To get to know the modern campus radical is to lose respect for him. When you’re face to face and he’s screaming, there’s a certain strange gleam in his eye. It’s something beyond moral certainty. Anyone who has spent time around the “most religious” person in church has seen that look. No, it’s moral certainty linked with ignorance, combined with an odd kind of pain, and culminating in a kind of feral desire to hurt you, to cause as much pain as he can.
I saw it in my worst “arguments” (if you can call them arguments) during my time at Harvard Law School in the early 1990s. This was the time between the violent campus unrest of the 1960s and the “intersectional” unrest of the 2010s. This was the time when campuses actively and proudly discussed implementing “speech codes,” when the in-class shout-down was a favored tactic of the radical Left, and when your own colleagues and classmates would do their best to ruin your career if they found you sufficiently odious.
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