A crime occurs when someone feels a hurt triggered

From The Campus Crusaders by David Brooks.

These students are driven by noble impulses to do justice and identify oppression. They want to not only crack down on exploitation and discrimination, but also eradicate the cultural environment that tolerates these things. They want to police social norms so that hurtful comments are no longer tolerated and so that real bigotry is given no tacit support. Of course, at some level, they are right. Callous statements in the mainstream can lead to hostile behavior on the edge. That’s why we don’t tolerate Holocaust denial.

But when you witness how this movement is actually being felt on campus, you can’t help noticing that it sometimes slides into a form of zealotry. If you read the website of the group FIRE, which defends free speech on campus, if you read Kirsten Powers’s book, “The Silencing,” if you read Judith Shulevitz’s essay “In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas” that was published in The Times in Sunday Review on March 22, you come across tales of professors whose lives are ruined because they made innocent remarks; you see speech codes that inhibit free expression; you see reputations unfairly scarred by charges of racism and sexism.

The problem is that the campus activists have moral fervor, but don’t always have settled philosophies to restrain the fervor of their emotions. Settled philosophies are meant to (but obviously don’t always) instill a limiting sense of humility, a deference to the complexity and multifaceted nature of reality. But many of today’s activists are forced to rely on a relatively simple social theory.

According to this theory, the dividing lines between good and evil are starkly clear. The essential conflict is between the traumatized purity of the victim and the verbal violence of the oppressor.

According to this theory, the ultimate source of authority is not some hard-to-understand truth. It is everybody’s personal feelings. A crime occurs when someone feels a hurt triggered, or when someone feels disagreed with or “unsafe.” In the Shulevitz piece, a Brown student retreats from a campus debate to a safe room because she “was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against” her dearly and closely held beliefs.

Today’s campus activists are not only going after actual acts of discrimination — which is admirable. They are also going after incorrect thought — impiety and blasphemy. They are going after people for simply failing to show sufficient deference to and respect for the etiquette they hold dear. They sometimes conflate ideas with actions and regard controversial ideas as forms of violence.

"Going after actual acts of discrimination." Would that they were. As far as I can tell, they are suppressing freedom of speech in pursuit of abstract, theoretical hurts. They want to control others, not in order to solve a problem but simply in order to exercise control. There is no problem solving and there are no solutions. Just a power grab. Whenever they come with an iconic face of a problem, such as Crystal Mangum, Emma Sulkowicz, "Jackie", etc. it turns out that there was no problem at all. There was a malicious lie.

When pressed for actuals cases where there was real discrimination or real injury, they either fail to deliver or they come up with cases that are already being addressed through the established system of laws and courts.

Brooks gives these people a pass by according them the cloak of good intentions. But if they were good people, they would care about the reality of their assumptions and the consequences of their actions. They don't. They are, broadly, unfeeling, totalitarian bigots.