It’s often tempting to dismiss events on the political fringe with a light laugh. Some of us occasionally responded thus when the latest news arrived about race, class, and gender studies on college campuses. But derisive levity was a mistake, not least because the expectation that students would bump hard into sobering reality when they left college and entered the world of work proved unfounded.

The joke was on us. Radicals graduated from academia and instead of getting a short, sharp shock that fitted them for the world as it existed, they brought their crackpot theories with them and changed the world. They open-carried intersectionality into their jobs and destroyed many individual careers and workplaces in general. We’re living with the consequences, and they’re only just getting started. There is much worse to come.