It's a plot so fiendishly brilliant that it could only come from the mind of a leftist apologist.
The conspiracy theory on Brian Leiter's blog, by Michael Simkovic, starts off with an attack so dishonest and vile that you don't know whether to laugh or wash your hands of the whole thing.
After a violent attack on civil rights protestors that left three dead and more than a dozen injured at the University of Virginia, students and administrators at Vassar became concerned when they learned that William Jacobson was coming to defend racism. Jacobson’s libertarian hosts advertised his lecture as “‘Hate Speech’ is Free Speech, Even After Charlottesville.” Jacobson’s previous racially charged comments and dubiousassertions earned Jacobson the admiration of White-nationalist websites such as V-Dare(see also here), the John Birch Society’s New American, and Breitbart news.
But Jacobson’s much-hyped lecture turned out to be a superficial and innocuous discussion of free speech, at the level of a high school civics class. Jacobson’s prosaic lecture was not news worthy. Instead, the press focused on student and university officials’ purported over-reactions to a talk about “free speech.”
William Jacobson is Jewish. The "radically charged comments" that Simkovic links to consist of Jacobson urging Senator Warren to apologize for falsely claiming to be Cherokee.
It’s time for Elizabeth Warren to apologize for her Native American deception
Elizabeth Warren is not Native American. Yet she claimed to be Native American while climbing the law school professor ladder to Harvard Law School.
You know who agrees with that? The Daily Show's Trevor Noah.
But the gist of Simkovic's argument is that the unjustified attacks on Jacobson prove that there's a conspiracy to make leftists look like they hate free speech.
The logic of it is easy.
1. Leftists couldn't possibly be lashing out without justification
2. If conservatives are victims of leftist violence, it must be part of a conspiracy to take over colleges
And that's his thesis. "A well-organized campaign to bait, discredit, and take over universities is exploiting students and manipulating the public." The proof is that conservatives get attacked on campus and then complain about it. That's equally good proof that the ACLU and the NAACP want to take over America.
Simkovic doesn't provide any evidence that Jacobson was a provocateur. He just starts from the assumption that the left has the best possible intentions and the right has the worst possible intentions.
And voila.