Kevin D. Williamson

Fake hate crimes, like false rape accusations, now are a regular part of college life, and they serve the same purpose: a pretext for terrorizing unpopular individuals and organizations.

The hoaxers rarely if ever endure any serious punishment. Punishment is reserved for the innocent.

Or the mostly innocent. Given the low intellectual climate on George Washington’s campus, the Jewish student returning from a trip to India with a Hindu symbol of auspiciousness — the Sanskrit word is svastika — surely must have known what he might be stirring when he tacked it up on the bulletin board belonging to his Jewish fraternity. He has been expelled from the fraternity and banished from the campus, and probably will be expelled from the university. Compare that with the treatment of “Jackie,” the University of Virginia student whose manufactured tale of a brutal gang rape sent that campus into convulsions — nothing happened. The student who originally complained about the swastika retracted his complaint after learning that the iconography in question was Hindu rather than Nazi — that he’d assumed the wrong kind of Aryan — but none of that matters to university administrators. […]

You cannot not notice a swastika.

But that doesn’t mean that you must proceed as though you are too stupid to tell the difference between Nazi vandalism and something that is — let’s be clear here — not Nazi vandalism. But those are the wages of multiculturalism, which is a moral pose that has displaced the actual study of culture — and cult is the first word in culture, which is why the study of religious thinking and tradition is a necessary part of any liberal education. Part of the value of a liberal education is that it helps you to avoid doing stupid things, e.g. effectively criminalizing the display of an ancient religious symbol in an institution purportedly dedicated in some part to the study of the liberal arts. […]

It is impossible to imagine educating in that environment. No doubt GWU students wishing to study the works of Max Müller, the great Sanskrit scholar, would have to endure a raft of trigger warnings, sign a legal waiver, and produce a note from Mommy before being allowed to crack open the Upanishads.

George Washington University is a private school, and as such it ought to be allowed to expel students for whatever reason it likes — swastikas, Crocs, being this girl. But the public universities are, if anything, even more ruthless policemen of speech and thought than are their private counterparts. And the modern public university — which is simply a beery extension of the modern public kindergarten — is a sort of terrarium version of the utopia that our progressive friends are always promising us. It is public, but you are there at the sufferance of those who operate these intellectual veal-pens. For the Left, the citizen exists at the sufferance of the state, not the other way around. Free speech on campus, if it is to be tolerated at all, is restricted to First Amendment “zones” — as though there were not a First Amendment zone stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Say the wrong thing on a college campus and you will be threatened with state-sanctioned violence.

liberal fascism