Attorney General Jeff Sessions Rails Against Campus Bias Response Teams

In his remarks today at the Turning Point USA High School Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., Attorney General Jeff Sessions decried the cadre of students, “mostly on the hard left,” who seek to silence speakers with whom they disagree.

Sessions reserved particular opprobrium for bias response teams, in existence at hundreds of campuses, which investigate students and staff suspected of committing microaggressions (small offenses or slights).

On this issue, Sessions isn’t just talk. The Department of Justice recently joined Speech First, a new free speech advocacy organization, in suing the University of Michigan over its anti-bias policies, which instructed students to consider their own feelings as the best indication of whether they had suffered a microaggression. A day later, Michigan announced it would change the definition in question. (Speech First is still suing over other aspects of the university’s speech policy.)

According to Sessions, the threat to free speech on campus is “radical and ahistorical”—and is something that the federal government is taking seriously.

“Donald Trump doesn’t believe anyone can tell him how to speak,” said Sessions. “Isn’t that true?”