LIBERAL BULLYING ON CAMPUS: A CASE STUDY
Not all liberals are bullies, but a great many are. Where liberals are in the majority, the bullies among them try to make life miserable for those who fail to conform. Almost every college campus is in this category. A case in point, one of many, is St. Olaf College, where my youngest daughter is a sophomore. The college newspaper has a commendably balanced story on the intolerance that prevails there:
Of the 12 students interviewed by the Manitou Messenger, several have been violently threatened because of their political beliefs, and almost all of them feel as though they can’t speak up about politics on campus – in class, online or with their friends.
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Reagan Lundstrom Warner ’20 is a political science major who has “learned how to keep [her] mouth shut.” While faculty are encouraged to remain unbiased, she said that one of her professors used class time to expound upon personal views.“[A professor] started every class with basically just ridiculing Trump for about 20 minutes,” Lundstrom Warner said. She plans to transfer to St. Thomas University next fall.
St. Olaf is an expensive school. Do parents know that they are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars so that their children can be subjected to irrelevant political tirades?
My daughter was among those who were threatened with violence:
Many conservative students felt that the campus became more hostile during election season, and some students received violent threats. On the night of the election, a student in the Pause threatened to beat up [College Republican President Emily] Schaller, calling her a “f***ing moron.” Over the next couple of days, she overheard multiple students threaten to hurt the next conservative or Republican they saw. Vice President of St. Olaf College Republicans Kathryn Hinderaker ’19 had a similar experience.“I think one of the hardest things was, the second day, I went into Buntrock and someone yelled from the bottom, ‘if you voted for Trump, you better be f***ing scared.’ Everyone clapped and applauded,” Hinderaker said. “Obviously, it didn’t feel super safe.”
Facebook was another venue for threats against those suspected of voting for Donald Trump:
[Former student Katie] Ivance noted that the insults continued on social media.“People were saying [things] like ‘F-you’ and ‘I wish you were dead,’” she said. Ivance isn’t the only one who has faced harassment online due to political beliefs. On Feb. 18, a student posted an unsolicited photo of a group of students that supposedly included Trump supporters and encouraged fellow students to “remember their faces.”Ivance transferred to the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities after the fall semester, citing harassment as her primary reason for transferring.
Schools cannot continue to permit this level of harassment and discrimination against non-left wing students. Public universities will not be supported by legislatures, and private colleges will not be supported by donors and parents, if the situation persists.
It is striking that this borderline fascist behavior by Democrats is occurring precisely as the Democratic Party slides toward irrelevance. Democrats try to enforce the view that voting for Donald Trump is beyond the pale, but Trump won the election. It is not as though Republicans are members of some obscure splinter faction. They control the presidency, both houses of Congress, thirty governorships and two-thirds of state legislative bodies.
Democrats are at a historically low ebb. You might think that this would cause liberals to re-examine their premises rather than try to bully others into submission. But thinking is not what liberals are best known for.
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