An optimist might be tempted to believe that leftists at America’s universities have discovered a secret weapon to defeat Islamic terrorism. After watching news reports of liberal students crying and having to be consoled by puppies and coloring books after losing the 2016 election, thousands of jihadists probably just laughed themselves to death. One can’t help but imagine the hysterical laughter during small-arms training at a terrorist camp when the instructor shows a CNN clip of the campus revolt and says, “I got your trigger warning right here.”
If the metrosexual college kids we’re seeing on news reports are representative of what the next generation has to offer, weapons of mass destruction will not be needed to bring down the Great Satan. A loud “boo” will probably send these snowflakes scampering for their safe spaces. And this from a nation that once produced the twenty-somethings who flew B-17 bombers through fields of flak and enemy fighters over Nazi Germany.
In explaining the Snowflake Revolution on campus, the news media squelched any hope that they learned a lesson from the country butt-whipping they just took from the voters. (In a country butt-whipping, as opposed to a regular whipping, a lecture accompanies the whipping, as in, “We’ve told you and told you to stop lying to us!”) But here they go again. This time, their narrative is that the protests on college campuses and in America’s city streets are caused, not by liberal intolerance of any ideas other than their own, but by President-elect Trump’s dangerous views. For example, in her “60 Minutes” interview with the president-elect, Lesley Stahl offered with a straight face the view that the demonstrators are simply “afraid” of Trump and the people who voted for him.
What we’re seeing in the post-election protests, they would have us believe, is frightened people standing up for their rights and those of the downtrodden. Following that line of thought, what the frightened leftists need is not to grow up and live in the real world but reassurance, consolation and – wait for it – policy concessions by the incoming administration!
Middle America is not buying it. We understand that what we’re seeing on our college campuses is essentially a tantrum by leftists who have been convinced of their moral superiority and, hence, their entitlement to rule over the rest of us. Speech codes, trigger warnings, and safe spaces are all monuments to the smug self-righteousness of campus leftists who preach diversity and tolerance while suppressing any ideas that challenge their own. And mainstream America finally decided to send a message to the ruling class, from the ivy-covered halls of the universities to the halls of power in Washington. That message is pretty simple for anyone willing to hear it: “You’ve had your say for years. Now shut up and listen.”
But in the ideological bubble in which these students live, the possibility that 60 million mainstream Americans might have legitimate concerns about open borders, crony capitalism, different rules for the rich and powerful, and multiculturalism-at-all-costs does not even merit consideration.
Irritating though it may be to be lectured by the Snowflake Brigades, however, there is one sense in which the campus leftists truly are victims. No, they are not victims of President-elect Trump and his alleged xenophobia and intolerance. They are victims of an educational system that is more concerned with ideological indoctrination than with teaching America’s youth to think critically. They are victims of a system that has institutionalized the toxic mix of narrow-mindedness and arrogance. And in a very real sense, they will soon become victims of the very worldview that they are parroting. In being taught that the world should offer safe spaces, coloring books, and puppies when they don’t get their way, these students are heading for a hard encounter with the world as it really is, a world for which they are dangerously unprepared.
Leftist intellectuals, from the so-called Progressive movement to the Cultural Marxists, long ago targeted our educational system as a prime target in their “long march” through the cultural institutions. They understood that controlling the minds a nation’s youth was the easiest path to eventually controlling the government. Under the banner of First Amendment protections on speech, the left claimed protection for left-wing professors, no matter how radical their views. That is fair enough in an open marketplace of ideas. But then, under the banner of tolerance, these left-wing professors gradually harassed and suppressed other views until the marketplace of ideas became a monopoly.
Not only have these students been deprived of the benefits of lively argument based in evidence and reason instead of emotion and attitude, but they – or at least their parents – are often paying top dollar for the experience. And they will continue to pay as they enter a world that does not play by the rules of the liberal campus.
The Snowflake Brigades are indeed getting screwed over, but not by Donald Trump.