Panic Attack

by Robby Soave

  Amanda would frequently ask the audience to respond to questions. “Who put this motherfucker in office?” she asked, referring to You-Know-Who.

  “White people!” a number of students, many of them white themselves, shouted in response. Other answers were given as well. Eventually Amanda noted that many educated women voted for Trump. When Amanda said something the audience liked, they would respond not by clapping—clapping creates too much noise, which can be distressing to survivors of various traumas, or so the activists believe—but by snapping their fingers.

  Occasionally Amanda would randomly call on a specific person to respond to what she had just said as a means of silencing the side conversations that some students were having. Shortly after the Ashley Judd clip wrapped up, this was exactly what happened to Michael (not his real name).

  Michael, I would later learn, was a puffy white kid with extremely blond hair. The subject of Amanda’s lecture had turned to the plight of women in America. Michael couldn’t help himself: he pushed back. It seemed like Amanda just wanted to bash America. “Why don’t we ever talk about women mistreated elsewhere?” Michael wanted to know. He pointed out that women in other parts of the world have it much worse. Women are still denied fundamental rights under the Islamic totalitarianism present in parts of the Middle East, and while sexual violence is rampant in the United States, American women have legal protections and recourse that other women do not.

  “Now we’re talking about sexual assault, something that might be triggering,” said Amanda, warning the rest of the room. “And to be honest, he is triggering me.”

  Amanda, an administrator in a social justice and inclusivity office at a public university, then berated Michael and a friend seated next to him, another white student, for articulating this perspective. It was a tense moment that seemed to divide the room: many appeared to support Amanda, while others evidently thought she had gone too far. I followed Michael and his friend when they got up and left the room. The friend, a skinny guy dressed in a nice shirt and jacket (whose name I did not catch), was shaken. He felt like they had been called out and shamed for making a completely reasonable point. Amanda had treated them scornfully, even though they were just as committed to social justice as she was.

  “If I didn’t care about social justice, I wouldn’t be here,” he told me.

  Another student, a woman of color, approached the young men to explain to them where they had gone wrong.

  Not everyone was on Amanda’s side, though.

  “The whole point of this conference is inclusion, and that was not inclusive,” I overheard a female student admit.

  * * *

  THIS BOOK HAS been the story of two extremes, woke intersectional safe-space progressivism and red-pilled identitarian right-wing populism—where they come from, what happens when they clash, and why they ultimately depend upon each other.

  That said, I don’t mean to draw a false moral equivalency between the far left and the far right. Even the most unreasonable fourth-wave feminist, for example, is not an extremist in the same sense as Richard Spencer. And while the left has a lot of power on college campuses and a great deal of currency on social media sites run by tech companies that are themselves staffed by left-friendly young people, the federal government is currently under the control of Donald Trump, a left-winger’s nightmare. Despite losing the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections, Republicans still control the Senate, the Supreme Court, and most state legislatures. Political power, at least for now, is firmly in the right’s grasp.

  And it’s probably likely to stay that way as long as the hard right’s foes—the left, but also liberals, centrists, and libertarians—remain hopelessly divided. Like it or not, the intersectionality-driven leftist war on moderation and cross-ideological coalitions makes alliance-building harder. This infighting is a gift to Trump and those who continue to support him.

  As I hope I’ve made clear, I’m sympathetic to many of the goals of intersectional progressives (except for democratic socialists, though I will make common cause with them on abolishing ICE, if they will have me). So are other libertarians, many liberals, and even some conservatives on specific issues. Where we disagree is on tactics. I have deep reservations about the left’s intersectionality and safe-space-fueled illiberal streak as it relates to free speech, due process, tolerance, and individuality. It’s not just that I personally object to these tactics; I also think that they are counterproductive, turning away far more people than they convert. They force progressive activists to battle each other, since the most marginalized person is awarded the most power and influence in any dispute. I hope my exhaustive chronicle of intersectionality-induced infighting prompts some self-reflection. Consider this conclusion a friendly appeal to dial down the performative social signaling, insistence on ideological purity, and embrace of the worst aspects of identity politics. If the left does this—makes peace with liberals for the good of the #Resistance—it can win. My concern is that something akin to the nightmare scenario will unfold: Zillennial leftists will become more radical and the far right more emboldened while the rest of us shrug and give up.

  Throughout this book, I have not shied away from pointing out inconsistencies in intersectional progressivism as I see them. But I hope readers don’t get the impression that I dislike the young people I interviewed. On the contrary, I was often impressed by their passion.

  Take Ziad, a high school senior who drew media attention in the spring of 2017 when he answered a question on a college application by writing the words “black lives matter” over and over again (he took a picture of the answer and tweeted it; it quickly went viral). Ziad considers himself an activist—his Twitter handle is @ziadtheactivist—but doesn’t think his stunt deserved praise: he was just making sure the admissions officers “remembered me for me.” Ziad was one of the first people I interviewed for this book—he was the first teenager I asked to define “safety.”

