The Revolution Turns on Its Base

The assistant professor probably thought she was safe from the madcap race-and-gender left since she was of mixed-race, queer and lecturing on Sappho. But she was woefully wrong. Black-clad demonstrators called her a “race traitor for not opposing the Humanities Syllabus, and they insisted she was “ableist” and a “gaslighter,” a relatively new insult of the left meaning someone who makes disadvantaged people doubt the reality of their oppression.

The teacher may well have felt doubly secure because she had revealed that she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and doubted she could complete the lecture if protesters appeared.

The scene was Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and in an article in the September 9^th issue of The Economist, the assistant professor teaching Sappho, Lucia Martinez Valdivia, confessed she is afraid of her students, just as another professor anonymously confessed the same thing to Vox in the most famous college article of 2015, “I’m a Liberal Professor, and I’m Afraid of My Students.”

“I‘m intimidated by these students,” said the Reed professor in her blog, “I am scared to death to teach courses on race, gender or sexuality, or even texts that bring these issues up in any way. … I’m at a loss as how to begin to address it, especially since many of these students don’t believe in historicity or objective facts (they denounce the latter as being a tool of the white cis-heteropatriarchy).”

Denying facts and running roughshod over dissent are not the cutting edge of the campus left. This is a newer phase of the revolution when the revolutionaries turn on their own. We had a glimpse of this at Evergreen State College a few weeks ago when Bret Weinstein, perhaps the left-most professor on campus, was attacked and abused by the left-most students for not leaving the campus on the day the young Jacobins ordered all white people to clear out. So, Weinstein was forced to relocate his family and go on the Tucker Carlson Show on Fox.

A few weeks after the Reed incident, the college invited Kimberly Peirce, who may have looked like a safe choice. She is the “gender-fluid” director of “Boys Don’t Cry,” (1999) praised as the first sympathetic feature film about transgendered people. But no, the hard leftists at Reed were furious that Peirce had used Hillary Swank, a non-trans actor, as the lead. So, protesters ripped down posters promoting the event, and put up their own, saying “Fuck Your Transphobia” and “Fuck this cis white bitch” (“CIS” is a disparaging word of people still identifying with their birth sex.)

At Reason, Robbie Soave wrote: “This is the elite American college campus: a place where even queer, leftist professors and filmmakers are afraid of being sent to the guillotine by self-professed radical students.”

The Economist reported that Humanities courses seem to be a recurrent source of friction because of their “Eurocentric” and “racist” content and because their authors are predominantly male and white.

Some students at Reed admit they are afraid to share their feelings with other students for fear of being targeted by campus protesters. But some students seem to resent the hard-left activists. One black student shouted down the activists: “This is a classroom. This is not the place. We are trying to learn. We are freshman students.” The Economist attached a subhead to this comment: “Thermidorian Reaction” but we are likely to see a good many more teen Robespierres before Thermidor arrives.