I spent the morning tweeting about this. Historian Rick Perlstein has written an instant history of the campus protests which puts the whole thing down to moral panic. It’s a well written piece in the sense that he manages to present the facts in such a way that his conclusions feel almost inescapable. At least that’s true if you haven’t really been paying attention, or maybe only getting all your information from MSNBC and The Nation. Here’s a sample:
You might have already stomached some of the videos of last week’s most harrowing abuses. At the University of Wisconsin, a balding, bespectacled professor face down, two cops pinning his left arm sharply behind his back, and a disabled professor getting her dress torn and suffering internal damage from police strangulation. The 65-year-old former head of Dartmouth’s Jewish studies program who dared scream “What are you…
