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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

No Traditional News Network

No Traditional News Network

In a newspaper article featured on the front page of the Indiana Daily Student last week, Traditionalist Youth Network received coverage for its activities on campus, including chalking to try to spread their ideologies.

Trad Youth is a white supremacy group that also hates gays, feminists and Jews. Some critics contended that by making Trad Youth a front page story the newspaper was legitimizing the student group.

The role of a newspaper, though, is to report on and cover news. As soon as Trad Youth began to make statements on campus, the IDS newspaper staff was obligated to bring that activity to light and do the best it could to report the facts of the situation.
These are students holding meetings on our campus, conducting protests in our community and writing their message on our sidewalks.

The IDS has an obligation to inform IU and Bloomington what is happening here. That is the role a responsible news organization must fill, and it is the role the IDS filled in publishing the story.

By choosing to write about the group, the IDS was appealing to its readership and attempting to engage readers with the issue on a more significant level.

Now that more people are aware of Trad Youth, contextualized in Indiana’s history of racism as a loving home for the KKK in the 1920s and the broader boom of hate groups nationwide, more can be done to discuss and rout the kind of extremism these groups represent. Trad Youth is a part of Indiana’s legacy of racism. We have a responsibility to know about and confront them.

But we must confront them in a measured fashion. We should not compromise our morals because we ardently disagree with theirs. The ideas Trad Youth represent may be contrary to those of the “normal” student at IU, but that does not invalidate their right to speak about their views.

Voltaire is often credited with saying, “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” Although their speech may be uncomfortable for most, they are well within their rights to say it.

As a matter of fact, it is vitally important that they have the ability to say these things. It demonstrates the incredible freedoms we have to speak, regardless of how contradictory the ideas may be to public opinion.

This makes people even more uncomfortable, though. How do we rationalize the fact that we actually support someone’s ability to speak out, even when that speech is hateful to the very essence of who we are?

Though Trad Youth is an inexcusable hate group, its members should be able to speak their views publicly. And when they do speak, it is the obligation of the press to be there to hear it.

­— opinion@idsnews.com
Follow the Opinion Desk on Twitter @ids_opinion.

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