Snowflake Meltdown
11th November 2016
Mark Steyn draws a comparison.
This is probably not the occasion to compare the vast conscript armies who slogged it out on the Western Front a century ago with their solipsistic progeny, the ululating ninnies of Generation Snowflake. This week American universities, now among the most expensive yet worthless institutions on the planet, have held mass “cry-ins” to protest Tuesday’s election. At the University of Michigan, sufferers from PTSD (Post-Trumptastic Stress Disorder) were consoled with Play-Doh and coloring books. Can you imagine any of the teenagers who stormed the beaches of Normandy – boys who were men, and often five, six, seven years younger than today’s elderly “students” – agreeing to participate in anything so ostentatiously self-indulgent as a “cry-in” followed by free Play-Doh?
What comes after the cry-ins? Monisha Rajesh, a journalist with The Guardian and my old newspaper The Sunday Telegraph, is hot for a “presidential assasination”. In 2008, the left were luridly fantasizing about what I called Obama assassination porn – how the bigoted right would surely not wait long to kill the first black president. Eight years later, the same people actively urge the assassination of his successor. They are what they imagine their opponents to be.