Kevin D. Williamson:
The Red Guards were the terrorist vanguard, mainly teenagers and people in their 20s, who helped Mao Tse-Tung execute the Cultural Revolution. Their first skirmishes were waged against the administrations of Tsinghua University and Peking University, which they accused of being blind to what we may as well go ahead and call “privilege,” though the language of the time was probably closer to “elitism” and “bourgeois” tendencies. They were fond of public-criticism sessions and reeducation programs, and the movement they helped launch would eventually persecute tens of millions of people and murder a million and a half. Among those were 23,000 members of minority groups, beaten to death after being judged insufficiently committed to the prevalent ideas of social justice based on their ethnic background.
The idiot children running amok on our college campuses right now aren’t exactly the Red Guards — they’re far too weak and wishy-washy for that. Call them the Pink Guards.
The Pink Guards have declared war on freedom of speech, demanding official retribution against those expressing even such innocuous sentiments as “all lives matter.” Indeed, they have declared complaints about the suppression of free speech to be a form of speech that must be suppressed, with students at the University of Missouri, the nation’s 103rd most prestigious institution of higher learning, demanding that students responsible for such counterrevolutionary activities be sent to reeducation camps (“required to attend extensive training for racial and cultural competency”). Protesters at Dartmouth physically assaulted students trying to study in the library and denounced them as “filthy white f***s.” At the University of Missouri, Professor Melissa Click physically assaulted a student journalist filming in a public space, and the university, which is run by feckless cowards, has taken no action against her.
The obvious thing that university administrations should be doing — and the one thing they will not do — is to expel these students and take out restraining orders banning them from campus. College campuses are places of learning, and universities have the right to impose reasonable standards of conduct. Whatever you believe “reasonable standards of conduct” to be, surely they exclude criminal assault and the actual disruption of academic activity. If the universities cannot draw even that line in the sand, then the public ones should simply be defunded and shut down as useless.
It isn’t just the universities, of course. In the summer of 2014 Senator Harry Reid led Senate Democrats in voting to repeal the First Amendment so that the power of the state could be used to suppress political speech they find inconvenient, up to and including locking up those who refuse to play by Democrats’ debate rules. In the state of New York, the office of Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is attempting to prosecute Exxon for believing and saying the wrong things about global warming, and for providing financial support to groups that oppose policies such as the Kyoto protocols. That is part of a long campaign by the Left, from imbecilic writers for Gawker to tenured professors to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to criminalize disagreement about global warming.
These white students REAL crime was pushing up the grading curve by, omg!!!!, STUDYING!
When we ran a business looking at a prospective employees college education was becoming less and less a guarantee that they ”knew how to learn.”
Throw that test out the window!
No doubt, the chanting thugs got extra credit for their “service”. Is it any wonder that most of what colleges produce to day is indoctrinated stupidity?