Censorship is so widespread on college campuses in both the U.S. and U.K. that some have remarked the world is witnessing a closing of the millennial minds.
Spiked interviewed British millennials who are standing up to the intellectually suffocating principal of political correctness. These three college students are fighting against the left’s intolerance towards opinions that don’t compliment their own.
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The main argument that they all have in common is that the demands for censorship and political correctness come from very few elite students who undemocratically control student unions and don’t represent anyone but themselves.
George Lawlor of Warwick University said that college campuses are like King Louis XVI’s Palace of Versailles.
“There are all these fashionable ideas that you have to conform to and if you don’t you get the most medieval repercussions,” Lawlor said to Spiked. “It happened to me. It’s like a tarring and feathering that happened to me. The genius of tarring and feathering is not only horrible for the person it happens to but it also deters other people from doing it.”
Lawlor’s crime against social justice warriors was that he wrote an 800-word op-ed opposing consent classes.
He received a stream of threats on social media and email and was bullied on campus.
Eleanor Sharman was so tired of the intense reaction to political correctness and censorship that she and several friends started a student newspaper called Versa.
“We immediately attracted a lot of vitriol,” Sharman said. “Partly because of the people involved. Partly because we were willing to platform opinions that other people found offensive and that they weren’t use to reading in the student press.”
Jacob Williams was so frustrated that he launched a student publication called No Offense that takes on liberal arguments on the college campus.
“You have a generation who have grown up, who have never been exposed to ideas that contradict their progressive liberal assumptions,” Williams said. “So what happened is that liberalism has started to eat itself.”
He continued that progressives who have never had to endure a debate now think that those who oppose their beliefs cannot accept conservatives as rationale human beings.
No Offense is a collection of offensive opinions in order to progressives on campus “shock treatment” and actually expose progressives to opinions unlike their own. Hopefully one day that principal can be adopted by the U.K. government which does not consider free speech a right and has no first amendment laws.