  “I think of safety as the right of every person to leave their house or to leave wherever they live, to walk this world and to feel safe and comfortable in their own skin, in their own ways that they identify, and to not fear violence, not fear prejudice, not fear discrimination, to not fear being bothered or to not fear living,” he said. “That’s safety to me, whether it’s violence, whether it’s verbal assault, whether it’s not being served at a town, or whatever it might be.” I don’t think anyone would disagree that that’s a hopeful vision for the future, at the very least.

  Now an undergraduate at Yale University, Ziad has cofounded a Gen Z consulting firm to help businesses understand what teens want. I met him in a coffee shop in Manhattan in the summer of 2018, more than a year after we had first spoken on the phone. Ziad skillfully interrogated my deeply held beliefs, which was an uncomfortable experience for me—I’m supposed to be the one asking the questions. Our discussion grew heated enough that a woman sitting next to us actually asked if we could keep it down. This was a young activist who wasn’t afraid of difficult conversations; he enjoyed them. And though he was certainly on the left—he was relieved that I hadn’t voted for Trump, and insistent that I raise progressive children—Ziad told me that, unlike many of his friends on campus, he wasn’t sold on socialism.

  In conversations with other young people, I found that many of them agreed with me that activist hostility to free speech was counterproductive.

  “I don’t understand why there’s anything productive to come from shutting people down,” Kat, a college student from San Francisco, told me. “I think if you actually have white supremacists in this community, then you should put them out there and let them go speak their ideas so everybody knows who they are.”

  I met her on a street corner in Berkeley where she was a spectator at the alt-right and antifa marches that ensued after the failed Yiannopoulos event in August 2017. A short twenty-six-year-old with pink hair and a nose ring, Kat hadn’t come to throw punches, or start fires, or shout anybody d
own. She just wanted to talk to people. But talking to people was often frustrating.

  “I started out coming to these rallies as an anti-Trump person, and then figured out that there was zero dialogue happening on that side of things,” she told me. As for the other side, she thought the wildly pro-Trump and pro-Yiannopoulos people probably didn’t even believe the things they were saying, but “if you don’t let them talk you’ll never know that.”

  It’s helpful to remember that the illiberal left and illiberal right are still minorities. There are a lot of young people who feel the same way Kat does about the growing hostility to free speech and about the rising tides of identitarianism—who believe in the principles of civil debate and the foundations of a free society.

  At some campuses, these young people are pushing back. During his sophomore year at Williams College, Zach Wood, a student of color who came from a disadvantaged background in the Washington, D.C., area, was involved in a campus group called Uncomfortable Learning. Under his leadership, the group invited a range of speakers to come to campus and talk about issues from a perspective students were unlikely to hear in class. Many of the speakers were controversial.

  “I disagree with these speakers, too, not just on the issues in which I bring them to speak, but from what I gather, from what I’ve read, on most issues, in fact,” Wood told me. “For me, part of intellectual growth, part of college, part of the experience, it’s sort of all about engaging with those views, strengthening your own position, understanding the opposition, and gaining a deeper understanding of humanity.”

  In 2015, one would-be speaker, the anti-feminist Suzanne Venker, provoked blind fury from the campus’s far-left students.

  “There were some people who questioned the judgment and the decision, and they did so in a way that was thoughtful and reflective, but the most vocal opponents were the most radical students on campus,” Wood told me. “There were students who would politically call themselves democratic socialists or Marxists or even communists or something of the sort, students who probably didn’t think Bernie was far enough to the left. These were the students who were most critical of me at the time.”

  Wood had no choice but to cancel the event. But something good came out of it, anyway: he was able to write about the experience for the Washington Post, and he became a nationally known pro-free-speech student. He’s now the author of a book on the subject, and a writer for the Atlantic.

  What’s so refreshing about Wood is that he holds conventionally liberal values—and sees free speech as one of those values.

  I asked Wood why he was unlike so many of the other young, politically interested people I had interviewed for this book—the ones who thought talking to their enemies was a waste of time. Wood told me he had grown up with a mother who suffered from schizophrenia, and the process of trying to comprehend her behavior taught him the importance of seeking understanding and practicing empathy, even when it seemed futile.

  “When I couldn’t rationalize why she was being cruel, or why she was enraged by something, something that seemed insignificant, I had to remind myself of the fact that her brain was working differently,” Wood told me. “From a very young age, I was in a situation in which I had to try to understand, to stretch myself in order to understand, and to try to empathize as well.”

  At other colleges, there are young people who share Wood’s values. Over the past few years, the mainstream student libertarian movement has sternly rebuked both the alt-right and the anti-free-speech left, and is an important force for civil discourse on many campuses. When Richard Spencer tried to crash the February 2017 Students for Liberty (SFL) conference in Washington, D.C., attendees denounced him to his face until hotel security asked him to leave. (It was a private space and Spencer had not been invited.) Today the young libertarians of Students for Liberty promote free expression and the values of the Enlightenment, and are an antidote to illiberal extremism at colleges. In recent years, SFL has been most successful at spreading classically liberal values internationally, in places such as Africa and South America: in 2015, its student activists were closely involved in the successful effort to oust the corrupt left-wing president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff. (Disclaimer: I was involved in the group as an undergraduate.)

