Trigger Warning: “BACK IN MY DAY” rant in 3…2…
I don’t harbor many memories from undergrad that are related to social justice or student protests. At one point, one guy (it was the mid-oughts, so we can assume he was one of three hippies at Purdue University) went on a hunger strike, but I can’t for the life of me remember why; all I remember is walking by his little encampment on the way to class and racking my brain for the reason why this person was slowly starving himself. It wasn’t a very effective protest.
We had the usual pro-life vs. pro-choice protesters, and a campus crier (I refuse to call him a “pastor”), and at one point a sizable demonstration popped up against a panel discussion featuring Cindy Sheehan, but nothing particularly noteworthy happened.
Oh, how the times have changed. The uproar coming from Mizzou, Amherst, UT-Austin, and other campuses across America has devolved into full-fledged lunacy. Students fed up with real and perceived microaggressions, macroaggressions, poop swastikas (both real and imagined), and racially-motivated sideeye glances are demanding action on the part of their universities.
Some enterprising individual collected those demands all in one place.
Some are longer and more detailed than others, but just about all of them contain demands for various politically correct and socially acceptable band-aids they claim will put an end to racism in America—or at least repress speech and actions that could be construed as racism…or something like it…arguably.
Most of these statements beat around the bush when it comes to speech repression and blatant race preference. The Black Liberation Collective, however, which is one of the organizations behind the nationwide student protest movement, gets right to the point: they want affirmative action, they want it for free, and they know how to pay for it:
This is what we should really be paying attention to, by the way—a scan of the Collective’s beliefs statement reveals that the group both rejects capitalism and advocates for the complete dismantling of our current state structure.
What we’re seeing here isn’t the product of a legitimate desire to address a discrete problem; this is a coordinated effort to tear down and rebuild in the image of a movement that is anti-capitalist, anti-speech, and fundamentally anti-equality.
More than just the careers of university officials are at stake. With every protest, demand, and hashtag campaign, these activists are broadening the definitions of “racism” and “hate speech” to include things we never knew were hateful until a sophomore with an eggshell ego declared them to be so. They’re moving the goalposts, which ensures both a continuation of this mad culture of victimization, and the future relevancy of “advocacy groups” hell-bent on recreating academia in the cowardly image of whatever rank SJW coined the term “safe space.”
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