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Now the age of victimhood that we’re in has provided us with another group who stupidly want to take to the street in protest. The sight of white nationalists marching in protest in Charlottesville, Virginia to chant “You will not replace us” in protest of the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue is truly disturbing. No matter how much I condemn the ridiculousness of today’s political correctness and culture of victimhood, no one should claim some sort of racial superiority simply because of the color of their skin. And anyone who adopts the symbols of Nazis immediately forfeits any respect.

Jim Geraghty points out how stupid this is by their own sorts of arguments.

If you march in a parade with a Nazi flag, I never want to hear you bitching about a Mexican flag at an immigration amnesty rally again.

— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) August 12, 2017

There is no way that anyone claiming to be patriotic can honestly praise the Nazis, the KKK, or espouse white supremacy. Grabbing a tiki torching and performing a Nazi salute is a sign that you’re an idiot, not that you have anything to say worth listening to. The chant of “blood and soil” that the marchers were using is particularly repugnant. That’s not what America is about. We are a nation of individuals that was founded on an idea, as embodied in the Declaration of Independence. And driving a car deliberately into a crowd of people is as much as murderous act or terrorism as it is when it happens on the streets of London of Paris.

And President Trump’s tweet demonstrated just to sort of vague muddying of blame that always irritates me.

If you march in a parade with a Nazi flag, I never want to hear you bitching about a Mexican flag at an immigration amnesty rally again.

— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) August 12, 2017

He should denounce the KKK marchers specifically, especially since so many people think he’s deliberately sent dog whistle messages of support to win the vote of the #alt-right. David French is right to point out that, when Trump is really angry at someone, he doesn’t have any problem being specific in calling them out.

Trump is very, very specific when he wants to condemn someone – ask the Khans, Judge Curiel, Comey, his AG – his vagueness has a purpose.

— David French (@DavidAFrench) August 12, 2017

Trump’s attempt at moral equivalence is just as despicable as those who try to blame the Israelis and Palestinian terrorists equally when Jews are murdered. If Trump is so proud of calling out “radical islamic terrorism,” then he can call out white supremacy. There should be no equivalence between those who march with Nazi salutes to praise white supremacy and those who march in protest against their racism.

As Byron York writes about the President’s platitudinous statement,

Nobody has an obligation to denounce every kook and racist in the country. But when a prominent racist declares, at a rally featuring people wearing your campaign slogan, that he is carrying out your agenda, and you are the president of the United States, there is an obligation to speak out. It’s not hard. Ronald Reagan, as usual, did it right.

“Those of us in public life can only resent the use of our names by those who seek political recognition for the repugnant doctrines of hate they espouse,” Reagan wrote after the Ku Klux Klan endorsed him. “The politics of racial hatred and religious bigotry practiced by the Klan and others have no place in this country, and are destructive of the values for which America has always stood.”

White supremacists, neo-Nazis, and KKK members today believe they are carrying out Trump’s agenda. Trump has a moral obligation to publicly and forcefully condemn them and reject their support. The horrors in Charlottesville provide him the opportunity to do so.

Sadly, it seems as if Trump is going to let this opportunity pass him by.

Ben Shapiro has some important things to say about those who want to explain how the alt-right is not part of the conservative movement.

One of the hottest takes from the Left is that the alt-right represents the entire right — that what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia represented conservatives broadly. That’s factually incorrect, and intellectually dishonest. The alt-right is not just conservatives who like memes or who dislike Paul Ryan. The alt-right is a philosophy of white supremacy and white nationalism espoused by the likes of Vox Day, Richard Spencer, and Jared Taylor….

They openly acknowledge their antipathy for the Constitution and conservatism; they believe that strong centralized government is necessary to preserve “white civilization.”

That is not true conservatism. That is why the #alt-right, which is not all that numerous, despises so many conservatives. Shapiro should know since he’s been on the receiving end of their internet attacks for a while now. Of course, Trump and his campaign has been winking and nodding at these people from the beginning. This weekend’s equivocation is just a continuation of his behavior during the campaign. And Trump’s behavior emboldens white nationalists who think that the President of the United States represents their thoughts.

