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Yale Student Says His ‘Entitled’ Colleagues Are Obsessed With Political Protests

Yale Student Says His ‘Entitled’ Colleagues Are Obsessed With Political Protests

“I call it Protester Derangement Syndrome, or PDS for short.”

Esteban Elizondo is a senior at Yale who believes his fellow students are consumed by their embrace of political protests.

He writes at the New York Post:

Entitled Yale students are sick with ‘protester derangement syndrome’

Sit-ins, hunger strikes and angry mobs: These are all things I became accustomed to in my late teens and early 20s. No, I haven’t been living in a country experiencing severe political unrest. I am living in New Haven, Conn., and attending Yale University as an undergrad.

While this may sound bizarre to you, behavior typical of a severely oppressed society has taken hold among students who are part of the Ivory Tower. I call it Protester Derangement Syndrome, or PDS for short.

Yale students enjoy luxuries akin to European aristocracy. Students live in resort-style housing that includes lavish feasts, massage parlors and recreational spaces that boast everything from a printing press to a pottery studio. However, Yale students afflicted with PDS display derangement symptoms similar to an oppressed religious cult. They refuse to interact with the world around them. They have demanded the buildings be renamed. They support the desecration of art. They sanitize history by demanding professors exclude certain authors from syllabi.

The Yale administration believes they can treat PDS through concessions and pacification. Unfortunately, their prescription has been ineffective. The disease has even spread to graduate students, who in 2017 held a “hunger strike” as part of their attempt to unionize.

For some background, graduate students receive a full-tuition scholarship, funding for their research, full health coverage and a minimum $31,800 “stipend” that goes up by year. That still was not enough. They decided their working conditions were so unbearable and their employer so hostile their only choice was to go on hunger strike. Except they ate anyway when they were hungry.

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Comments

I saw the same thing at Harvard 40 years ago, so it’s nothing new. The students at Harvard and Yale are among the most privileged children in the world. When they begin to realize that, many of them go deeply into the throes of White Liberal Guilt.

When a kid has a bad case of White Liberal Guilt, the only way he can feel better is to participate in protests to tell other people that they are worse than he is. This also leads to shaming other people, the cancel culture, and extreme political correctness.

These students don’t really care about the less privileged; in fact, they wouldn’t socialize with them, and they don’t want them in their school. They just want to feel good about themselves, and to stop feeling so guilty about being rich, spoiled, and privileged. So they protest and shame everyone else.

Grad students are also always being told that ‘conservatives’ (i.e. anyone opposed to the leftist agenda du jour) are all stupid, ignorant Yahoos, and who would ever want to be associated with one of those? So they all do as the rabble rousers tell them to, have very little confidence that they can really change anything (they can—and have!) and above all never realize that the ‘reforms’ they are proposing could ruin the very institutions that they expect to employ them for the rest of their lives.

Robert Frost once said that a liberal was someone so broad-minded he could take every side in an argument except his own. That about sums up most campus radicals.