Useful idiots on both sides.
Via NRO:
Much has been made this week of a University of Missouri student-activist group’s demanding everything from their university president’s resignation (he obliged) to the walling off of public spaces on campus in support of a student going on hunger strike. But in attempting to duplicate civil-rights-era protest movements, the campus group calling itself “Concerned Student 1950” (CS1950) is not only diminishing the accomplishments of that era but making enemies of those they depend on the most for their messaging: a sympathetic media. As students attempt to prove their activist bona fides at the behest of our social-justice president, whose White House leapt to their defense, most lessons from the era they are attempting to emulate are being tossed aside.
The media at large, including ESPN personalities, tweeted and offered messages of support when the Missouri football team threatened to boycott their upcoming game against Brigham Young University this weekend. (Their boycott would have potentially cost the university $1 million in penalties.) The team joined CS150 in protesting “systematic racial injustice,” which would somehow be remedied with the scalp of the university president, Tim Wolfe. What the team should still be protesting is the Colorado Buffaloes’ getting a fifth down and going on to defeat it in their 1990 game. That was actual proven, real injustice.
Unlike the civil-rights era demonstrators whose mantle these students would like to assume, theirs is a culture of protest fed in large part by a bored and relatively coddled generation under the misguided belief that they are growing up in a world without a purpose of their own. Therefore a purpose has to be created and history misread. This behavior can’t be wholly blamed on the younger generation — professors tasked with educating them should know better.[…]
In another ironic turn, the movement, which professes to be inspired by the anti-police rallies in Ferguson, went so far as to threaten to call the police if media continued to try to invade their “safe space” (i.e., the grounds of a public university where they were demonstrating). In a campus-wide e-mail, the group urged students to report any hurtful comments directed at them to the police. That’s the same police the campus group claimed had brutalized them just weeks earlier.