On September 28, the Party of the Right, a conservative debating society within the Yale Political Union, held a debate on the possible merits and demerits of colonialism, promoted on whip sheets as “Resolved: Reform the Savages.” As provocation goes, it was Milo-light, deliberately offensive, if in keeping with the long traditions of P.O.R., a cultishly obtuse and backward-looking group, self-styled cultural neanderthals obsessed with cigars and the British empire and watching Leni Riefenstahl films for laughs. They had debated the topic years ago and no one much cared.

But this being 2017, a familiar drama began. A student posted an image of the flyer on Overheard at Yale, an intra-college Facebook group with over 20,000 members and one of the grand student hubs on campus. The “Reform the Savages” announcement was peppered with inane jokes about colonialism, and capped with a picture of a generic Native American chieftain in a headdress. The Party’s chairman, Quinn Shepherd, attempted to apologize, in private, to the Association of Native Americans at Yale, but the overture was rejected, according to a screenshot of the conversation posted by the student.(“So can we apologize.... but like in /private/[?]” The student described the interaction.) Within minutes, the comments section exploded.

“How is this okay,” another student posted. “How do people think this is fine.” Calls to disband the “alt-right” group ensued. A conservative student who tried to distance herself from the Party of the Right, became embroiled in a debate with several students, eventually giving up when someone compared her to the K.K.K. In the grand tradition of spectator sports, one student began egging the conflict on: “RACE WAR RACE WAR RACE WAR.”

Rarely in the past had the Party of the Right cared much about how the rest of Yale reacted to their provocations—and at any rate they mostly failed in their mission to offend. But after over 600 students had made their opinions known on the Facebook post (the social-media vote count was as follows: 54 “shocked” faces, 149 ”likes,” and 419 “angry” faces), Shepherd posted a lengthy, apparently heartfelt apology on Facebook, bearing responsibility for the whip sheet and admitting that its ”cheap shots” at edgy colonialist humor were ”ultimately unproductive and harmful.”

The debate, Shepherd wrote, “centered around the detriment that colonialism worldwide has caused marginalized communities on social, political, economic, and cultural levels.”

The apology didn’t exactly solve things—in fact, it infuriated many of the group’s critics, who viewed it as insufficiently sincere, only a partial retreat from the Party of the Right’s position, though at least it was an apology, a bit of progress, however minor. “How could your ‘attempts to discuss’ not be an attempt to sweep this under the rug and prevent blowback, when you were the one who approved the whip sheet in the first place?” wrote one student. “Would you have reached out and apologized the moment after you approved it? Or ever, had it not gotten out? Unlikely.”

The most vehement critics of the apology, surprisingly, came not from the campus left but from the P.O.R.’s own alumni. In the Party’s private Facebook group, the Yale Daily News reported, graduates from decades ago tore into the undergrads for releasing a “dreadful” statement caving in to political correctness. “Only good injun is a dead injun,” wrote one. At another point, Class of 1970 alum David Zincavage suggested that the students “put on an old time Minstrel show in blackface.” None of the current members, Shepherd told the Yale Daily News, had ever met Zincavage. The story eventually leaked into the press when Fox News jumped on the controversy, turning a local dispute, briefly, into a matter of national concern.

The conflagration is a case study in how left-right battles are weaponized: Fox News, like other great powers of the right and left, is always on the hunt for the next splendid little campus war. Clashes between truculent conservatives and indignant liberals have become a reliable genre of outrage porn for an industry that thrives on cultural warfare. But it also illustrates how distorted these proxy struggles have become by the heavy weaponry of tech and media, social and otherwise. Facebook helped produce the Party of the Right’s apology—and ensured that the fight would continue.