However, those on the left are not innocent in all this. Violent groups such as Antifa that have been ignored by the media have emboldened and increased the numbers on the alt-right. He links to the NYT reporter, Sheryl Gay Stolberg who saw “club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists” in Charlottesville.

She was forced to backtrack and suggest that the Antifa thugs weren’t “hate-filled” after online blowback. But Antifa has trafficked in hate and violence for over a year now — we all remember how they’ve been assaulting people asserting their free speech rights in Berkeley, and how they have been engaged in street fights with alt-righters in places like Sacramento.

This isn’t “whataboutism.” Nothing justifies the alt-right’s racist perspective or murderous violence by an alt-righter. But it would be factually incorrect to ignore Antifa’s continuing role in the violent incidents that have now spread across the country. Because the Marxists in Antifa try to shut down free speech, they drive foolish people into the morally incorrect binary decision of supporting the alt-right, rather than loudly rejecting the ideology and violence of both sides….

Charlottesville, Sacramento, Berkeley — we’re watching a microcosmic re-enactment of Weimar Republic brownshirt-vs.-reds violence in real-time, complete with the same flags being flown. Just as then, some leadership condemning the evil of alt-right white supremacy, the viciousness of hard-left Marxism, and the violence anyone commits in violation of basic rights should be unceasing and thunderous.

It’s not.

And so the problem is likely to metastasize.

And let’s just agree that Donald Trump is no more responsible for the deaths in Charlottesville than Bernie Sanders is responsible for his supporter shooting up the GOP politicians in Alexandria.

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We need to stop cheering on the hyphenation of the country. When Black Lives Matter rioted and objected to the anodyne statement that “all lives matter,” it was wrong. And one result has been these white protesters thinking that they needed to march to assert that “white lives matter. And then people with weak grasps on reality and morality decide to take action on their own by shooting police sitting in their cars, going to Virginia to shoot GOP politicians, or driving a car through groups protesting against white nationalist. Richard Fernandez writes about this “War of the Hyphens,”

The war of the hyphens has broken out, and for its combatants there is only one thought: how do I get back at the enemy hyphen? The long sought-after goal of diversity has been attained and it is not what many imagined….

Hopefully it isn’t too late for reconciliation but there is every chance that resentment will intensify. Human history suggests that conflict like entropy, grows faster than understanding. It is harder to unscramble an egg than to scramble it. The process of division may grow until the resentments which drive the hyphens apart are finally overcome by the attractions of cooperation and commerce. That day has not yet returned. Until then division will spread and spread.

Mark Lilla, who has a book coming out this week, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, has an essay in the WSJ based on his book that is very apropos of the entire subject of how divisive such identity politics has become in our country. He is a liberal who is speaking to liberals about how to win back those working-class voters whom they’ve alienated. He has his own theory about how the ” divisive, zero-sum world of identity politics” has led to the country losing a sense of a national solidarity. He objects to the slogan from the 1960s that “the personal is the political” which he argues has gone beyond arguing for feminist goals on sexuality, the family, and the workplace and now has become something else.

But the phrase could also be taken in a more romantic sense: that what we think of as political action is in fact nothing but personal activity, an expression of me and how I define myself. As we would put it today, my political life is a reflection of my identity.

Over time, the romantic view won out over the radical one, and the idea got rooted on the left that, to reverse the formula, the political is the personal. Liberals and progressives continued to fight for social justice out in the world. But now they also wanted there to be no space between what they felt inside and what they did in that world. They wanted their political engagements to mirror how they understood and defined themselves as individuals. And they wanted their self-definition to be recognized.

This was an innovation on the left. Socialism had no time for individual recognition. Rushing toward the revolution, it divided the world into exploiting capitalists and exploited workers of every background. New Deal liberals were just as indifferent to individual identity; they thought and spoke in terms of equal rights and equal social protections for all. Even the early movements of the 1950s and ’60s to secure the rights of African-Americans, women and gays appealed to our shared humanity and citizenship, not our differences. They drew people together rather than setting them against each other.

