Conservatives' campus con job

Hey liberals: Stop falling for this scam

Students protest a Richard Spencer speech at the University of Florida.
(Image credit: Brian Blanco/Getty Images)

Conservatives and centrist liberals have dedicated an incomprehensible amount of time and attention to the politics of elite college campuses over the past few years. Whenever some angry lefty kids protest an inflammatory conservative speaker, there is a paroxysm of outrage from people like David Brooks, Andrew Sullivan, Joe Scarborough, Bari Weiss, Jonathan Chait, and many others. Most recently, a few minutes of a handful of Lewis and Clark Law School students heckling Christina Hoff Sommers before she gave a speech inspired two full columns in The New York Times lamenting the death of liberalism in the West.

There is a great deal to be said about this phenomenon — from the extremely slipshod way in which key terms like "trigger warning" or "safe space" are defined, to the lack of attention to nationwide data, to the ignoring of instances in which BDS activists, anti-Trump inauguration demonstrators (some 59 of which are still facing serious jail time on a trumped-up riot charge), or minority academics have had their speech much more severely suppressed.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.