Winter is over, but the snowflakes still swirl and dance across the US.
This is particularly noticeable in California, where the lefties at the University of California, Merced (located just east of San Jose and San Francisco, in case you want to visit and see these creatures in their natural habitat) are up in arms over a recent protest by College Republicans.
As strange as it might appear, the superficial issue is immigration, so let’s start there.
As Liz Wolfe reports for Reason, during the first week of March, the Merced College Republicans staged an ad campaign for their group featuring hand-held signs reading “I.C.E., I.C.E., Baby” and, in some cases, listing the phone number of the Immigration Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE).
This prompted a response from the college administrators.
The officials condemned the group's "bigoted and hateful" tactics but reminded students that ‘as nasty as the club's signs were, they are protected by the First Amendment.’
So signs (i.e. free speech) that supported tighter immigration policies and the enforcement of current immigration law are, according to the administration, “bigoted and hateful.”
Now, I happen to disagree with most “strong-on-immigration-enforcement” folks, for reasons stemming from my moral opposition to all forms of government and due to a strict reading of the Constitution (which does not mention immigration as a federal power). But how is calling for enforcement of the immigration laws “bigoted and hateful”?
Even after the PC administration stuck its proverbial head into the lion’s den, the college lefties weren’t satisfied. As Ms. Wolfe reports:
When the student legislature got wind of this, it released a statement saying it ‘would like to apologize to the student body for not taking a definitive stance against the violent actions from the College Republicans sooner.’ It continued: ‘Members of the senate believe that we should not tolerate or support any individual or organization that perpetuates hate speech on our campus. Direct endangerment of any kind should be condemned on this campus.’
Violent?
Posting of the number is not a direct act to endanger any illegal immigrant at the hands of ICE, and it is not an encouragement to call ICE. The statement from the student legislature appears to label the "I.C.E., I.C.E." posters as literal acts of hate and “direct endangerment”, which is a fraudulent and very dangerous way to describe what the College Republicans did.
And the student politicians are taking it a step further. Seeing the Inter-Club Council grant funding to the evil College Republicans to attend a state confab of like-minded students elsewhere in CA, the college legislature has called for the financial by-laws to be changed. They want:
…financial bylaw changes that will prohibit student fees from funding partisan organizations on campus…
Which presents the much, much larger issue.
This is not just a case of disagreeing about immigration. It’s not even solely about leftists crushing free speech. By now, we all recognize the tawdry and tiresome progressive practice of crushing free speech and inclusiveness in the name of free speech and inclusiveness. That tactic itself is a byproduct of toxic postmodernism, whereby leftists for generations have taken it onto themselves to define the meaning of what others say, write, or think, allowing the leftists to demonize and stifle any opinion that might offer political dissent.
The amazing thing about UC Merced is that this agitated student legislature is so up in arms over voluntarily paid student funds being used to promote any political group on campus, yet they say not a word about the overall public school system in CA. While they agitate about this “problem,” the entire paradigm of the taxpayer-funded, state-run college system is completely lost. This giant cesspool of government force goes overlooked, while they prance about, angrily pronouncing that their funds shouldn’t go towards political causes.
Wake up, kids. This is precisely what your vaunted state-funded education system does, on every rotten level. And there’s nothing voluntary about it, compared to your touchy-feely world of college dues, money you can opt not to pay by simply not attending the school.
Does the college legislature consider the fact that the entire pedagogy of the university system and public school systems in California are filled with political opinions, that it is the nature of the polis to force everyone to have to participate in political steering of their funds?
Seems unlikely that they get the message.
One might think that college students would know the economic axiom of the Tragedy of the commons, which I have mentioned previously in other pieces, and which states that anything that is publicly run will pit people against each other to determine how the funds will be spent. Yet all of their haranguing misses this much larger ethical point.
Leftism is not about consistency or ethical interaction with one’s neighbor. It’s about control and power. This is what the left has been about for centuries, and it’s not going to change. In fact, publicly subsidized college just makes it worse, taking tax cash, and indoctrinating snowflakes while watering down content and inflating grades.
The snowflakes we see swirling aren’t snow at all. They are ashes of the ivory tower, long ago incinerated on the pyre of political correctness, as the worshippers of the state dance and sing, and western civilization is reduced to cinders.