And it appears the champions of campus absurdity believe there’s no conceivable limit to their nuttiness. Respect diverse opinions? Normalizing hate! Refrain from violence? Oppressor! And now, if you even suggest that civility would be useful in campus discussions . . . well, I bet you can guess :

Rarely does a day go by when something doesn’t happen to affirm my belief that my son’s career plan - which does not include a four-year university degree - is a wise one. How can you spend any length of time around this nonsense without becoming dumber just by virtue of exposure to it? It’s the second-hand smoke of stupidity.

Something similar is happening in collegiate debate, where historically high standards of decorum are under siege as manifestations of white patriarchal thinking. So are the factual and logical proofs that debaters are normally expected to offer in arguing their case. Some participants are challenging the format, goals and ground rules of debate itself, in some cases refusing even to stick to the topic at hand.

Their thesis can be a tad hard to follow, unfolding as it does in that dense argot for which academia is universally beloved. But their core contention is twofold: One, that civility, as currently practiced in America, is a white construct. Two, that in a campus setting, the “woke” white student’s endeavor to avoid microaggressions against black peers is itself a microaggression—a form of noblesse oblige whereby white students are in fact patronizing students of color. Not only that, but by treating black students with common courtesy and expecting the same in return, white students elide black grievances, bypassing the “race talk” that is supposed to occur in preamble to all other conversations. Got it?

Their article in the Howard Journal of Communications, “Civility and White Institutional Presence: An Exploration of White Students’ Understanding of Race-Talk at a Traditionally White Institution,” describes a need to stamp out what they call “whiteness-informed civility,” or WIC. The pervasiveness of WIC, it seems, erases “racial identity” and reinforces “white racial power.”

From the land that irony forgot—which earlier gave us microaggressions and trigger warnings—comes a new and surprising movement, this time to combat civility. Civility, you see, is a manifestation of the white patriarchy. Spearheading this campaign are a duo of University of Northern Iowa professors, who assert that “civility within higher education is a racialized, rather than universal, norm.”

The passage in bold is really something. If you’re courteous to black students, that implies an expectation you’ll get courtesy in return, and that’s an unrealistic expectation. Thus, white people being courteous to black people is racist. And since rudeness to black students is clearly going to be racist as well, what we’re left with is that any white/black interaction at all is racist by definition.

What must it be like to be one of the people who thinks like this? We read about this stuff, shake our heads and laugh at the absurdity of it all, but there are people every day offering up these beliefs in supposedly serious settings, and thinking they’re saying something enlightened and intelligent. How can you walk or breathe when your thinking has become like this? I can’t even imagine.

But I really don’t mind that the left is doing this to itself. They’re influencing no one and winning themselves no converts as a result. They’re burrowing into left-wing cocoons and talking only amongst themselves, where there’s no one of sound mind to tell them what psychos they’re becoming with every deranged thought that spews from their heads. They have no idea how out in left field they really are vis-a-vis mainstream society, which is why they’re absolutely flabbergasted when they lose an election or don’t find the public on their side on a matter of “social justice.”

It’s a source of nonstop entertainment for the rest of us, and it’s getting them exactly nowhere. Keep it up, campus leftists. Just try not to burn anyone’s property down in the process. That’s against the law. Or is the law racist too?