Andrew Sullivan on the war on dissenters:

Five years ago when I wrote “We All Live On Campus Now,” I noted how illiberal practices that originated in elite colleges — bullying, ostracism, public condemnation, speech shutdowns, purges of dissenters — were becoming common in every sphere of life, super-charged by social media. From 2020 on, that dynamic has intensified, especially in journalism, with the media purges of 2020 lifted straight from the campus woke playbook.

And this week, we saw another campus maneuver: an open letter from a thousand or so New York Times contributors, accusing the NYT of “follow[ing] the lead of far-right hate groups” in its coverage of transgender issues. Other campus tactics: a loud demo outside; alliance between insiders and outsider activists; public shaming of named journalists; accusations that the NYT is a “workplace made hostile by bias” (the now-familiar HR gambit); and non-negotiable demands for even more hiring solely on the basis of identity and ideology.

But the New York Times isn’t a university. Newspapers have different goals, different rules, different standards, different criteria and reasons for the criteria, different consumers/markets – so many differences. Universities cater to people who don’t have fully developed brains yet; newspapers do not. Student activism isn’t always bad or repressive or wrongheaded…but sometimes it is.

Students like having A Cause that the adults have neglected, and they have been known to do great work. The Civil Rights struggle featured a lot of students, and they helped it wake up a callous nation. But Trans Activism is Not Like That. The activists want it to be, but it isn’t. The cause isn’t the same and it isn’t even similar, not even similarish. It’s grotesquely dissimilar – it’s luxury protest as opposed to the life and death kind.