Veering Right

I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. In the late sixties and early seventies, I watched the culture change. I can remember seeing smoke from the fires set on the university campus. I recall the vans full of hippies loading and unloading on The Hill. Some of them were students. Some of them weren't. It was a time during which the way we learned shifted from being primarily a classroom based activity to the world around us.
Outside those ivory towers, across the country, young people were questioning authority in ways that had not been done before. Rather than banding together to start scrap drives or volunteer at the USO dance, students marched in the streets. They pushed for change in social, political and economic arenas that had been only hypothetical discussions in class a decade before. Liberal bastions were created in places where these flowers blossomed. College campuses became places where ideas could grow and our country could evolve as a result.
This was true for quite some time. Nearly fifty years. Now the phrase "Campus Republicans" isn't just a punchline. There are voices being raised as a pendulum swing to all that left wing claptrap. Somehow the push back is coming from a conservative place that many might have believed had disappeared. Donald Trump Jr. has been taking his book tour on the road, visiting colleges along the way, When he showed up at the University of California at Los Angeles last week, he was booed off the stage. Not by the libs he came "to own," but by conservatives who believe his daddy is not tough enough on the "snowflakes." Triggered, indeed.
Meanwhile, on campuses across the country, incidents of racism, sexism and homophobia are on the rise. Syracuse University just announced a one million dollar plan to curb racism after a white supremacist manifesto was dropped into students' phones overnight. Nazis have become the oppressed in this weird scenario, and their suffering has become the new talking point for those who live in a world where ideas, no matter how inane, are allowed air and a place to thrive. Ridiculously far right voices like Milo Yiannopolis and Gavin McInnes complain that they are being silenced. By college pukes. Whatever happened to the Free Speech Movement, anyway?
There's no such thing as a free lunch, either.