The shortsightedness of all involved is staggering. Set aside the brazen illiberalism of their actions and briefly consider this from a consequentialist perspective.

For starters, leftist activists are far more likely than anyone else to use sidewalk chalk and should be pushing to dispense with existing, rarely enforced campus regulations. The medium is unusually suited to the powerless, too: It is cheap, easy to use, and very hard to suppress. Yet they’re signing on to surveillance and punishment for chalk-wielding activism, as if it hasn’t even occurred to them that their allies stand to lose the most from future crackdowns, whereas Donald Trump 2016 could foreswear sidewalk chalk forever without suffering from it at all. I don’t know whether these students have an incoherent theory of how power works, or haven’t thought the matter through, but future leftist activists may rue their behavior.

What’s more, if the sidewalk-chalker is unmasked and punished, the effect will be to fuel the popularity of Trump 2016, not to undermine it. This is so obvious to everyone outside the bubble of campus leftism that I begin to wonder if activists at Emory don’t understand that, or just don’t actually care about outcomes beyond their bubble.

At ages 18 to 22, many of us were less able to see the world through the eyes of others than in earlier or later years. I find it easy to forgive college students, whether activists or otherwise, when they display that quality. It doesn’t make them bad people. Still, good people can harm important causes. I wish the ideological cohort that makes privilege so central to their analysis would expend more effort reflecting on this fact: Those on track to earn degrees from prestigious universities are unusual in their ability to indulge rhetoric and actions without reflecting on how they will be perceived by fellow citizens or undermine the rights of the powerless.

Put more simply: Please stop undermining #NeverTrump and the culture of free speech that will be especially vital if the billionaire with authoritarian tendencies is elected president.

Off campus, these students have managed to generate lots of incredulous coverage—and some open mockery—from the Washington Post, ABC News, Gawker, People Magazine, the Associated Press, CBS, The Week, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, The Daily Beast, and beyond. Has there ever been a more self-evidently counterproductive course willingly taken by activists than the one presently unfolding? Outsiders can only hope Emory's president doesn’t succeed in finding whoever wrote the messages and making a martyr out of a Trump supporter in media outlets that would in almost no other circumstances regard his partisans as victims of unfair treatment.

Already, other damage has been done. Earlier this week, I noted that a black student at UC Davis suffered a hate crime near campus. Three men were later arrested for the assault. Previously, I’ve highlighted the horrifying affects of NYPD spying on innocent Muslim students and the UC Berkeley riot police that turned batons on students. There is sometimes good reason for college students to be concerned about their physical safety on campus, and there are incidents of racism that do not threaten physical safety but are nevertheless abhorrent and understandably upsetting. When students react like this to the mere appearance of the name of a leading candidate in the middle of a presidential-election year, treating the most commonplace political advocacy as if it makes them unsafe, they create perverse incentives for invoking victimhood and deflate the currency of claimed trauma and offense.