Campus protests became of fixture of late-1960s radicalism, and have had an iconic status in pop culture ever since. There is something almost pantomime about them now, as if they are French revolutions in miniature but without so much bloodshed and little in the way of long-term purpose or effect. It seems the further left a college campus goes socially and politically, the more ritualized such protests become.

That’s the thought which has occurred most to me in the recent protests against the performance artist Milo Yiannopoulos, and most recently the libertarian sociologist Charles Murray, whose March 2 lecture on sociological fragmentation in America provoked a violent protest at the elite Middlebury College. But where the protests against Yiannopoulos, whose entire brand is predicated in trolling the agitated political left, were entirely to be expected, there is something different about the protests against the professorial Murray.