Prior to reading this article, I already decided I don't care about these college protests. I find them stupid and wrong, but I also believe they will not have long term negative influence on college culture. There's always going to be a few crazy people in every crowd, that's not evidence society will be destroyed. It's like South Park said, 1 out of every 4 Americans is retarded.
So, in that sense, Sargent has a point. This is behavior we can pretty much expect from college students, and shouldn't be overly threatened by. The media does tend to focus a lot on out of control kids. It's an old media narrative which will not go away any time soon. I'm ashamed to admit I have never heard of the
example Sargent posted in the thread, and he is correct about it being a more serious threat to free speech. It's not getting as much media attention because it's not an out of control craaaaazy millennial who's responsible for the crime. I also had no idea
this was a problem.
As an example of media bullshit, for this post, I tried to find the story of the girl who got fired for being mean to Black Lives Matter. Instead, I found out
she wasn't actually fired. Something is wrong when the media covers college students being annoying more than they cover protestors being
murdered.
Now, here's where I differ from Sargent. I think these protests are crazy, even if they are not as big of a threat as the media has been acting like. Sargent seems to think they are not crazy.
All I'm saying is that if you disagree with the protesters, it's really lame to pretend that it's over a "free speech" issue. Because what's actually going on here is that a largely powerless group (young minorities and women) are using the First Amendment to try to raise awareness of the problems they're facing, and our response is to shout at them to shut up and say they threaten our way of life. Which is, frankly, how people always respond when a new group tries to ask for equality, respect, and justice. And that's actually the point, because ...
Ugh. Really, Sargent, we aren't "pretending" it's a free speech issue. I think college kids trying to shut people up is actually a free speech issue. I also don't think either minorities or women are "largely powerless." Especially if they are privileged enough to be attending real colleges. Minorities and women have relatively less power compared to white dudes, but we're not a bunch of perpetual victims. It's completely fucking insane to form a hate mob over an email about Halloween costumes and no amount of comparing this to the god damn civil rights movement will change that.