Counterculture emerges against oppressive dogma

Hallelujah, the pushback has begun. For a couple of years it seemed like campuses across North America were descending into a fact-free realm of moral and cultural relativism. Everything was about trigger warnings, owning your privilege and cisgenderism (if you don’t know that last one, trust me, you’re better off for it).

None of it had anything to do with the real world.

Thankfully, reports of the demise of higher learning have been greatly exaggerated. While Gen X and older millennial geezers like me could smell something foul, the stench was clearly even worse for those on campus in the thick of it.

Because for every nitwit who aspires to smash the busts of Plato and Shakespeare as atonement for their white male privilege, there is now a non-conformist student ready to step up and fight back.

And I use that phrase nonconformist specifically. Today’s campus rebels aren’t necessarily conservatives. They’re certainly not all pro-Trumpers.

These young people are just independent minds who don’t want to be told how to speak and think on every single little issue.

Last year, I gave a talk at the University of Toronto campus about political correctness and a couple of the attendees upset with the hysteria that had infected their intellectual brethren identified as far-leftists. That’s how politically diverse the rebel alliance is now.

They wanted productive ways forward, instead of just shutting down events and threatening administrative and quasi-judicial action.

For about the past year or so, the pushback has been happening regularly on campuses across Canada and the United States. We saw it last week at the Canadian Freedom Summit in Toronto, which drew hundreds of students. We see it daily on social media.

The students of 1968 were the last crop to bring about a major cultural change on campus. Some of the issues they promoted — like civil rights — were extremely important. And after their victories, most of them cut their hair, got a job and became productive members of society.

Some stuck around though, enrolled in doctoral programs and perverted their philosophy of equity into an “oppressed versus oppressor” mindset, the prism through which they continue to see all human interaction. These regressives are determined to reignite some twisted interpretation of yesterday’s battles.

During the years, many of them have become the ones calling the shots in the academy. They’ve got public money to spread their toxic ideas to new generations.

They got away with it while they were off in the corners, relegated to their fringe studies. Now that it’s writ large though, common-sense students encounter it everywhere and are refusing to be duped. The old counterculture is now the control freaks of establishment. The nonconformists are the new counterculture.

These rebels are also an extremely diverse group, in all sense of the words. They’re not about to let divisive groups like Black Lives Matter split them up along racial lines.

They know full well that our similarities matter more than our differences and that this racial purity obsession groups like BLM harbour is just a silly and backwards agenda to be exploiting in the 21st century.

Free speech is the issue rebels are going to fight their battle over. If you control language, you control minds, as one of their intellectual leaders, Jordan Peterson, reminds them.

For all the bad rap today’s young people get, they’re incredibly quickwitted and informed. And they’re not going to put up with this garbage anymore.