I'm not native to Missouri but it has been my adopted home for almost ten years now. It shames me to watch the behavior of these bullies towards photojournalist Tim Tai at the University of Missouri as he attempted to exercise his First Amendment rights.
In the video of Tim Tai trying to carry out his ESPN assignment, I see the most vivid example yet of activists twisting the concept of "safe space" in a most confounding way. They have one lone student surrounded. They're forcibly preventing him from exercising a civil right. At various points, they intimidate him. Ultimately, they physically push him. But all the while, they are operating on the premise, or carrying on the pretense, that he is making them unsafe.It is as if they've weaponized the concept of "safe spaces."
You can read a timeline of the events in the video at the link. They include highlights such as:
Around the 20-second mark, a woman shouts that the photographer needs to respect the space of students, just as they start to forcibly push him backwards.Just after the one-minute mark, having been pushed back by students who are deliberately crowding him to obstruct his view, things grow more surreal as the photographer is told, "Please give them space! You cannot be this close to them."
At the 1:24 mark, as the students are chanting at the photographer and some are visibly smirking at him--and as he's frustrated but doing his best to keep his cool--a protestor tells him, as if he is disrespecting them, "You think this is funny."