  I’ve spent a lot of space in this book scrutinizing leftist intolerance and infighting. That’s because leftist Zillennial activists greatly outnumber their rivals on the right. But I wouldn’t want anyone to come away with the impression that the left is the main threat to free speech. Indeed, over the two years I spent writing this book, conservative hostility to free speech norms appeared to grow tremendously. Many people on the far right—and not just the alt-right—are increasingly interested in regulating private social media companies as public utilities and forcing them to extend a platform to conservative views. The right can complain all it wants about Facebook and Twitter treating it unfairly, but calls for government to level the playing field are a direct assault on the First Amendment. This is not a good look for conservatives who claim to be supporters of free speech.

  What will it take to save activism from itself and reassert liberal norms? I won’t pretend that I have easy solutions. It seems fairly likely that two big factors in young people’s lives—social media and the education system—are partly responsible for the present situation, though it’s not obvious what should be done about it.

  Given college’s pivotal role in elevating unreasonable demands and fostering illiberalism, as well as its decreasing ability to guarantee any kind of economic security for graduates, one tempting answer is to encourage young people to do something other than waste their time pursuing a degree. If the university is a breeding ground for cultlike behavior, PTSD, and mountains of debt, why bother?

  Beyond the liberal arts, many young people in more technical fields are doing something other than college, too. Silicon Valley is teeming with dropouts—people who decided the classroom experience wasn’t worth it and was actually limiting their growth potential. The college bubble hasn’t burst yet, and it could still be a long time coming, given the powerful government forces at work, but alternatives are at least proliferating. Competition breeds improvement; if colleges had to offer their services at a more competitive price, it’s possible they wouldn’t spend so much time and money policing microaggressions.

  As for social media, some people think kids’ dependency on it is rotting their brains. “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades,” wrote the psychologist Jean Twenge in an article about teen smartphone usage. “Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”1 She cites higher rates of depression, unhappiness, and suicidal thoughts among teens who are addicted to their iPhones. “The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression. Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.”

  I’m a little skeptical of dramatic claims about teen depression, since authority figures have wrongly blamed new technology—radio, television, cellphones—for various social ills in the past. But if smartphone addiction does make teens depressed, it helps explain why mental health has become such a foundational aspect of the intersectional victims hierarchy.

  Illiberal activists have a lot of power on campus and on social media. Elsewhere, their rage doesn’t matter as much. Still, they have some ability to enact long-term, broad-based social change. The activist young people I spoke with for this book didn’t plan to stick around campus forever. Many will graduate and find jobs in law, policy, tech, and finance. At a march against climate change in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2017, I spoke with two female activists—students at the University of Virginia—about what they planned to do after college.

  “We’re both business majors and we�
��re both also really passionate about sustainability, so I think for us it’s a lot about the intersection of economics and business and these social issues and environmental issues,” one of them said. “Activism is great, but I think the most change is probably going to come from the business side.”

  In Chapter Four, we saw how a small cabal of left-wing activists was able to hijack existing, well-intentioned harassment law in order to make campuses more repressive places. It’s not impossible to imagine the same kind of thing happening in the workplace: picture a boss who is afraid to reprimand negligent young employees out of concern that they will say their PTSD is triggered.

  It’s never too late to begin fostering different attitudes and beliefs among the next generation. Well, okay, it is too late for millennials, and Gen Z is already in school. But someone else will come along after that. Better civic education in K–12 schooling might help them learn something about the First Amendment. And a saner approach to safety might make them more independent and responsible—and get them out of the house from time to time.

  As for social media, who knows what will happen. The journalist Taylor Lorenz thinks “social” and “media” will split in the near future: “Tweeting out your opinions only to be shouted down by Nazis has caused many users to abandon posting on open social networks and instead spend more time in closed networks and group chats.”2 This could ameliorate some of the toxicity of online public discourse, which would have positive effects. It’s my opinion that intersectionality has primarily been spread by social media.

  It’s all too easy to groan about “kids these days,” but—as I hope I have made clear—whatever faults the Zillennial generation may possess, much of the blame lies with other parties. For instance, the Australian millionaire Tim Gurner chided millennials for spending all their money on “avocado toast” instead of saving up to buy their first homes. As I am a millennial who did not yet own a home at the time this book was written, let me make it abundantly clear that fancy brunches are not the thing preventing us from buying homes. The truth has two parts: (1) the housing crash, an economic disaster inflicted upon us by older Americans, is still fresh in our memory, and (2) our most promising job opportunities are in cities, where renting often makes more short-term sense than buying. (Besides, avocado toast is delicious.)