Play-Doh. Coloring books. “Cry-in” events.
These are just a few of the responses on American college and university campuses to stunned students who are unable to cope with the result of the American presidential election.
Around the country, students are indulging in mass protests, sometimes violent, and outbursts of emotional hysteria, partially in response to encouragement by their professors.
At Cornell University, students held a “cry-in” to protest the results of the election and claimed to be “terrified.”
The University of Michigan Law School, ranked by U.S. News as the No. 8 law school in the country and where costs are more than $50,000 a year, placed on its website an advertisement for “Post-Election Self-Care With Food and Play.” It would have featured coloring books, blowing bubbles and using Play-Doh, but the event was canceled after it brought ridicule and mockery on the school.
President-elect Trump is a graduate of the prestigious Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Nonetheless, rather than celebrating Trump’s victory, the mood at UPenn was something akin to grief, with professors canceling classes and students calling in to report feeling sick. One dorm set up a “breathing space” for traumatized students to use coloring books and play with puppies to recover from the result. There was also a “solidarity walk” on campus to support “POC [‘People of Color’], immigrants, POWs, Muslims, Jews, Latinxs [the new politically correct wording for Latinos/Latinas], LGBTQ+, minorities, women disabled folks [sic], POWs [repeated], anyone and everyone who is affected and would be/will be affected by a Trump Presidency.”
In other cases, protests have been more violent. Students at American University in Washington, D.C., burned the American flag and engaged in vulgar chants against Trump. Faculty at Towson University in Maryland organized a “walk-out” culminating a tense confrontation with a lone Trump supporter and obscenity-laden threats of violence. The watchdog organization Campus Progress documented dozens of universities around the country where canceled classes, raucous student protests and “safe spaces” plans were promoted or where students weren’t allowed to talk about election results .
It’s a curious combination of militancy and weakness, threats combined with begging. But an expert on campus radicalism argues there is an entire system underlying these absurd tactics.
“In order to win an argument in this moral system, one must be a victim,” said Scott Greer, deputy editor at the Daily Caller and author of the upcoming book “No Campus for White Men: The Transformation of Higher Education into Hateful Indoctrination.”
“Students are reacting in such a childish manner due to the dictates of victimhood culture. Thus, we are seeing young adults return to toddlerhood to claim Trump’s victory is a legitimate crime against their security.”
Greer suggested that in the topsy-turvy vision of morality championed by the campus left, obtaining the status of “victim” gives people more power to shut down viewpoints they don’t like. Thus, college students create increasingly elaborate rationalizations, insisting they are part of the “oppressed class” even when they are highly pampered, wealthy students at elite American universities who in some cases receive special privileges through affirmative action. The tactic also allows left- wing students to threaten or even use violence while maintaining they are the ones under threat.
“Cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy are dominant traits among the campus left,” Greer said. “Victimhood gives them the power to lash out at their enemies and make bold threats. It protects them from the repercussions, and they can just say they acted aggressively out of fear as an oppressed person.”
Even voting for Trump can be taken as evidence of “aggression” against the “oppressed” in certain circles. The mantra “your vote [for Trump] was a hate crime” has been spray-painted on monuments and used on protest signs since the election. The concept that a vote for Trump was a “hate crime” is even being intellectually defended at far-left websites such as the Huffington Post.
When did colleges go insane? Why is it so hard to be a conservative in higher education? And why are pampered, wealthy students so eager to pretend they are oppressed? Up-and-coming conservative superstar Scott Greer rips off the mask of higher education in the controversial can’t miss book “No Campus for White Men.” Preorder it NOW at the WND Superstore.
Such a narrative is also widely accepted on college campuses. One student at Converse College was kicked out of class for disagreeing with her professor’s comparison of Trump’s election to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
In many of these protests, rage against Trump is coupled with demands for more campus “diversity officers” and other set-asides, which critics contend raise costs and don’t actually help educate minority students. However, the funding and set-asides allow left-wing activists to further push multiculturalism on campus and more effectively forward their political agenda.
Greer alleges that what is driving the hysteria on campus is a form of left-wing identity politics in which conservatism is equated to “whiteness.” “Whiteness” is viewed as inherently evil and threatening.
“They see Trumpism as synonymous with ‘white male bigotry,’ and they blame this terrible event, the election of Donald Trump, on all of White America,” said Greer. “Note how everyone who says they are afraid right now precedes their statement with an assertion of their identity. ‘I am a transgender Latino and I fear for my life.’ None of these folks are saying they are afraid as white males — they all assert their status as a minority, which apparently includes white females as well.”
Greer suggests what is needed is not outreach to these protesters but ridicule.
“We need full-on mockery,” he stated. “And we need to see a real effort to defund the schools that coddle these inane outbursts. President Trump should use the Department of Education and the Republican Congress to browbeat schools into getting a backbone and stop allowing for the domination of minority identity politics.”
The protests may just be getting started. On Wednesday, college students around the country participated in a “walkout” to protest Trump’s plans to deport illegal immigrants. They demanded colleges and universities become “sanctuaries” in which illegal immigrants receive immunity from law enforcement.
And Greer argued conservatives should not deceive themselves about what is occurring. He charged the conservative movement fundamentally misunderstands how the campus left operates and what truly motivates it.
“There’s an unwillingness to see the minority identity politics and anti-white racism at work,” said Greer of movement conservatives. “They’d rather see it just as a lack of respect for ‘free speech’ and a negative result of ‘helicopter parenting.’ But there’s something more, and it shouldn’t be underestimated.”
When did colleges go insane? Why is it so hard to be a conservative in higher education? And why are pampered, wealthy college students so eager to pretend they are oppressed? Up-and-coming conservative superstar Scott Greer rips off the mask of higher education in the controversial can’t miss book “No Campus for White Men.” Preorder it NOW at the WND Superstore.
