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Of Words, Mobs, and Guillotines

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After spending years coddling “snowflake” students, today’s university administrators, like the leaders of the French Revolution, find themselves targeted by the out-of-control monster they helped create.


Over the last 20 years we’ve seen college students demand safe spaces that insulate them from views that are supposedly hurtful. We’ve seen students claim that the presence of a conservative speaker on campus has created trauma and thus the school needs to cancel exams. Mobs of petulant malcontents have repeatedly shut down speaking engagements even with threats of violence because the speaker supposedly expresses hate speech.

Worse, we’ve seen institutions of so-called higher education coddle and capitulate to these agitators, granting their ridiculous requests and even joining in the chorus of those attempting to silence “incitement to violence” or, as you and I would call it, “disagreeing.”

And worst has been the zealous rush by Western governments to embrace censorship in the name of stopping so-called hate speech or misinformation.

Yet despite students, university academics, and politicians donning their capes and eagerly carrying out their crusade to rid the world of “haters,” the amount of hostile, intolerant rhetoric on college campuses is only increasing.

Ironically, it is almost all from those who seek to silence alleged hate speech. For saviors who promised a world of unity and peace, they sure use a lot of hateful language, riots, and violence.

Take, for example, what’s been going on at George Washington University. There, Pro-Hamas/anti-Israel groups have been engaging in protests, vandalism, and bad behavior for months, not unlike at so many other college campuses. Last week, though, GW students decided to channel their inner Robespierre and stage a mock tribunal, complete with chants of “guillotine, guillotine, guillotine, guillotine.”

Video of the gross display can be seen here but I will warn you that the demonstrators could use a bar of soap to wash out those expletive-filled mouths as they chant for murder.

If you’d rather not watch the video of foul-mouthed, entitled, sanctimonious college students lobbing charges of genocidal support at their college administrators, I will sum it up for you. They believe that President Ellen Granberg, Provost Christopher Bracey, the GW Board of Trustees, and the GW police are funding Israel, which, in their mind, equates to support for genocide. The penalty for supporting Israel is the guillotine.

As the little revolutionaries hold their kangaroo court, drums pound. Chanting takes place. And the hatred is evident. The lead demonstrator seems not to just have policy disagreements with the administrators, but personal, vehement hatred.

I’ve read about and watched numerous videos of college student protests and written about several. What I always notice about left-wing protestors is the rage. They don’t disagree with the people they protest — they loathe them. Their voices reach a shrill fever pitch as they launch into profanity-filled character assassinations.

The scene at GW was no different.

They parrot the same claims they once used on conservatives: The people they disagree with are hateful, bigoted, racist, transphobic, homophobic, sexist, and so on and on. They use the same talking points the left peddles in every gender studies course, every news broadcast, and every leftist politician’s faux outrage.

And what is evident — and frightening and tragic — is that they believe it.

They actually believe that if you think a person can’t change their sex then you want children who believe they are transgender to die. They actually think that man-made climate change is going to destroy the planet in the next few years and if you don’t support banning fossil fuels then you will be personally responsible for killing us all. They really believe that if you think that a woman shouldn’t be allowed to murder her child then you hate women. They really think that Israel is the oppressor of this virtuous “nation” called Palestine and that support for Israel is support for genocide.

Would most of the bleeding-heart leftists bring a guillotine to campus and behead administrators? No, they wouldn’t.  Would some of them, if given the opportunity, gladly join in a violent revolution? You bet your life they would.

If we’ve learned anything about mob mentality, it’s that when angry people become a mob, they are capable of horrors.

No historical example illustrates that better than the French Revolution, which spawned the guillotine. It was a godless revolution, one that spurned Christianity and reveled in envy and hatred. The paranoia and psychopathic fervor of the French mob led to the murder of many of its own leaders — not to mention those commoners whose only crime was not being enthusiastic enough about the revolution.

Yet while America’s college campuses become hotbeds for pro-Hamas propaganda, and universities cower to their demands, America continues its crusade against “hate speech.”

Take the case of a 16-year-old high school student in North Carolina who was suspended for using the term “illegal alien.”

Christian McGhee’s English teacher at Central Davidson High School had allegedly assigned vocabulary words, including “alien.” The 10th grader asked for clarification as to whether the word referenced “space aliens or illegal aliens without green cards.”

Cancel culture ensued immediately. The school suspended him and the “tolerant” left began lobbing accusations that McGhee is a racist. He began receiving so many online threats that his parents had to remove him not only from the school, but from their home. Christian is now staying with family in another town and is being homeschooled.

As Christian and his family, which has filed a lawsuit against the school, have argued, there is nothing racist about the term “illegal alien.” Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines it as “a foreign person who lives in a country without having official permission to live there.”

So why is it that Christian McGhee was suspended and subjected to threats, but pro-terrorist college students can take over university buildings, support the genocide of Jews, call for the murder of administrators, shut down any speaker they disagree with, and make campus so dangerous for Jews that universities deactivate Jewish professors?

Because it was never about safe spaces or stopping hate speech. It was never about unity, love, and coexisting. It was always about ensuring there is only one acceptable orthodoxy: radical leftism.


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