Today’s watered-down version of the Chinese Red Guards

Kevin Williamson of National Review Online sees parallels between today’s college campus shenanigans and one of the most disturbing elements of 20th-century history.

The Red Guards were the terrorist vanguard, mainly teenagers and people in their 20s, who helped Mao Tse-Tung execute the Cultural Revolution. Their first skirmishes were waged against the administrations of Tsinghua University and Peking University, which they accused of being blind to what we may as well go ahead and call “privilege,” though the language of the time was probably closer to “elitism” and “bourgeois” tendencies. They were fond of public-criticism sessions and reeducation programs, and the movement they helped launch would eventually persecute tens of millions of people and murder a million and a half. Among those were 23,000 members of minority groups, beaten to death after being judged insufficiently committed to the prevalent ideas of social justice based on their ethnic background.

The idiot children running amok on our college campuses right now aren’t exactly the Red Guards — they’re far too weak and wishy-washy for that. Call them the Pink Guards.

The Pink Guards have declared war on freedom of speech, demanding official retribution against those expressing even such innocuous sentiments as “all lives matter.” Indeed, they have declared complaints about the suppression of free speech to be a form of speech that must be suppressed, with students at the University of Missouri, the nation’s 103rd most prestigious institution of higher learning, demanding that students responsible for such counterrevolutionary activities be sent to reeducation camps (“required to attend extensive training for racial and cultural competency”). Protesters at Dartmouth physically assaulted students trying to study in the library and denounced them as “filthy white f***s.” At the University of Missouri, Professor Melissa Click physically assaulted a student journalist filming in a public space, and the university, which is run by feckless cowards, has taken no action against her.