The mob marches on

Another mad milestone in Americans’ seeming inability to so much as listen to views with which they disagree: Death threats just forced Ajit Pai, chair of the Federal Communications Commission, to cancel an appearance at the nation’s biggest tech industry trade show, set to start Sunday.

Which means that at least one person is so enraged by Pai leading the charge to undo net neutrality, he or she stooped to criminal intimidation, and perhaps even plotted to do Pai physical harm.

This is madness, of exactly the sort that led Brown University students to shout down former Police Commissioner Ray Kelly four years ago.

And that last year led rabid Middlebury students to hound conservative scholar Charles Murray as he tried to leave campus — and left professor Allison Stanger, who had the temerity to sit on stage with Murray, with a concussion.

And that prompted Columbia students to shout down Danny Danon, Israel’s representative to the United Nations.

And that triggered a public radio station in Berkeley to cancel a discussion with the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in the midst of an uproar over his comments criticizing Islam.

And that propelled students to rush the stage at the College of William & Mary during a talk about, yes, the First Amendment, chanting “liberalism is white supremacy.”

This virus of supposedly enlightened intolerance now plagues places where adult professionals congregate. It was bound to come to this, and it’s damn depressing.