Tucker Carlson On Smith College

Tucker Carlson and the New York Times have both picked up on the cultural and political significance of the fiasco at Smith College.

“NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — In midsummer of 2018, Oumou Kanoute, a Black student at Smith College, recounted a distressing American tale: She was eating lunch in a dorm lounge when a janitor and a campus police officer walked over and asked her what she was doing there.

The officer, who could have been carrying a “lethal weapon,” left her near “meltdown,” Ms. Kanoute wrote on Facebook, saying that this encounter continued a yearlong pattern of harassment at Smith.

“All I did was be Black,” Ms. Kanoute wrote. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith College, and my existence overall as a woman of color.” …

But they did not offer any public apology or amends to the workers whose lives were gravely disrupted by the student’s accusation.

This is a tale of how race, class and power collided at the elite 145-year-old liberal arts college, where tuition, room and board top $78,000 a year and where the employees who keep the school running often come from working-class enclaves beyond the school’s elegant wrought iron gates. The story highlights the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with it. …”

The Wokelash is coming.

As the Silent Generation dies off, the Baby Boomers retire, Gen Xers become elders and the Millennials start entering middle age, the brats are coming to power on the progressive Left. Alternatively, their peers who reacted against them and who defined their own identities against political correctness and wokeness and in favor of nationalism and populism are coming to power on the Right.

Why didn’t it happen sooner? It is because so many old people were still in power and Baby Boomers refuse to retire. Congress is still a gerontcracy that is decades behind the times. 40% of Older Conservatives think racial equality is a very important issue. 3.8% of Younger Conservatives feel the same way along with only 20% of Moderate Younger Middle Income Voters. No one under the age of 40 on the Right remembers the Civil Rights Movement or the Thirty Glorious Years. The Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton were the face of “civil rights” when we were growing up. Antiracism is also synonymous now in our times with political correctness and wokeness and hating White people. The mainstream media has lost its legitimacy and has become synonymous with the Democratic Party.

The moral halo of the Civil Rights Movement which was so powerful back in the 1960s and 1970s simply does not exist anymore. The Rev. Al Sharpton didn’t have the gravitas of MLK in the 1990s and 2000s. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi have even less gravitas than Al Sharpton in the 2010s and 2020s.