendees got a chance to hear from an eloquent representative of a persecuted minority on American college campuses.

Black conservative author and entrepreneur Mason Weaver (pictured) travels the rocky road of the college lecture circuit about 50 times a year, with a standing offer to debate all liberal professors who disagree with him. “They don’t want to debate a 50-year-old man,” says the author of It’s Okay to Leave the Plantation. “They want to spread their gospel to 20-year-old kids trapped in their classrooms.”

Weaver graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and goes back to his alma mater as a visiting lecturer. These visits keep him up-to-date on campus orthodoxy.

“Liberalism is a religion,” Weaver concludes. “Liberals view conservatives as interrupting their sermon.”

When Weaver spoke at California Polytechnic at San Luis Obispo in 2003, the promotion of the event resulted in a landmark legal case. Engineering student Steve Hinkle was threatened with expulsion for trying to post flyers advertising a talk Weaver gave at the school. After more than a year of legal wrangling, Hinkle got university administrators to expunge his student record of the complaints against him.

“Liberals are like children,” Weaver says. “They are always saying that something is not fair or that it is the intention that counts.”

“My reply to this is: If I break into your room with the intention of making love to you but rape you instead, then, according to you, since my intentions were honorable, it’s okay because there is no difference to the liberal.”

Weaver, not one to mince words, has given this answer to politically correct coeds. He does not get many responses to this argument.

“You cannot stay liberal and think,” Weaver offers. His disenchantment with liberalism began when he helped run a federal program that set aside a portion of government contracts to be allotted to minority contractors in order to give their businesses a boost. Few contractors catapulted out of the program, let alone into independence as truly independent free enterprises. Weaver was not surprised that the program, still in existence, failed to meet its own goal.

“If minorities get a 10 percent set-aside, that means ‘the man’ gets to keep the other 90 percent,” Weaver explained. “Why would anyone ever want to limit himself this way?”

Weaver gives his audiences a provocative challenge. “If the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, why aren’t you trying to find out what the rich are doing to get rich and applying yourself to do the same?,” Weaver asks rhetorically. “Has it ever occurred to you that everything we have came from a rich person?”

“Rich people create new jobs,” Weaver explains. “We should have a holiday to celebrate rich people.”

“They get rich producing things that you and I need and want.”

James F. Davis is the president of Accuracy in Academia and Malcolm A. Kline is AIA’s executive director.