All that began to change when the New Left shattered in the 1970s, in no small part due to identity issues. Blacks complained that white movement leaders were racist, feminists complained that they were sexist, and lesbians complained that straight feminists were homophobic. The main enemies were no longer capitalism and the military-industrial complex; they were fellow movement members who were not, as we would say today, sufficiently “woke.”

It was then that less radical liberal and progressive activists also began redirecting their energies away from party politics and toward a wide range of single-issue social movements. The forces at work in healthy party politics are centripetal; they encourage factions and interests to come together to work out common goals and strategies. They oblige everyone to think, or at least to speak, about the common good.

When we’re covering the civil rights movement of the 1960s, I give the students a speech by MLK arguing how we all need to work together along with speeches and writing by other black leaders such as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Black Panthers leaders. The latter three all argue for some form of black separatism and rejecting the help of whites. They wanted a black movement of blacks and for blacks and angrily rejected the idea of an integrated civil rights movement. Right there, it’s clear of how, as Lilla argues, the movement became centrifugal and has continued.

The results of this shift are now plain to see. The classic Democratic goal of bringing people from different backgrounds together for a single common project has given way to a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition. And what keeps this approach to politics alive is that it is cultivated in the colleges and universities where liberal elites are formed.

Lilla traces the history of these movements and how disaffected whites who felt that there was no place for them within the liberal movement became Reagan Democrats. Decades later, young people have embraced this atomization of society and the focus on their identities and movements revolving around whichever identity they embrace. And, Lilla argues, this has permeated their ability to reason.

For those students who will soon become liberal and progressive elites, the line between self-discovery and political action has become blurred. Their political commitments are genuine but are circumscribed by the confines of their self-definitions. Issues that penetrate those confines take on looming importance, and since politics for them is personal, their positions tend to be absolutist and nonnegotiable. Those issues that don’t touch on their identities or affect people like themselves are hardly perceived. And classic liberal ideas like citizenship, solidarity and the common good have little meaning for them.

As a teacher, I am increasingly struck by a difference between my conservative and progressive students. Contrary to the stereotype, the conservatives are far more likely to connect their engagements to a set of political ideas and principles. Young people on the left are much more inclined to say that they are engaged in politics as an X, concerned about other Xs and those issues touching on X-ness. And they are less and less comfortable with debate.

Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X…This is not an anodyne phrase. It sets up a wall against any questions that come from a non-X perspective. Classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. What replaces argument, then, are taboos against unfamiliar ideas and contrary opinions.

As a professor at Columbia, I wonder if Lilla will get in trouble for arguing something so oppositional to the progressive ethos. How can he argue that it is not helpful for students to embrace their identities and seek to engage in politics through the guise of that identity? His calls for solidarity are directly opposite the calls for diversity (of the approved variety) that so many progressives consider the foundation for everything else in the university or workplace?

I was talking to a student of mine, an extremely intelligent young man who is also very liberal. He spent the summer at a program at a prestigious university focused on international relations. When I asked him how it went, he was very enthusiastic about the opportunity to talk with so many other intelligent students interested in the same things he is. However, he told me with a little bit of embarrassment, that he thinks he’s become more conservative since this experience. I was surprised since that isn’t the usual pattern for students spending time at elite universities, even for a summer program for high schoolers. When I asked him why, he said that the liberal students had a hard time arguing their positions except for talking about their “feelings.” The conservative and libertarian students, he noticed, were much better at putting forth reasoned, fact-based arguments that he’d never heard before. His conclusion was that liberals weren’t used to having explain and defend their positions because everyone around them agreed with them, but the conservative kids were used to being in the minority and so had had to toughen up their ability to argue. It seemed a very mature observation that I’ve heard conservative thinkers make but it really surprised me that a high schooler, a liberal himself, had come to the same conclusion.

