Triggered

  Before he was president, my father watched as Democrats exported the American dream to our competitors while Americans—good, hardworking Americans—struggled, and it sickened him. That dream was our only substantive export for decades. He was sick of watching other countries who hate our guts prosper, while our prospects went down the drain because of Democrats’ decisions. They were exporting the American dream to people who despised our freedoms and our values, all while our citizens suffered. Donald J. Trump brought that dream back to where it belongs—right here in the U.S. of A.

  After what my father and his administration have accomplished for workers in their first three years—tax cuts, raises in workers’ salaries, historically low unemployment—there is absolutely no defensible reason for a working-class voter to support any Democrat. By making ideas such as socialism and open borders mainstream tenets of the Democrat Party, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, et al, have made the United States less livable than ever for members of the working class. Instead of investing in workers, they have helped ship jobs overseas, costing the American workforce countless jobs and opportunities. They’ve also allowed thousands of people to enter the country as illegal immigrants—who take, far too often, from the system while contributing nothing. What better way to destroy American progress than by having overcrowded schools and health care systems that collapse under the strain of a growing population of dependents who won’t ever pay into our systems? Only a Democrat could possibly think that’s a good idea!

  8.

  BACK TO SCHOOL

  YOU MIGHT BE SURPRISED AT WHAT THE MONEY YOU PAY FOR TUITION BUYS YOU.

  So you disagree with someone.

  Congratulations! You’ve officially taken your first step toward making the world a better place. In this country, disagreement and debate—especially in the political arena—are the two most important things we have. They are what made the United States of America great in the first place. Without them, we’d still be a British colony and learning how to curtsy to the monarch while sipping afternoon tea.

  Still, this is 2019. Before you go disagreeing with someone, you should know that debate and disagreement aren’t what they used to be. For instance, if the person you disagree with is a member of a minority group and you’re not, you’re going to have to shut up. Also, if that person is a woman and you’re not, you’ll have to shut up. Oh, and if you make more money than the person you disagree with, you’ll have to shut up.

  To make matters easier, I’ve compiled this handy checklist so you’ll know the rules going forward.

  Don’s Handy Checklist for Not Getting Called Racist, Misogynist, Fill-in-the-Blank Phobic

  Are you:

  White?

  Straight?

  Male?

  Christian?

  Cisgender? (This, as I understand it, is our new word for when you “identify” as being the same gender you were assigned at birth. In other words, if you have man parts and feel like a man, or woman parts and feel like a woman.)

  If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, you may want to shut up. If you answered “yes” to all five, you definitely need to shut up (yes, even if your parts match the way you feel).

  If you answered “yes” to only one or two, hold on. We’re not done yet. Here’s the second part of the list:

  Is the person you disagree with:

  African American/Asian/Hispanic/Native American?

  A woman?

  A Muslim?

  A Democrat?

  Poor?

  Transgender?

  Under a lot of stress right now?

  An illegal immigrant?

  If you checked off any of these boxes, unfortunately, you’re also going to have to shut up. In fact, why don’t you just strap a dog muzzle on your face. These days, that’s the only way you’ll be able to make the radical left in this country happy. This kind of muzzling has been going on for so long that most people probably don’t even realize the strangeness of it anymore. The left owns most of the space in the public square, having all the major news organizations on its side. It’s the same with social (or not-so-social) media. They have a literal army of social justice warriors across every medium. They even have the vast majority of colleges and universities covered, to ensure that the next generation of voters are brainwashed young! Don’t get me started on safe spaces, where you can express all your feelings in a three-foot-square designated box on campus.

  But what happens if you reverse the roles?

  Well, then, none of the above applies. If you’re a black Muslim woman looking to criticize a white male, not only can you do so with complete impunity, you get to be a guest on The Rachel Maddow Show. And once you get there, whatever you say is gospel. Your feelings—and you—are infallible.

  Today, those on the left are allowed to say whatever they want with zero consequences. They’re allowed to question anyone, protest anyone, and start riots in opposition to anyone, and nothing will happen in return. The liberal press will make them look heroic. CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times have all used the phrase “antihate protestors” to describe Antifa thugs. You don’t hear the press say a bad word about the extremely dangerous rhetoric that comes from Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and the rest of the Squad. But if a conservative says or does something they don’t like—such as, I don’t know, getting booked to speak at the University of California, Berkeley, or some other bastion of higher learning—well, then, he or she is a racist or a sexist or a person without a soul.

