Empower Wisconsin | Sept 28, 2020

MADISON —Free speech is dead on college campuses. 

The time of death occurred in late August, when the Badger Herald, a University of Wisconsin-Madison student newspaper, fired a conservative columnist shortly after refusing to run his op-ed. 

What was Tripp Grebe’s controversial “hot take”? He doesn’t think we should defund the police, according to the College Fix. 

“If we’re expecting police officers to be better, why would we be taking money away from them? When schools are failing, we don’t ‘Defund Schools,’ we give them more money and implement new plans to ensure their success,” Grebe wrote in his submission. 

He was told by the newspaper’s opinion editor Samiha Bhushan in an email that, while the piece was well written, it was “too much of a hot take,” and that upper management of the paper were worried it may “alienate” incoming freshmen, the College Fix reported. 

“Additionally,” the email continues, “we just posted an editorial board supporting BLM and another article publicly endorsing two candidates who want to defund the police. As a result, your article would cause a lot of backlash that we cannot afford right now.”

After the Young America’s Foundation started asking questions about the Herald’s editorial decision, Grebe was shown the door. He was told that he was being dismissed because of sourcing issues. This, despite the fact that his piece contained nearly 20 different sources from news outlets such as CBS News, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the National Economic Bureau.

Read more at the College Fix.