They came wearing Uggs.
The incipient fascists of the campuses are on the march from University of Missouri to Amherst College to Smith College to Claremont McKenna College. Their communist allies are on the march at universities across America, demanding that others pay for their tuition. If this is America’s future, as Ronald Reagan once told student protesters, I’ll sell my bonds.
The kiddie Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is in full swing. One the one hand, we’ve got the Pantywaist Fascists too timid to handle “microaggressions” but just aggressive enough to call the cops for hurt feelings, the racists who ban white students from their “safe spaces,” and their weak-kneed allies calling for “muscle” against reporters. On the other, we’ve got the intellectual flotsam of the Occupy Wall Street movement, insisting that the one-percenters at the banks that grant loans now hand that money over for free so that they can use it for their vital degree in gender studies and their concentration in lesbian dance theory.
What does this alliance of radicals fight for? Let’s take a look at their program.
Dismissing Evidence As A Standard For Racism. The University of Missouri race conflagration began as a poop-swastika Reichstag Fire. The original complaints of the students were based on four incidents. First, the student government president, Payton Head, who is black, claimed that he’d been called the n-word by a group of men in a pickup truck. No police report was ever filed. Head recently claimed that the KKK had been seen on campus as well. He had to retract that one.
Then, a group of black students said a drunk white guy called them the n-word. They reported the incident to police, and the university took all necessary steps to investigate and prosecute. After that, reports emerged of a poop swastika in one of the dorms; again, the university fully investigated, and according to police reports and administration emails, the prime suspect is a fellow who uses anti-Semitic slurs and called a white kid “bitch ass nigga.” Finally, black student hunger striker Jonathan Butler claimed that the president of the university, Tim Wolfe, allowed his driver to hit Butler with his car during an attempted shutdown of the homecoming parade. Video shows that Butler rushed directly toward the car (Butler, by the way, is filthy rich).
Based on this utterly non-existent evidence of systemic racism, the Mizzou students got Tim Wolfe fired.
It’s not just at Mizzou. At Claremont McKenna College, the dean of students was forced to step down after writing an email to protesters sympathizing with their concerns – she wrote that protester concerns were important and “we are working on how we can better serve students, especially those that don’t fit our CMC mold.” This is not racism. Nonetheless, this “microaggression” meant somebody had to lose her job. At Amherst, students want the president to apologize for “injustices including but not limited to our institutional legacy of white supremacy, colonialism, anti-black racism, anti-Latinx racism, anti-Native American racism, anti-Native/ indigenous racism, anti-Asian racism, anti-Middle Eastern racism, heterosexism, cis-sexism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, mental health stigma, and classism. Also include that marginalized communities and their allies should feel safe at Amherst College.” No evidence of systemic approval of such acts has ever been documented.
Open Racism Against White Cisgender Males. The calls of “white privilege” come fast and furious from the college protesters. “White privilege,” of course, means “shut the hell up if you disagree with our agenda.” And that’s precisely how it’s been used. At Mizzou, anti-racism protesters insist that they be given racially exclusive “safe spaces.” At Cornell, a black student group cancelled an event backing their cause when they found out that white people would be coming–and that the event had been planned by a white student. If you object to any of these things, you obviously are a racist. The only solution: non-Asian ethnic minorities must be placed in positions of power across the country, regardless of qualification. As Concerned Students 1950 demanded, white administrators must admit their “white privilege,” and all future president and chancellor positions must be “selected by a collective of students, staff, and faculty of diverse backgrounds.”
An End to Freedom of Speech. Mizzou Student Association vice president Brenda Smith-Lezama summed up the perspective of the Pantywaist Fascists beautifully when she explained that the First Amendment had to go to make room for “safe spaces.” She explained to MSNBC host Thomas Roberts:
I personally am tired of hearing that First Amendment rights protect students when they are creating a hostile and unsafe learning environment for myself and for other students here. I think that it’s important for us to create that distinction and create a space where we can all learn from one another and start to create a place of healing rather than a place where we are experiencing a lot of hate like we have in the past.
She’s not alone. At Claremont McKenna, an Asian woman who said she had been racially harassed by a black man was shouted down by black protesters. One protester explained, “we don’t want a center for free speech meant too educate white students. We want a center that supports marginalized students first and foremost.” At Amherst, students demand “President Martin must issue a statement to the Amherst College community at large that states we do not tolerate the actions of student(s) who posted the ‘All Lives Matter’ and ‘Free Speech’ posters.” Furthermore, they want Martin to issue “a statement of support for the revision of the Honor Code to reflect a zero-tolerance policy for racial insensitivity and hate speech.”
Unity of the Dispossessed. It’s not just radical black students and their allies making common cause to tear down pillar institutions of American civilization. Other members of supposedly dispossessed groups are joining forces – particularly dispossessed forces that hate Jews. The Students for Justice in Palestine, for example, attempted to target the City University of New York Hunter College administration, blaming high tuition on the “Zionist administration” which “invests in Israeli companies, companies that support the Israeli occupation… and reproduces settler-colonial ideology throughout CUNY thorugh Zionist content of education.” SJP has also joined protests at campuses including UC Berkeley, somehow attempting to link their perverse boycott, divest, sanctions against Israel movement with the broader Marxist-Pantywaist Fascist alliance.
The Rewriting of Curricula to Fit Multicultural Narratives. At USC, students recently passed a resolution calling for $100 million in funding for “diversity” education; the original proposal would have called for mandatory “critical race theory and queer theory,” deconstructionist rewritings of history to meet multicultural demands. The Mizzou students want “comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum throughout all campus departments and units, mandatory for all students, faculty, staff and administration.” At Claremont McKenna, the students wanted all faculty forced to take diversity classes, and “more diverse course offerings for critical race theory, community engagement, and social justice issues.” The same holds true at Yale, where students demand that all undergraduates face the rigors of an ethnic students distributional requirement. The Yale students also want a monument on campus to demonstrate that Yale was built on “stolen indigenous land.” As the students at Ithaca shouted, “how can a campus dedicated to preparing us for the real world not actively foster growth to our consciousness of oppression and privilege?” The answer, of course, is that the real world don’t give two good bowel movements about your consciousness of oppression and privilege. But that’s not the point. The point is tyranny.
An End to All Behavioral and Academic Standards. At Amherst, students demanded that the dean ask “faculty to excuse all students from all 5 college classes, work shifts, and assignments” during their protest, and also “encourage faculty to provide a space for students to discuss this week’s events during class time.” At Mizzou, a professor quit after he refused to cancel exams to cater to the whims of these puerile children. And all the students want standards lowered so that more ethnic minorities are admitted at higher rates.
Free S***. The Frankfurt School suggested that since Marxism had failed, Western institutions could be converted to Marxism through racial polarization, among other tactics. That strategy has borne fruit in the joinder of the Pantywaist Fascists with Generation CCCP. The Million Student March may not know where money will come from to fund their education, and they may not know where jobs will come from after they complete their degrees in Professional Uselessness Training. But they will demand free things from everyone, all the time. The merger of the racial radicals and the Marxists comes in the form of their favorite slogan: “Education is a right, not just for the rich and white.”
They shouldn’t worry too much. No one is apparently receiving an education on campus, except for the Neville Chamberlains of the administration who keep bargaining with the alligator, hoping it will eat them last.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, and The New York Times bestselling author, most recently, of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.