The progressive resurgence that began sometime between Brendan Eich’s resignation from Mozilla and the burning down of the Ferguson QuikTrip has turned into something more than just another turn around the culture-war maypole. When the Confederate flag came down over the state capitol in Columbia — South Carolina! — that was a portent. When TV Land pulled The Dukes of Hazzard from its broadcast lineup over the roof decal on the General Lee, that was another. A cable channel that shows four hours a day of Gunsmoke reruns is not the Berkeley sociology department. Then the Memphis city council crossed the crucial messing-with-corpses threshold, voting in July to exhume from a public park, and relocate, the remains of a Confederate general and his wife. Two weeks later, protesters calling themselves the Commission on Religion and Racism attacked the grave with shovels because the contaminating couple had not been removed fast enough. Next time, said the ringleader, “we are going to bring the backhoe.”
College students were on summer vacation while these stories were unfolding, but obviously the campus Left was not about to yield its place in the vanguard of political correctness to the likes of the Memphis city council. The first campus to erupt once midterms were over was Yale, where, in default of more serious grievances, activists had fixated on making sure no one’s Halloween costume featured a culturally insensitive sombrero, kimono, or feathered headdress. On November 5, about a hundred students were gathered on the main quad chalking slogans (“Our culture is not a costume”) on the sidewalk when the dean passed by. He stopped to listen and ended up staying for three hours. “Please know that I have heard your stories and I’ll leave here changed,” he assured them. Flushed with this success, a group of students returning to one dorm tried the same gambit on their house master, who, like the dean, just happened to be walking by. But Master Nicholas Christakis refused to be cowed. His display of spine sent one girl into a meltdown, and camera-phone video of her rant found its way onto YouTube and from there into the New York Times.
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