While my fearless friend Ann Coulter was braving fascist left wing violence at U.C. Berkeley, I was getting heckled at Oberlin. (You can watch my speech above.) Frankly, I was shocked that anyone would heckle a wonderful guy like myself. I felt like the young Russian soldier in War and Peace who sees the French army coming over the hill and thinks, “They want to kill me? Me, whom everyone loves?”
But while my journey into the heart of academic leftist darkness did not give me an opportunity to prove I have as much courage as a 100-pound blonde, it was instructive. I learned a lot about what cruel and destructive bullies leftist professors and administrators are. Here are five reasons I think so.
- Several of my young conservative hosts discussed the fact that, when taking tests or writing essays, they had to regurgitate leftist talking points in order to avoid getting low grades. This is a disgusting position for a mentor to put a young person in, especially a young man. The very essence of manhood is integrity: the courage to think and speak and act all as one. To have a young person in your charge and force him to violate his own principles in order to please you is disgraceful and deeply, deeply unkind.
- If you are an American going to Oberlin — or really any other U.S. college or university — you are one of the privileged few on earth. You have won the lottery of life. You are not oppressed. You are not a victim. In a world of concentration camps and beheadings, sanctioned rapes and wholesale slaughters, it is a sin for such a lucky child to think himself anything but blessed. He should be preparing to take advantage of his good fortune in order to build a life and make a contribution to the world. For an adult to train these fortunate children into grievance is to guide them into lies and unhappiness. Only a bitter failure or a sadist would do such a thing.
- Some of the hecklers who came to my speech seemed to me clearly mentally ill. Some of that mental illness expressed itself in gender dysphoria. For a putative grown-up to teach young people that their personal problems are political — that they feel bad not because of the tensions within them but because of their treatment by society — is to push them further and further away from self-knowledge and possible cure. It’s an obscene thing to do.
- Likewise, for an adult to teach any young person that he cannot be successful or happy until the world is free of prejudice or unkindness toward him is to cruelly soften his will to the point of paralysis. I don’t care what color or which sex you are, there are going to be people who hate you without reason. If you’re planning to spend your life putting an end to such hatred, you are planning to waste your life. What teacher would urge his student into such folly?
- At Oberlin, as at other educational facilities, there are segregated dorms — black dorms, Jewish dorms, Latin dorms, etc. These are supposed to be “safe spaces.” College should be a time when you leave the safety of your neighborhood and meet and live with all different kinds of people to find out how alike you are, and in what ways you are different. For adults to allow their charges to cower in fear of that broadening experience is to fail them utterly.
Observation shows and science confirms that a young person’s brain does not fully mature until age 25. Your college years should be years in which your mentors train you to integrity, reason, self-confidence and broad-mindedness. Instead, the bullying leftists of academia are betraying their charges for the purpose of imposing their political view.
Shame on them.
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