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Campus Intolerance Comes of Age
For the past half-century, a class of people used to making the rules of society and culture – and more importantly, seeing them obeyed – are tightening their grip on a politically chaotic time. The old guard media soothsayers, keyholders to political office, and ivory tower academia were thoroughly embarrassed by the 2016 election. But it didn’t just strike a blow to the elitists. It provided an opening for a new kind of illiberal warrior brought up in the very institutions the well-heeled and cocktail-circuit coastal class created. We’re seeing it played out in the pages of television and print news, media, sports, politics, and culture. The only thing most Americans might agree on is that we’ve collectively lost our minds.
The New York Times staffers who staged a temper-tantrum badly disguised as a ‘virtual walkout’ for principle over Senator Tom Cotton’s opinion piece proved nothing but their intolerance for the very freedom of expression and First Amendment rights that they long held as the press’ duty to defend. One could think they suffered a momentary lapse of judgment, but history shows us the Times sets a low bar for accepting and publishing op-eds from less than savory characters – even America’s enemies, and blatant anti-Semitic cartoons – but the opinion of a duly-elected US Senator was a bridge too far.
We’ve seen these little fires of ideas squelched by our journalist ‘firefighters’ with the cold water of herd delirium. Personal offense outrage is the tidal wave from which no one is safe, and once it builds enough power, the destruction is swift and total. The phenomenon is the latest symptom of a culture obsessed with self-virtue and political moral ascendancy. Its roots are planted deep in educational institutions that taught a generation to ignore America’s exceptionalism and eternally apologize for the sins of our forefathers. It isn’t just going back through high school yearbooks or MySpace comments from 20 years ago, the problem is rooted in a sheltered, fearful social structure, intolerant of ideas that bring about personal offense. When kids are conditioned to think words and ideas are violence, and only allowed to accept one set of viewpoints as legitimate, they grow up to become the intolerant adults they were told exist in an America founded on racist, sexist, even fascist principles, and must do everything possible to destroy dissenting views.
Now, these college graduates from esteemed institutions are storming the gates with their diplomas and idealism and demands in hand. At the New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Bon Apetit, ESPN, the NFL and nearly every cable news outlet, the marketplace of ideas is being replaced with the soft Marxism of pledging allegiance to only one legitimate viewpoint. Even here in Minneapolis, where social-justice warriors display Equality bumper stickers and yard signs like badges of honor, the mob descends with unquestioning intolerance. The famed Holy Land Deli had its lease terminated and several Midwest Costco stores stopped selling Holy Land products after it was publically revealed the owner’s daughter posted racist tweets and Instagram posts going back at least eight years. This is after the owner fired his daughter for her behavior. But the mob would not be satisfied. I’m not defending her language, but if we are to live in a society that truly values free speech, we must consistently apply the standard of defending the good and the bad.
Now we have a situation in which the same crowd proclaiming that words are violence, who expound their moral authority through virtual walkouts and foot-stomping also laud the actual violence that hijacked a legitimate protest and practice of First Amendment rights. So it’s no surprise that the same people who self-virtue by pledging to shut-down a needed national conversation about race relations, poverty, police violence, and equality based on the merits of the debate are willing to trade any semblance of good faith to achieve solutions – or at least work towards them – to further an intellectual or policy debate for petty whining and hurt feelings. And now we see the results of caving to the mob. Weakness is provocative and emboldens the attackers. The goalposts of compliance are moved ever forward. It’s not enough to be a neutral observer. One must pledge his soul to the cause and the dogma of the most powerful. Not only did the New York Times tantrum-children win the resignation of its editor, they turned their ire on people like Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss who I think work within the scope of their employer to further publish ideas to enrich the conversation, not mute it.
This is the most consequential battle in the culture war. I’m skeptical conservatives can wait by the sidelines, thinking the progressive and radical left will destroy itself. We have been on this path for decades and America has only drifted further left. Every time a gender is added, every drag queen story hour, every insistence that a man can menstruate, proves there is no limit to the nonsense passing as ‘a truth’ when a young person’s feelings are at risk. And if they don’t apologize for being proven wrong about charging dissenters as Grandma Killers, don’t bother waiting for one after charges of thought-crime or word-violence. And when they’re wrong about how they pushed the country to the brink of civil upheaval and economic ruin, they’ll rewrite history to benefit their narrative – just as they did with the 1619 Project. At best the new radicals will gaslight or memory hole the real story. This is a war that will not be won in a single election cycle, but rather will take generations.
