Check your Privilege

Dear liberal college students,

You are understandably angry about the bigoted demagogue’s stunning electoral defeat of the pathological liar. You believe that your elected leaders are indifferent to your concerns and neither care about nor represent people like you. You have suddenly and shockingly been swept from power; your opposition controls Congress, the presidency, the Supreme Court, thirty-three governorships, and thirty-two state legislatures. You feel that your opinion has been—dare I say—marginalized.

You are probably feeling like your voice is unheard. And that sucks. Believe me, I’ve experienced it. For the last eight years, your conservative peers have felt the same way. Our dissent has been labeled at best obstructionism and at worst bigotry, homophobia, intolerance, or part of the so-called “war on women.” Thanks to the nebulous concept of the “microaggression” and the Orwellian bias response teams operating under the ever-watchful bureaucrats in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, unpopular beliefs on college campuses have frequently been met with derision, slander, and allegations of harassment rather than open-minded attentiveness and willingness to debate. Princeton remains, for now, a fortunate exception to this alarming trend.

We have but one piece of advice for you: check your privilege (one of the few silver linings of Trump’s victory is that we can use this ordinarily contemptible phrase non-ironically.)

Check your liberal privilege: the overwhelming majority, if not all, of your professors share your political views, as do most of your peers.

Check your liberal privilege: no one will claim that you oppose President Trump because you are sexist towards men or because you hate white people.

Check your liberal privilege: you will never be investigated by a bias response team for expressing your views on gender or “rape culture,” as Northwestern did to Laura Kipnis.

Check your liberal privilege: your university will never dismiss your sincerely held political views as a “microagression,” as UCLA labeled the statement “affirmative action is racist.”

Check your liberal privilege: your peers will not attempt to abolish your student organization for condemning your political opponents, as Wesleyan students tried to do to the Argus after a columnist had the audacity to criticize the sacrosanct and infallible Black Lives Matter movement.

Check your liberal privilege: when you invite a speaker who shares your hatred of the president, he will not be banned from campus, as DePaul University did following a (shouted-down) Milo Yiannopoulos lecture sponsored by the College Republicans.

Check your liberal privilege: when you hang posters expressing your views on abortion, your peers will not deface or destroy them, as pro-choice students did to pro-life students at American University.

Check your liberal privilege: your college might even set up a safe space for you when your corrupt candidate loses an election, as did the University of Pennsylvania.

The list could go on, but you get the point. Even in dissent, you remain in full control of the ivory tower, its culture, and its byzantine bureaucracies and kangaroo courts. As long as you remain the sheltered bubbles of your elite universities, you are blessed with liberal privilege.

 

This privilege notwithstanding, constantly criticizing your government can be stressful. We conservatives have extensive experience dissenting from the political status quo and would like to offer you some reassurances:

We promise to listen to your speakers’ concerns rather than screaming at them. We promise to evaluate your arguments based on their merits rather than the race or sex of their proponents. We promise not to accuse you of harassment and file anonymous reports of bias when you disagree with our views of race relations or human sexuality. We promise not to distribute placemats accusing you of ignorance (Harvard) or plaster our slogans over your billboards (Dartmouth). We will not spit on you as you leave a lecture (Yale), nor will we demand that your newspapers remove op-eds that offend us (Brown).

In short, we promise to treat your dissent far better than you have treated ours.

Sincerely,

-Princeton’s right wing

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