
Via College Fix:
Ralph Nader has a bone to pick with coddled college students.
In a wide-ranging interview with Pacific Standard, the veteran third-party presidential candidate and consumer crusader connects the rise of Donald Trump with the increased sensitivity of the modern American campus.
Construction workers used to “stand on a corner and whistle at a pretty lady,” but now “they can’t do that anymore”:
Multiply that across the continuum. You can’t say this about that, and you can’t say that about this. And the employer tells you to hush. And perhaps your spouse tells you to hush, and your kids tell you to hush. … A lot of these people grew up on ethnic jokes, which are totally taboo now. …
They used ethnic jokes to reduce tension in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s. And they’d laugh at each other’s jokes and hurl another one. But it still flows through ethnic America, you know. There are hundreds of things that people would like to say.
Unprompted, Nader contrasts this easygoing attitude with privileged little snots in the ivory tower:
You see it on campuses — what is it called, trigger warnings? It’s gotten absurd. I mean, you repress people, you engage in anger, and what you do is turn people into skins that are blistered by moonbeams. Young men now are far too sensitive because they’ve never been in a draft. They’ve never had a sergeant say, “Hit the ground and do 50 push-ups and I don’t care if there’s mud there.”
