What is Wrong with So Many College Kids?

Video footage of youths cheering the spectacle of murder warrants a rigorous psychological and cultural investigation.

I just received an Instagram post displaying a video of what appears to be an American college kid using a bullhorn to lead a jubilant chant:

We got Charlie in the neck!

We got Charlie in the neck!

Who’s next?

What is wrong with American kids like him, who appear to be shockingly numerous? The only well-documented equivalent I can find in history are descriptions of the cheering crowds that gathered around the guillotine erected in the Place de la Concorde during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.

Documents from the time describe a carnival atmosphere of great excitement and jubilation, with rising tension as the condemned mounted the scaffold and placed his or her head in the stock under the blade. The crowd then erupted in cries of joy and “Vive la République!" when the blade severed the head. Some people then pressed forward to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood of the executed to keep as mementos. Vendors sold souvenirs and programs and miniature guillotines for dinner parties to slice bread and vegetables. Women apparently enjoyed the spectacle as much as men. The Tricoteuses ("knitters") sat beside the scaffold, knitting and keeping a running tally of the heads that dropped.

In France, the Reign of Terror began in 1793, but the British statesman and writer, Edmund Burke, predicted in 1790 that it was coming.

How did Burke—a liberal member of Parliament who strongly advocated that Parliament listen to the grievances of the American colonists—know that the French Revolution would descend into bestial violence?

He knew because his informants in Paris carefully described to him the depravity and ideological possession of the Revolution’s early leaders. Such leaders had many of the same appalling character traits as today’s college administrators, who do nothing to promote free speech and show respect for so-called “conservative” speakers who are, as a matter of course, threatened with violence by deranged, brainwashed students.

As Daniel McCarthy just wrote in The Spectator:

. . . colleges and universities across the country have long discouraged or completely prevented conservatives from speaking by demanding heavy security expenditures and indemnities against left-wing violence. Instead of imposing the costs of violence on those who threaten violence, institutions of higher education in our country impose those costs on those who are threatened.

American institutions of higher education have fallen far into a very dark place and this descent has been ushered by morally and intellectually depraved administrators. The only way to restore dignity and reason to such institutions is to fire most of the administrative staff of most colleges. Let them get real world jobs doing something useful.