The country is harvesting the poison crop from the seeds planted by the Woodstock generation. They clamored for a seat at the public debate table, demanding to be heard on issues from war to civil rights, drugs, and abortion. They sang about holding hands, speaking up, and reaching out. They grew up and traded the flowers in their hair for university tenure and political influence. Their heir apparent coming of age now would insist they’d scoff at those demanding a boycott of farmer Max Yasgur for providing his farm for the biggest gathering of hippies on the planet. But the truth is, if Max was on the other side of the debate today he would be mercilessly attacked. They wouldn’t stop at boycotting his milk, they’d kills his cows and burn his farm.
So much for make peace, not war.
Published in General
Bret Stephens made his own bed, denigrating the people who were trying to warn others about what was coming, and I guess his usefulness is at an end.
Capitulation only makes the mob hungrier for more power. I think Bret got caught in a mushy middle – for better or worse.
The quick cave people just make it worse for themselves and everyone else. I have never seen a forced apology be accepted in a forgive and forget manner. Never apologize if you don’t mean it. The mob does not respect authority, because they believe they are the authority. They need a lesson evidently not obtained in college, but should have been when they were growing up. As a professor once said about the students he taught, they were not special like their mother told them.
I am, by nature, a problem-solver. I like to fix things (unless they’re mechanical!) And I don’t think I’ve ever been through a period as frightening, discouraging and hopeless in my adult life. Every time I think I have an idea of something helpful or useful, I realize that it has no potential. No one is interested. No one is listening. No one cares.
I think that’s it, in a roundabout way, people are looking for some big, sweeping THING that will solve all problems. “Just defund the police”, “Just get rid of Trump”, “Stop saying mean things.” Maybe a consequence of a federal government looked upon as savior instead of personal responsibility for communities and family? Either way we get list in the shouting match of big platitudes instead of realistic, incremental things that add up to better lives for most everyone.
I’m also reluctant to come up with ideas because I truly believe that many of those protesting aren’t interested in solutions–at least solutions that have any potential at all. They just want to offer solutions that sound compassionate and loving and non-violent–as they destroy their own neighborhoods. How do they deal with the cognitive dissonance??
Yes, good point. Maybe they burn down their neighbor’s business hoping theirs won’t be. Then help with the cleanup effort. (Views from Minneapolis)
Dana White has been warning the media that they are on the chopping block, that they face massive layoffs and downsizing in the months ahead. He points this out in the context of sports journalists attacking the very businesses upon which their jobs depend. “Who will be let go first, you or the NFL commentator? Sports or business news reporters?” This extends to the children trashing the newsrooms in a farcical repeat of the Cultural Revolution. It did not end well for all those Little Red Book waving young people. It may well go badly for our SJWs even faster.
I think a tipping point for me was during this latest ruckus, hearing versions of “If you don’t join in to tear down the system from which you benefitted, then you are a cause of it (=racist).
Er, no. EACH INDIVIDUAL must decide to what degree and in what circumstance to dedicate time and resources for the making of a better world (even if we could all agree on what that would be). You can’t start sentences with “and if you don’t stop everything and join us….” or we cease to be agents of worth for much of anything, instead assigned by a mob to drop tasks we trained and dedicated ourselves to, and forced to take up tasks we may be unsuited for. There is a diverse world of simultaneous efforts taking place all the time if you bother to notice, and they can’t be just tossed overboard if the next generation is to inherit anything. So bug off and let me be as ethical in treating people as well as I can in my little corner, in real life, while I skip raging with my puny fist out in some random street.
But the day may come when not only our Facebooks are scrutinized, but our quiet works are held againt us.
We saw something similar, albeit at a much lower level of trying to wall off opposing points of view, half a century ago, in the 1968-72 time period. The angry left did not have the same control over the big media outlets they do today, but they did have the same certainty of their positions, and they they were already in the majority and the Wave of the Future, due in that case to the new wave of 18-to-21 year old voters who would assure America of a run of progressive leaders for the foreseeable future. It really took a 49-state loss by McGovern in ’72 to knock the far left side of the party off stride — in the summer of that year at the DNC Convention in Miami, the arrogance of their power caused them to not just banish all the Southern Democrats from having a say in the party platform, but also banish Richard Daley and anyone they saw allied with his Chicago machine, as payback for how the police handled the ’68 DNC riots.
Trump hatred, social media and the fracturing of media market share to the point the big media outlets don’t care about attracting a cross-section of viewers or readers anymore have fueled the current situation. But the base of it is the same as in 1972, as well as 1984 and to a lesser extent 2004, in that in the election after losing control of the White House since the modern primary system began, the Democrats always move left, not towards the middle, because the majority of their base is certain they lost the last election because their idiot candidate wasn’t progressive enough. Kerry ran to the left of where Al Gore ran in 2000, but after the McGovern and Mondale losses, they touted his Vietnam War status, in hopes of making people think his actions there were a good thing. Biden’s sort of in the same boat — not as far left as Bernie, but still running to the left of where Hillary was in 2016.