If the Democrats followed Lilla’s advice they would have a strong chance at winning back those voters whom they alienated so much that former Obama voters were willing to vote for Trump.

I am not a black male motorist and will never know what it is like to be one. If I am going to be affected by his experience, I need some way to identify with him, and citizenship is the only thing I know that we share. The more the differences between us are emphasized, the less likely I will be to feel outrage at his mistreatment.

The politics of identity has done nothing but strengthen the grip of the American right on our institutions. It is the gift that keeps on taking. Now is the time for liberals to do an immediate about-face and return to articulating their core principles of solidarity and equal protection for all. Never has the country needed it more.

Just as every Republican I’ve seen, except for the President and Vice President, have quickly condemned the white solidarity marchers in Charlottesville, Democrats should also start criticizing those on the left who march to exclude others such as the Black Lives Matter movement.

However, I suspect they never will because they are too afraid of alienating the minority populations who form the foundation of their party’s coalition. While that might be good news for the Republican Party, it’s very bad news for the country.

The WSJ writes how the outrage and tragedy caused by the white supremacy march in Charlottesville is caused by “the poison of identity politics.”

That principle has since been abandoned, however, in favor of a new identity politics that again seeks to divide Americans by race, ethnicity, gender and even religion. “Diversity” is now the all-purpose justification for these divisions, and the irony is that America is more diverse and tolerant than ever.

The problem is that the identity obsessives want to boil down everything in American life to these categories. In practice this means allocating political power, contracts, jobs and now even salaries in the private economy based on the politics of skin color or gender rather than merit or performance. Down this road lies crude political tribalism, and James Damore’s recent Google dissent is best understood as a cri de coeur that we should aspire to something better. Yet he lost his job merely for raising the issue.

A politics fixated on indelible differences will inevitably lead to resentments that extremists can exploit in ugly ways on the right and left. The extremists were on the right in Charlottesville, but there have been examples on the left in Berkeley, Oakland and numerous college campuses. When Democratic politicians can’t even say “all lives matter” without being denounced as bigots, American politics has a problem.

Mr. Trump didn’t create this identity obsession even if as a candidate he did try to exploit it. He is more symptom than cause, though as President he now has a particular obligation to renounce it. So do other politicians. Yet the only mission of nearly every Democrat we observed on the weekend was to use the “white supremacist” cudgel against Mr. Trump—as if that is the end of the story.

It isn’t, and it won’t be unless we confront this underlying politics of division.

Not long ago we were rereading Justice Clarence Thomas’s prophetic opinion in Holder v. Hall, a 1994 Supreme Court ruling on dividing voting districts by race.

“As a practical political matter,” he wrote, “our drive to segregate political districts by race can only serve to deepen racial divisions by destroying any need for voters or candidates to build bridges between racial groups or to form voting coalitions.” Writ large, Justice Thomas was warning that identity politics can destroy democratic trust and consent

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Many on the right spent a lot more of last week worrying about employment practices at Google than about North Korea. Given how long we’ve been having these same discussions about North Korea and have come to the same conclusion that there is nothing feasible that we can do so we might as well pretend to be negotiating some way to punt on the whole question, perhaps a open discussion of how the snowflake mentality roiling college campuses has now seeped into the workplace. Walter Olson explains that this has been going on for a long time and government has actually facilitated this by its pressure on businesses to make sure that they don’t have a hostile workplace.

And Rauch explained the indirect mechanism by which this has come to pass: “What the government cannot do directly, it now requires employers to do in its stead: police ‘discriminatory’ speech.”

Now, as then, government pressure on employers to ban speech consists less of direct you-must-ban mandates and more of litigation incentives whose contours are not explicitly announced.

Legal or HR departments will counsel an employer that allowing certain instances or categories of bad speech to go undisciplined might be an offense under Title VII anti-discrimination law, or evidence of one.

Some enforcement of these laws is done directly by federal agencies, but most of it takes the form of civil lawsuits by disgruntled workers or class action lawyers.

