The effects of ideas hatched and promoted into the culture by academia cannot be denied. Neither can it be denied that they can morph beyond their intitial application into power social weapons.
The term hate speech began it all.
Next we had students taking the academic trope “trigger words” along with the claim that if your words trigger a bad reaction in me, you should not have a right to say those words. Students began demanding various professors did not have right to say some things in the class room. Then their speech was truncated further by college administrations comming up with rules for the professors to simply avoid certain words and phrases - a long list of them.
Next we had the state of California enacting a law that made it a crime (for state workers) to not address a “transgender” person with the pronoun that person demands be used for them.
The ediface of (a) you can’t say that, and (b) if you do I have a right to violently react to it, was birthed in academia and made manifest in all sorts of ways all over society.
From it all it is not really strange that the idiot Will Smith thought it was his right to attack Chris Rock or that an audience member would attack Dave Chappelle.
To find the folks who light the flames of social outrage you need not look any further than the explosive and incindiary extreme hyberpole of the top Dim politicians reacting to the abortion decision leak from the Supreme Court. And folks wonder why the nation is so divided yet refuse to identify the major sources of the extreme divisions - the party of the Democrats.
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
― George Orwell, 1984
“The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”
― George Orwell, 1984