Citing FIRE’s 2027 student survey, the author says 69% accept shouting down a speaker, 50% blocking one, and 30% accept violence. He treats that as campus intolerance worse than a pub and as a homegrown problem that outside pressure, not the campus itself, must fix.

He applies Mattias Desmet’s “mass formation”—a group that shuts out dissent—to campuses and to Covid-era firing of Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff. Classrooms are called a left-led captive audience; FIRE, he notes, finds most students afraid to speak.

He argues TV once tested ideas on Crossfire until Jon Stewart helped kill it in 2005 after liberals lost nightly debates. Without conservative challenge on campus and in media, he says closed minds harden—and, at the extreme, toward violence. 

I have been saying for many years that there is more tolerance for free speech in your local pub than on your local college campus.

This point was driven home again with the recent publication of the 2027 survey of college students done by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Yesterday, I wrote a piece that provided the evidence. Today I want to discuss why this is happening; the analysis is my own, not that of FIRE.

Let’s focus on the three most salient examples of intolerance on college campuses. Seven-in-ten (69%) say it is acceptable to shout down a speaker; half (50%) say it is okay to block someone from speaking; 30% believe that violence is........

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