Yik Yak: Enemy of Campus Political Correctness

Given the stifling political correctness that prevails on most college campuses, and the fact that a dissenting opinion is likely to be met with bullying (if not actual official punishment), it’s not surprising if conservative students keep their heads down, and are afraid to speak up.

But one type of social media allows them to speak up anonymously. Yik Yak allows student in a particular geographic area or at a particular school (say: Marquette) to speak up and dissent from the intolerant orthodoxy.

Naturally, the politically correct leftists don’t like this. For example, they label posts that fail to show sufficient respect for their proclaimed grievances as “racist.” This has happened at Claremont College, and here at Marquette.

At both Marquette and Claremont, the the vast majority of “racist” tweets were not racist at all. They just disagree with the activists.

Not surprisingly, campus leftists and college administrations want to put an end to this. As an article in The College Fix explains, “Campuses ‘symbolically’ ban Yik Yak as battle over app rages.” Some colleges have blocked Yik Yak from their college Wi-Fi networks. Of course, this isn’t very effective, since students can connect via the cell phone infrastructure.

In this, college campuses resemble authoritarian nations, in which the party in power tries to censor and block communications that the regime dislikes, but technology keeps undermining the effort.

And yes, contemporary U.S. campuses are the nearest thing in American society to foreign authoritarian regimes.

Update

Students used Yik Yak to pan, and kill a required environmentalist indoctrination course at Eastern Michigan University. Interestingly, the faculty union demanded that students who posted nasty tweets about the course should be tracked down and punished. They were not.

Further Update

Of course, the politically correct want politically incorrect voices silenced, and nobody is more intolerant of politically incorrect speech than feminists. Thus we have the following from the The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Seventy-two women’s and civil-rights groups on Wednesday announced a campaign to enlist the federal government in pressuring colleges to protect students from harassment via anonymous social-media applications like Yik Yak.

The groups have sent the U.S. Education Department a letter calling for it to treat colleges’ failure to monitor anonymous social media and to pursue online harassers as a violation of federal civil-rights laws guaranteeing equal educational access.

What do they mean by “violation of federal civil-rights laws guaranteeing equal educational access?” They mean people are allowed to criticize feminists!

The article in the The Chronicle of Higher Education has some of the offending posts, and all of them clearly fall into the category of constitutionally protected speech, directed against the a campus Feminists United club. The list is below:



Calling feminists “feminazis” or “femicunts” is grossly uncivil, but it’s no worse than calling Republicans “Republithugs” which leftists do all over political discussion groups and comments sections on the Internet.

Likewise, suggesting sending the feminist women off to an all women’s college where there are no men and no non-feminist opinions to tolerate is a jib against feminists. But implying that feminists hate men and are intolerant of other opinions is no worse than claiming that Republicans hate the poor, which liberals do all the time. In fact, it’s closer to being factual.

The Yik Yak posts, in other words, are not threats, and not even hate speech directed toward women as a group, but political taunts directed at people with particular opinions.

But feminists think they represent women generally, and they think that criticizing them is hate speech directed against all women. In other words, feminists think their political opinions are privileged, and nobody should be allowed to criticize them.

And they want government to punish anybody who does.

Which is to say that they (or at least the campus activists among them) are nasty authoritarians.

Supposedly Racist Tweets at Claremont College Aren’t

A bunch of black students staged a “black lives matter die-in” at Claremont College, apparently taking over a public space and inconveniencing students who just wanted to get some food or get some studying done.

A fair number of students were unimpressed with the demonstration, and said so on Yik Yak.

How did the black students respond? By calling the tweets “racist” and making a video reading some of them.

Of course, there was nothing racist about the tweets unless you think that any dissent or failure to be supportive is racist. Check out the supposedly racist statements.



This, of course, exactly parallels tweets Marquette students posted in response to a “diversity” demonstration that blocked traffic on Wisconsin Avenue. In that case also, a lot of Marquette students were unsympathetic, and said so on Yik Yak (Facebook login required to view page). Good for those Marquette students.

Note to leftist students: get out of your little politically correct bubble and face the fact that a lot of people disagree with you. And the vast majority of people who disagree with you are not racist, they just don’t buy your arguments.

The little world you live in, pampered and coddled by university bureaucrats and leftist faculty, isn’t the real world that exists off college campuses. Your college experience is teaching you things that don’t transfer well into the real world. The tweets responding to your antics are a dose of that real world, and if you stubbornly insist on demonizing the people who post them, you are marginalizing yourself.