I tend to be right leaning and would flip out if the extreme left was censored. If you can't have a discussion you can't have democracy.
Florida is demanding ideological surveys of faculty within the state. Laws are being passed banning discussion of "CRT" in a variety of institutional levels. I've got a few friends who receive fairly consistent death threats every time they are mentioned by Fox News or equivalents for being "anti-american ivory tower leftists" for teaching courses on police violence or race and gender in medieval europe. One of the authors of the 1619 project had their position changed from a tenured position to a TT position after interference from the board of a public university.
Heck, the Trump administration published "the 1776 project", which was absolutely ahistorical nonsense (no single historian was involved in the project) explicitly designed to shift history curricula towards a specific ideology.
By actual lawmakers.
What I'm trying to say with that is that it's not an equal comparison. There is no political mobilization for extreme left ideas that is even remotely comparable to the far-right that align with some narratives that the students obviously consider as dangerous, such as anti-Islam and anti-immigration, anti-LGBTQ, and pro gendered labor division.
I am not in favor of flat out banning such books (even if I personally believe they have no place in an environment of science and learning such as a university), but it's easy to understand why the response of left-leaning students towards right-leaning topics is stronger than the inverse.
A good democratic country will swing between extreme polls but if you look around you'll see many strongly leftist ideas (extreme gun control, censorship, minors consenting to sex reassignment surgery etc.) getting quite a lot of support and becoming laws in many countries. I certainly wouldn't argue that they're being ignored.
However, none of the points you named are anywhere even remotely near "extreme left", even by US standards. Those are all Democrat party talking points, which is anywhere from slightly left of center to center-right.
The "extreme left" (no, US Democrats are not socialists) has no political representation anywhere in the Western world and barely registers in public consciousness at all.
That's false. In France there's a far left party ( France Insoumise, which has or has had stuff like redistribution of wealth and nationalisation of infrastructure, increasing the minimum wage in multiples in their programme, and regularly works with the Communist party for elections ) which is pretty mainstream, and their candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was 4th with 19.6% in the last presidential elections. ( For reference, 3rd was with 20%, 2nd with 21.4%, first with 24%)
Isn't there a far left party in Spain as well? And Italy?
Western world != US, Canada, UK.
Something I notice is that, whether it's nationalist Italians burning Communist literature, Germany (WWI-era) burning Catholic writings, or the Nazis burning Soviet books, it's...almost exclusively the right-wing that supports censorship, at least on the list for destroying libraries. When I think of who's actually achieved anti-censorship in the United States, I think of people like Allen Ginsberg, the reason the First Amendment actually began to mean something in the US for the first time in its history. Now, I could be wrong, but I think Ginsberg was...a leftist going against the right-wing?
The left seem to have a certain libertarian bent if anything: They seem to want private enterprise to be able to host what they want. It makes sense from a free market perspective.
My understanding was that the "left and right" is more or less orthogonal to the "authoritarian vs libertarian" dimension. The authoritarian forms of both are absolutely terrible, that's why we have democracy: so they can do their best to cancel each other out.
Even in the US, they are, at least some of them, more prominent in the more centrist faction of the Democratic Party than even the Democratic “left”, much less the actual (for the USA) “far left”. Remember that one of the establishment arguments early on against Sanders was that he had a historically weak voting record on gun control.
The American Right tends to confuse the degree to which a position is associated with the Democratic Party with how far “left” it is.
"Extreme gun control" is interesting. By that criteria, Australia is extremely leftist! As is the UK and almost all of europe! Or... maybe the US is the extreme one here.
No. Extreme leftists use guillotines to bring literal class war to the rich. Sieze the means of production and all that. You get the job the state gives you, you get what the state gives you. Collectively somehow even though everybody disagrees with the fundament?
Moderate leftists write laws to tax profits in order to provide infrastructure and services to people to increase the baseline of wellbeing in the state. Biden is actually quite conservative in that regard
In society’s most important institutions of science and learning, ALL ideas must be open to scrutiny, especially unpopular ones.
Shouldn’t we want society to be built on the bedrock of truth via scrutiny, rather than on the mere sand of intellectual fashions?
It is just my personal opinion that anti-science does not have equal value as science and should not be found right alongside it. Given the correct context and time and place, I don't fundamentally have an issue with the books existing or people being able to read them.
I'd argue that this is anti-science. The biological theory "en vogue" is that homosexuality (not the sexual act, the falling in love part) is determined by hormonal balance during pregnancy. I don't think any theory argue that this is dangerous, and well, about immorality, it has nothing to do with science.
So this idea is anti-science, and i don't think is interesting enough to take a spot on a shelf in a science university. Maybe in the reserve. Are you disagreeing with that?