Campus Activists Are More Radical—and Troubled—than You Think

When only victimhood confers moral authority, ‘victims’ rule the roost, often violently.

David French

Americans have become accustomed to student activism. Progressive Boomer parents and grandparents fondly remember their days in the quad, protesting the Vietnam War. My generation’s liberal activists built their anti-apartheid shantytowns and rallied for more faculty diversity. Hollywood and mainstream historians have whitewashed these movements, emphasizing their idealism, overlooking their violence and oppression, and proclaiming student protest as a virtual rite of passage for the good American citizen.........

 

Campus radicals hold a shared vision that has the potential to rip this nation to shreds. It’s a vision instigated by people with impossible demands who combine towering self-righteousness, mental instability, and bizarre utopianism to create a recipe for endless conflict. Indeed, their vision is not only immune to reason, it rejects reason entirely...... the more mentally unstable the person and the more unrealistic his demands, the more moral authority he has.......

 

When political activism is so intimately connected to subjective, moment-by-moment psychological well-being, conflict is eternal. There is literally nothing that anyone can do to permanently remove human pain, especially the pain of people who are already mentally troubled.........Read more