Inez Feltscher Stepman writes for the Federalist about the dangers of campus “insanity” filtering into the broader society.
Conservatives once laughed at radical campus politics, imagining that upon impact with the “real world,” blue-haired social justice warrior activists would have to grow up and confront the hard realities of the capitalist marketplace. Instead, what’s becoming increasingly clear is that academic leftism is metastasizing off-campus, spreading into some of the world’s largest corporations as well as institutions of culture, with graduated millennial employees as its carriers.
While the right wrestles with how to deal with big technology companies’ hostility to conservative voices on their platforms, the source of that enmity goes mostly unremarked upon: Google’s highly credentialed workforce has roughly the personal politics of a faculty lounge. Regrettably, universities don’t live up to the Las Vegas adage–what begins on campus definitely does not stay there. It spills over into every aspect of our broader culture, from complaints about actors not precisely matching the intersectionality profile of the characters they portray, to the leftward tilt of America’s corporations.
That’s all the more reason for Republicans on campus to take the ideology that threatens free speech in universities seriously and advance legislation to protect one of America’s most cherished freedoms. Without strong, smart pushback at the academic source, the country will soon be dealing with even more censorious consequences of an ideology that does not recognize its opponents’ rights to speak.
