In the days since the Hamas attack on southern Israel, Americans have seen that something is deeply wrong at our elite universities. As most of us watched in horror as terrorists kidnapped children, live-streamed the murders of old people on their Facebook pages and slaughtered young people at a music festival, students at our finest colleges blamed the victim and marched for the aggressors.
The question is how did we get here? And the answer is slowly and then all at once.
The conversations on campuses for the last few years centered around feelings. "Words are violence" but now it turns out actual violence can easily be excused and dismissed when the victim isn’t in the correct "oppressed" class.
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This vile, and intellectually bankrupt, philosophy has informed everything happening on our campuses. Students were forced to walk a very narrow philosophical line where all of their opinions had to fit in with the campus left-or else.
The bullying from these leftist authoritarians was irrational and deeply harmful. Morgan Bettinger was expelled from the University of Virginia because she was accused by leftist activist Zyahna Bryant of saying that the Black Lives Matters protesters would make good speed bumps. There was zero evidence that Bettinger had said such a thing but it didn’t matter. She was out.
Bryant went on to get hired for an ad campaign for Dove brand products. Casually destroying a classmate’s life was lucrative.
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This is the way it went for a long time. The left was in charge of how people spoke and the repercussions they faced for it. Cancel culture was a good thing to them. They called "consequence culture."
It didn’t even have to be kids yet in college. When the Covington high school boys wore their Make America Great hats in Washington, DC or when conservative Parkland student Kyle Kashuv was accused of using the n-word when he was 15, the repercussions were swift and unchallenged. The Covington boys had to sue to recover their reputations. Kashuv lost his acceptance offer from Harvard. The left set the rules and the rest of us abided by them.
Now those rules will be applied to them as well. Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman saw the letter from Harvard student groups blaming Israelis for their own slaughter and took the step of asking Harvard to release a list of members of each of the organizations that signed the letter.
He tweeted "I have been asked by a number of CEOs if @harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas’ heinous acts to Israel, so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members." A dozen other CEOs joined his cause, noting that they too did not want to hire anyone making excuses for terrorists.
Suddenly, to those on the left, college students were children again and words were just words. The demanded the same grace that had never been offered to the students who found themselves on the wrong side of the leftist cancel mob was now being demanded by the students and their defenders.
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Ryna Workman, president of NYU’s Student Bar Association, posted about the massacre of civilians "Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life" and had her job offer rescinded by the law firm Winston&Strawn.
Workman isn’t sorry for accusing the murdered of being the cause of their own demise. She has continued to defend what she said.
"I thought you were for freedom of speech!" cry the people targeted by the very cancel culture they created. We’re supposed to forget that schools gave up on the idea of countering speech with more speech.
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They canceled conservative speakers, they allowed the kids to target their political enemies for firing or general life destruction and now we’re supposed to take it easy on the very bullies that sullied our culture with their totalitarian methods.
No, mutually assured destruction is the only way forward. Consequence culture, you say? Let’s see some.
A great lesson of college is to think before you speak and consider the repercussions of emotional outbursts.
That lesson should now get taught far and wide.