Litigation is costly and hazardous to employers. Companies will expend significant effort to avoid it or to reduce its risk.

Taking steps against tasteless cartoons, or loose talk, such as the discussion of whether there are any psychological or behavioral differences between the sexes in the now famous Google memo, is perceived as cheaper and safer than facing a lawsuit later.

Olson points out that all the complaints go one way.

hostile-environment law is not content-neutral. It plays favorites on topics and it takes sides in debates.

By 1997, when I wrote my book, there were already dozens of reported cases in which liability claims cited anti-feminist statements, such as generalizations, stereotypes and loaded language about females.

The speech of this sort that got employers into legal hot water was “frequently not at all obscene but often highly political and analytic in content.”

Meanwhile, a search then found not a single case in which the reverse type of statement — generalizations, stereotypes, or loaded language unfriendly toward males — had been ruled to contribute to a hostile environment.

In the outside culture, debate continues about the extent to which women’s under-representation in tech jobs is owing to discrimination, and how much to individual women’s own educational and career decisions. Within a given company like Google, there is a real legal hazard in letting Side B in this debate express its opinion, but no corresponding legal hazard in letting Side A speak as forcefully as it likes.

Google is currently being sued on sex discrimination claims, which means lawyerly caution would be at a zenith on whether to let its corporate culture be portrayed in a future courtroom as tolerant of sexist argumentation.

To sum up: don’t assume Google acted unusually. Under current legal incentives, what just happened counts as normal.

Charles C. W. Cooke illustrated this exact point by posing this sort of thought experiment to demonstrate that there really isn’t a neutral argument that anyone who wrote such a document as this Google employee did criticizing the place where he worked might well be fired.

For the sake of argument, suppose that the original memo had hewed to the opposite line — that is, that the author had made the case he was criticizing. Suppose he had charged that minorities and women were under-represented at Google because Google is institutionally racist. Suppose he had proposed that men and women have identical traits and proclivities. Suppose that he had called not for calm, but for action, and that he had called out his bosses not for an excessive commitment to social justice, but for their inadequacy. What, one has to ask, do we think the response would be? Do we imagine that he’d have been fired for “criticizing his employer,” or for “making his colleagues uncomfortable”? Would we have seen a press release from Google’s CEO in which the memo was disavowed on the grounds that it undermine Google’s commitment to meritocracy? Are we to believe that such a firing would have been defended on the grounds that, by electing to cause a public fuss, the author had it coming? And would we have seen the usual round of self-contradictory platitudes — that the company was too tolerant to tolerate; too inclusive to include; too committed to free expression to permit open dissent?

I sincerely doubt it. On the contrary: I suspect there’d have been a summit. I suspect that we’d have seen a series of press releases from Google reaffirming a commitment to improvement. I suspect there’d have been a host of op-eds about “Google’s problem,” replete with sympathetic quotes from the press shop. I suspect, in other words, that we’d have seen much the same reaction from Google as we have seen from colleges when faced with grievance-laden manifesti: Swift and humble acquiescence.

He’s exactly right. Someone criticizing their workplace for racism or sexism would be a heroic whistleblower. Saying that Google was going about trying to increase diversity in improper ways, however, was not acceptable.

The other infuriating aspect of this whole story was how the media, Google employees, and Google itself deliberately lied about the contents of what James Damore wrote. If you had just watched cable TV or read comments online, you’d soon realize that they had never read what Damore actually wrote.

As David Harsanyi has written, James Damore, the Google engineer whose internal memo led to all this sturm und drang committed three crimes.

The first crime is proposing that a meritocracy might be healthier for a company than bean-counting race, ethnicity, and sex. The second is pointing out that ideological diversity matters. The third and most grievous of all is suggesting that men and women are, in general, physiologically and psychologically different, and thus they tend to excel at different things.

Some women were reportedly by his writing this that they stayed home from work for one day because Damore’s memo made them feel uncomfortable. Way to conform to the very stereotype that you’re trying to debunk. Ann Althouse casts doubt that women at Google actually did this since the source that NPR quoted is a former employee.

