Kerby Anderson

Campus riots and protests have been successful in canceling or interrupting speeches by Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, Heather MacDonald, David Horowitz, and Ann Coulter. As we get closer to commencement proceedings, other speakers will be disinvited because of the fear of violence. This will continue until rioters are prosecuted and students who engage in violence are expelled.

The common explanation for this behavior on campus is that the millennial generation is the “snowflake generation.” While that may be true in some aspects, those rioting on the campus hardly look like meek snowflakes. They are very aggressive in their words and behavior.

Heather MacDonald has experienced these campus protests and believes that we have misdiagnosed the problem. An article in a 2015 issue of the Atlantic on The Coddling of the American Mind blames the problem on parenting. But she asks that if “risk-adverse child-rearing is the source of the problem, why aren’t heterosexual white males demanding safe spaces?” They had the same sort of parents.

She persuasively argues that the problem is not psychological but ideological. Campus intolerance has surfaced because of decades of teaching that Western culture is racist, sexist, and the primary reason for so many evils in society. Read some of the blog posts and letters from students protesting her. They reject the idea of a single truth, and believe that promoting Western values are merely a veiled attempt to oppress them.

That explains why one student writing in the U.C. Berkeley campus newspaper justified the riots. He explained, “I can only fight tooth and nail for the right to exist.” Another justified his actions by saying they were “not acts of violence. They were acts of self defense.”

Campus riots will continue not because students are snowflakes but because they are Western cultural opponents.