The student who wrote this is anonymous and the piece was published by Thomas Lindsay of See Thru Edu.

Campus Cannibals?: A Student’s Take on Political Correctness

The fact that far-leftists are stifling free speech on college campuses has become almost a truism. But things have taken a surprising turn: leftist censorship has turned on itself. Recently a self-described liberal professor confessed students, and the classic feminist play “The Vagina Monologues” was banned from campus because it committed the crime of assuming women have vaginas.

These recent leftist self-immolations have left me wondering what’s going on. From a tactical political perspective, it makes sense to shut down debates about abortion if you’re radically pro-choice, as recently happened at Oxford University. But this fervor is more than politics; it’s almost a religion. What’s going on?

I recently took a look under the hood of the radical leftist ideologies that are stifling free speech on campus. Here’s what I found: Speech is now about identity, not ideas. Some leftists now believe that what people have to say is less important than who is saying it.

The root of the problem is relativism, the idea that there is no objective truth, but only narratives “constructed” by individuals largely on the basis of race, class and gender. Because no ideas can be described as “true,” identity becomes the most important basis on which to judge speech.

You see this, for example, in the recent Jenner affair. In a Vanity Fair article, Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner said that women’s brains are different from men’s. As a trans woman, Caitlyn is a member of an oppressed group and so has been widely lauded by liberals. But when a white, heterosexual man—Harvard President Larry Summers—made the same point that men’s brains differ from women’s, he was crucified and fired for it. Why the difference in reactions? One word: identity. Larry Summers is a white, heterosexual man, which makes him either the arch oppressor or, at very best, the heir of piles of privilege. Jenner is a member of an oppressed group, and so is free to espouse ideas that the privileged Summers cannot.