The thought-crime for which he was fired was for suggesting that men and women are different and those differences might explain why there aren’t as many women who are software engineers rather than blaming the imbalance on sexism. For some arguments, we’re supposed to believe that there is absolutely no difference between women and men. And we’re supposed to ignore physical differences when it comes to professions that demand a certain amount of upper body strength such as being a firefighter or serving in combat. But then, other times, the assumption is that women are actually different. Why else would having more women be software engineers give a business some benefit of diversity? Why would be told that having a woman president would make a difference in fighting corruption or that women are better at preserving peace ans so more women should be “at the negotiating table”? I remember Nancy Pelosi bragging that, when she became Speaker of the House, she would bring a big broom to clean out corruption because women are good at cleaning up messes. She told Barbara Walters, “Maybe it will take a woman to clean up the House.” Doesn’t that seem to imply that women have some special ability that men lack?

We’re told that women are more empathetic and better able to talk things out than men. Apparently, when the generalization makes women look good, it’s perfectly fine to engage in such discussions. However, if such differences are used to suggest that there might be a reason why fewer women become software engineers, we’re creating a hostile workplace.

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Mona Charen is amazed that anyone would find what Damore write so outrageous.

So what did he say that was so intolerable? Did he say women aren’t smart? Did he say that women should not be recruited to work at Google? Hardly. He offered that perhaps biological differences between the sexes may partially account for the fact that women are not 50 percent of the engineers at Google (though they are about 48 percent of Google’s non-tech employees). He observed that, on average, men tend to be more interested in things and women more interested in people. What a scandal! Except, in 2015, women accounted for 20.03 percent of all engineering graduates, but 84.43 percent of health professionals. As Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute noted, the share of women holding tech positions at Google (20 percent) is close to the percentage of women computer science graduates (18 percent).

Damore said that men are more competitive and women more cooperative. Studies of the effects of testosterone and other hormones confirm that there is a biological foundation for these differing traits. Damore noted that women prefer more workplace flexibility than men and that accordingly, Google might want to permit more part-time work to accommodate women’s preferences. He pleaded, above all, that Google treat every person as an individual.

It is remarkable to me that any difference between the sexes is presumed to be a disadvantage for women — to the point that facts must be suppressed and orthodoxy enforced.

Our society erupts in routine firestorms about women in technical fields because that is one of the few that is male-dominated. But women far outnumber men in many other realms. Besides earning 56 percent of all bachelors degrees, women comprise 55 percent of financial managers, 59 percent of budget analysts, and 63 percent of insurance underwriters. Sixty-one percent of veterinarians are women, along with 72 percent of Ph.D. psychologists. Why are these disparities tolerable?

What Damore said about men being attracted to things and women to people is of course a generalization. Individuals will vary. Some women are into engineering and technical subjects, God bless them, just as some men are drawn to pediatrics and social work. But the bell curves are different, and the fact that men lag behind women in veterinary medicine is not necessarily due to structural sexism or discrimination. It may be a matter of preference. That was Damore’s point about engineers at Google.

So when will the government start instituting investigations and diversity programs to find out why fewer men are becoming veterinarians or psychologists?

Ah, so this is what well-considered advise and consent means if a senator is putting politics first.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is blocking the confirmation of President Trump’s nominee to run the Justice Department’s antitrust division, offering no explanation and refusing an offer to meet with Makan Delrahim, according to a source with knowledge of the confirmation process.

Warren reportedly put a “hold” on Delrahim’s nomination as the Senate confirmed dozens of nominees for key administration positions before lawmakers started their August recess. Warren’s obstruction came after Delrahim’s nomination sailed through the Senate Judiciary Committee by a 19-1 vote featuring broad support from some of the Democratic Party’s most liberal members.

A source with knowledge of the process to confirm Delrahim told the Washington Examiner that Warren has not responded to a request to meet Delrahim.

