Our Maoist Youth

Roger Simon of PJ Media notes disturbing similarities between today's campus culture (as epitomized by Mizzou and Yale) and Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution:

Some people ridicule these students as "snowflakes" unable to stand up to the slightest discomfiting words or images. But it is far worse than that. These so-called "snowflakes" are the potential shock troops of the aforementioned Red Guard, American style. There is a fine line between the extreme entitlement that demands to be warned before reading Ovid's Metamorphoses (as happened recently at Columbia) and a kind of narcissistic rage acting out against any presumed enemy in its path. How do you think the CR actually happened in China? Yes, the country was significantly poorer, but the psychological evolution was strikingly similar.

So think twice if you don't think it could happen here. Who would have thought the president of one of our great public universities would lose his job in part because someone said he saw a swastika written in feces on one of the bathroom walls, which now, suddenly, no one can find and might have been a photograph in the first place, if it ever existed? [bold added]

Commenting on this intellectual atmosphere before, I noted how reminiscent faculty reactions have been of Ayn Rand's commentary about the student "protests" of the 1960s. On that score, I see that I am not alone.

-- CAV