Great article.

The section “How Did We Get Here?” also describes Millennials as though they are separate from the audience of the piece. It is almost as if the undertone of the article is “kids these days”, albeit in a much more academic and well-expressed manner.

There’s something else going on here as well, that I think some folks in the “blame Millenials” camp aren’t seeing, that speaks towards a shift not only in this safe space corner of education, but overall education itself. Gen X and older generations weren’t indoctrinated into the social justice program, because the social justice program, as a collective group of concepts, is relatively new.

Take racism, for example. Gen X and the Boomers think in terms of the traditional definition of racism, which basically marries up with “racial prejudice,” and a younger generation has been indoctrinated with a new “prejudice plus power” definition that was invented from whole cloth years after the Civil Rights Act and the death of MLK. So when the older half of the country takes a crap on Millenials for supporting Sarah Jeong, for instance, they don’t realize that Millennials have been subjected to a completely different indoctrination program than have older generations. It’s a “you get what you pay for” sort of deal.

The privilege narrative, the microaggression narrative, the trigger warning narrative, the rape culture narrative, and a host of others are all bound together in a kind of a crowdsourced epistemological web, knitted together in academic echo chambers and intended to weaponize victimhood.