Warren’s office declined to comment to the Washington Examiner, but clues about her opposition can be found on her Facebook page and in her potential 2020 presidential aspirations. Warren commented on Delrahim’s nomination in an April post saying that by picking Delrahim, “Trump shows that he’ll put the interests of giant corporations ahead of the American people.”

So she doesn’t even need to talk with the guy before she knows that she opposes him. Somehow, she has intuited his unsuitability for the job when other Democrats such as Patrick Leahy, Dick Durbin and Al Franken don’t have a problem with him. I’ve long thought that the Senate rules that allow one senator to place a hold on a nomination unless 60 senators vote for the nomination to advance to a vote as an extremely stupid rule. It’s one thing to have the whole minority party united in opposition, but one senator? Why should a single senator have such power? I remember when Senator Carl Levin placed a hold on all of Bush’s nominees to the 6th Circuit because his cousin had been nominated by Clinton and had his nomination bottled up in committee the last few years of Clinton’s presidency. It took until 2008 for Levin to lift his hold after Bush finally agreed to renominate the senator’s cousin. The other senators go along with the one senator’s holds because they want their own holds respected when that time comes. It’s one example of comity within the Senate. They agree that they want their individual powers to continue so they’re willing to allow one senator block movement. It’s a bipartisan shame.

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Who knew how sexist cheese is? Well, PETA has figured out all the sexism involved in forcing cows to lactate and then taking their milk.

In its never-ending quest to equate animal rights with human rights (founder Ingrid Newkirk’s famous quote is “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy”), PETA now claims cows are raped to produce the milk that ends up in your mozzarella. The group posted a video on its website (credited to a Brazilian affiliate) showing various clips of animal brutality including “cows who are imprisoned on dairy farms [that] are forcibly impregnated through artificial insemination again and again on rape racks. Rape racks. All for your milk, cheese, and yogurt.” Stopping this practice, the group suggests, is as important as stopping “sex trafficking, slavery, genital mutilation, and honor killings.”

Yes, because milking cows is just like raping or enslaving women or mutilating them. How do people even think like this? I’d like to see PETA representatives go to some woman’s clinic or talk to the women kidnapped by ISIS and explain this equivalency to them.

It now can be considered a microaggression if a university provides chairs that are too small for people who are overweight. Or if the people cast in plays and dances are all thin and good-looking.

The size of our society’s chairs is now being considered a “microaggression” against overweight people, according to a guide released by The New School, a private college in New York City.

In a list titled “Common Examples of Microaggressions in an Academic Setting,” the guide states: “Seats in the classroom / auditorium / office are too small for many people.”

Other items on the list include: “Students cast as the lead in school plays or dance shows, and models chosen for school fashion shows are all conventionally thin and conventionally beautiful,” and “Being called ‘overly sensitive’ when addressing a microaggression.”

As many of these sorts of guides tend to do, this one takes care to point out that a “Microaggression is not ‘Micro’ in Impact,” because “if it impacts someone, and it’s a big deal to them, it’s not micro.”

The guide goes on to explain that it’s the job of the school community to tackle any and all microaggressions using methods such as reporting them to the administration and/or doing a “check-in” with any perceived victim, which is something that I’m not sure would go over so well in the case of the chair example. (“Hey Jessica, I noticed you are way too fat for all the chairs in class, and I just want you to know that I’m here for you” doesn’t really sound like it would be too helpful or kind.)

It’s as if people are trying to find new groups of people to be persuaded of their victimhood.

I remember after 9/11 thinking about how the country had spent the summer of 2001 worrying about the disappearance of Chandra Levy and whether or not Congressman Gary Condit had anything to do with it. It all seemed so very trivial after the events of 9/11 and rather depressing to think that that was what we’d been distracted by day after day. I’m not saying that her murder wasn’t tragic, but think of all the stories that we missed because people were endlessly speculating about what had happened to her. Whenever the news seems especially crazy, I start thinking about that moment and fear that some terrible event will overshadow all these stupidities and wake us all up to what we’ve been missing.