Campus Skirmishes in the Culture War

Skirmishes in the Culture War have broken out at Yale University and the University of Missouri at Columbia, and the intolerant neo-fascist protestors are winning.  They're reminiscent of the Red Guard student thugs in China some years ago.

Mario Loyola writes about these developments, and the apologetic show trials that result:  "To submit to tyranny — to offer groveling apologies like the university officials have done at New Haven and Columbia, like dissidents making forced confessions in Stalinist show trials — is not only grotesque and shameful, it contributes to the problem."  Link

At Yale, a liberal teacher was surrounded on campus by a threatening student mob and yelled at by the now-infamous Yale Screaming Girl when, breaking with liberal orthodoxy, he had the temerity to defend the principle of freedom of expression in choosing Halloween costumes.  He quickly folded and has issued a groveling apology.  James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal commented on the story and in closing quoted an apposite passage from 1984, Orwell's novel of a dystopian future:  “But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”  Link

R Balsamo