If college liberals are so naive, why did the campus right fall for Yiannopoulos?

[DonViejo]

By Alyssa Rosenberg February 21 at 11:56 AM

I promised myself that I’d spend less of 2017 dissecting the provocations of assorted jerks and frauds. I held out for a while. But as Milo Yiannopoulos’s reign as the latest conservative enfant terrible crumbled this weekend over video of him suggesting that very young teenagers can consent to sex with adults, with organizers of the Conservative Political Action Conference rescinding a speaking invitation that they had extended to him and a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster canceling his $250,000 book contract, it seemed worthwhile to note one particular element of his confidence game.

Yiannopoulos’s rise coincided with a new wave of protest on college campuses and was directly facilitated by conservative college students who booked him in an attempt to raise even more ire from their liberal peers. At the same time that conservatives were criticizing liberal college students as vulnerable snowflakes making unreasonable requests of their administrations, conservative college students and groups were enabling the rise of an intellectual fraud at the cost of their own funds and credibility.

Utopianism can be a form of naivete. Given the sheer variety of students who gather on most college campuses, it would take an impractical — if not Orwellian — effort for administrators and faculty to anticipate their students’ every need. And given the inevitable contradictions between those needs and desires, it would be impossible to accommodate every single one of them. Hoping for a world free of economic precariousness, myriad forms of discrimination and the unkindnesses of youth may be impractical, given present political conditions and university politics. The solutions that the left and liberal college students propose may even be downright undesirable. But as forms of callowness go, wanting to improve the world is hardly the worst.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/02/21/if-college-liberals-are-so-naive-why-did-the-campus-right-fall-for-yiannopoulos/?utm_term=.00abf852f64d&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1

[bettyellen]

1. Young people honk it's just trolling and don't think about civil rights issues-

Many still follow whatever crap they grew up with.
It took going to a big convention for HRC to see that there was so much bigotry and intolerance that she left the GOP. I think being raised to support it and having mostly one on one contacts makes you give people the benefit of the doubt to a large extent. I don't get who could be comfortable at one of DTs rallies.