Intolerance on the left also takes a toll

Amid rising far-right extremism in America, concerns about intolerance on the left are often dismissed as a right-wing moral panic. And yet there is considerable evidence that activism motivated by seemingly laudable progressive goals — to advance racial equality or combat sexual violence, for example — can take ugly and destructive forms and cause grave damage. Two recent news stories illustrate this.

A long piece by Emma Camp in the June issue of Reason magazine (where, for full disclosure, I am a contributing editor) details the ordeal of University of Virginia student Morgan Bettinger, who was accused of threatening racial justice protesters in the summer of 2020 and faced possible expulsion. While Bettinger was eventually cleared, her life was derailed, and she still refuses to identify her workplace for fear of being stalked.

The charge against Bettinger, first made by fellow UVA student and activist Zyahna Bryant on Twitter, was that she had approached protesters in her SUV, blocked their path, and told them twice that they would make “good speed bumps” — then called the police when angrily confronted. While the video posted by Bryant did not show the threatening remark, the accusation was instantly amplified, and Bettinger was pilloried as a racist villain on and off campus.

Yet a UVA investigation found no corroboration for the threat despite dozens of witnesses. According to Bettinger, a truck driver blocking traffic to protect the protesters spoke to her when she stopped to look at the protest; she said she told the man that it was good he was there, “because otherwise these people would have been speed bumps.” The driver said he didn’t hear her exact words over the engine noise. Bryant most likely heard a secondhand report that Bettinger had mentioned “speed bumps” and interpreted it as a threat.

Incredibly, the UVA panel initially found Bettinger guilty of hate speech, assuming that a mere mention of “speed bumps” was threatening due to the death of Heather Heying, the anti-racist protester run down by a white supremacist driver in 2017. After graduating under punitive sanctions, Bettinger was exonerated on appeal — but a negative mark on her record remains, impeding her law school prospects. Meanwhile, Bryant has been widely feted by the media as an intrepid social justice activist.

In another case in New Jersey, reported in The New York Times this week, a false accusation that tapped into social justice sensitivities — in this case, about sexual assault — led to a loss of life. A year ago, Jack Reid, a 17-year-old junior at the private Lawrenceville School, killed himself after more than a year of bullying and ostracism based on a persistent false rumor that he was a rapist — which spread around the school and then online. A school investigation found that the rumor was baseless, but the school did not take any steps to publicly exonerate Reid.

We hear a great deal about the problem of harassment by right-wing trolls, often directed at racial and ethnic minorities, women, and gay or transgender people. That problem is real, with online harassment sometimes spilling over into real-life threats and violence. Yet the examples of Bettinger and Reid show that “progressive” shaming of alleged racists and misogynists has its own dangers — especially when accusations are taken at face value and abetted by the media. Social justice activists often talk of the “harm” caused by hate speech. But righteous anger can also fuel misdirected hate and cause very real harm.

Opinions expressed by Cathy Young, a cultural studies fellow at the Cato Institute, are her own.

By Cathy Young

Cathy Young is a writer for The Bulwark.