  Nowhere is this double standard more evident than on college campuses, where everything is permitted and no one is in control. During the time I spent on the campaign in 2016, I learned that some of the most dangerous ideas that permeate our culture today originate in the classrooms of our most liberal universities. That’s where liberals have their feelings coddled, their worst impulses encouraged, and their brains warped by weird radical theories. They want diversity in everything except thought. Conservatives, on the other hand, are told to shut up and stay in the shadows. Countless times on college campuses I’ve had scared conservative students come up to me to say thank you for making them feel normal and welcome in their school. It is that bad and worse. Below is the first paragraph of an op-ed piece written last year by a student on the staff of the Yale Daily News.

  Republicans are single-handedly destroying the Yale community. They do not offer anything substantial to our campus. They are all racist, bigoted, homophobes, whose mere presence serves as an unwelcome reminder that Donald J. Trump is our president. The very idea that there are Republicans lurking among us is truly disturbing and offensive. I am tired of having to share a campus with people who hate minorities and support the patriarchy. If Yale is truly a progressive school that cares about the safety and mental health of its students, it will stop accepting Republicans.

  The insanity probably reached a tipping point around September 2017, when a mainstream conservative named Ben Shapiro was invited to speak at UC Berkeley. It had been a while since I had been on a college campus long enough to know just how crazy they were. But I was watching the news coverage in my office, and the whole thing seemed very familiar. As the event drew closer, protestors gathered where the event was going to take place. The crowd began chanting “No Trump. No KKK. No fascist USA!” in unison.

  Around the building, there were police in full riot gear. Obviously, the Berkeley administration had learned from its mistakes. A few months earlier, it had allowed a speech by a conservative British political commentator, Milo Yiannopoulos, to be shut down by the social justice mob. Student activists and members of Antifa had shown up with weapons and wearing hockey pads, ready to rumble. The campus police hadn’t been prepared to deal with that kind of assault. By the end of that night, the protestors had caused about $500,000 worth of damage and brutally assaulted dozens of people who had stood in their way—or, in some cases, people who had just happened to be walking by.

&nbs
p; The next time someone tells you that free speech is not under assault or in danger in this country, remind them that we often have to deploy full SWAT teams to make sure it’s protected, which is what was done at the Shapiro event. Combine that with the constant threat of doxing by the online outrage mob and you can see that the left has made great inroads to limit freedom of speech and thought. The threat is real. Watching the news coverage, I couldn’t help but laugh. I met Ben Shapiro only once, but anyone who’s read a few lines of his work can tell straightaway that he is not a “fascist” or a member of the KKK. In fact, he’s among the few people in this country who have been willing to speak the truth about the Democrat Party’s association with racism, slavery, and the KKK. He’s also an Orthodox Jew, which would probably make it hard for him to be a Nazi, too. And, he’s not a Donald J. Trump supporter.

  But those distinctions don’t matter to people who show up at speeches to protest, burn things, and cause violence. There’s no nuance in their view of the world. To them, you’re either with them or against them. And if you’re against them, you’re evil. (I’ve always found it funny that the same people who’ll tell you there are something like fifteen genders are the same people who tell you that politics boils down to either “Nazi” or “not Nazi.”)

  Before Shapiro’s appearance, the University of California, Berkeley, smugly released this message: “Our commitment to free speech, as well as to the law, mandates that the students who invited Shapiro be able to host their event for those who wish to hear him speak.”

  In other words, yeah, we’re committed to free speech, and we’re so gloriously tolerant of other opinions that we’ll let this event go on as planned.

  Also, we might get sued if we don’t.

  In the same statement, the university announced that it would offer counseling services to anyone who was traumatized or triggered by the speech, saying it was “deeply concerned about the impact some speakers may have on individuals’ sense of safety and belonging. No one should be made to feel threatened or harassed simply because of who they are or for what they believe.”

  Bear in mind that we’re not talking about people who were tied to a chair and had Shapiro’s speech blared into their ears through headphones. We’re talking about people who didn’t even attend the speech, who just happened to be on campus (no doubt wearing scarves and tossing Frisbees) while the event was going on—people who probably wouldn’t even have known Shapiro was even there if it hadn’t been for the university-wide email blast about it. In some sense, it was almost as if the university wanted to make it clear how much it hated Ben Shapiro and wanted to suggest that anyone who wasn’t upset like a little baby about it was some kind of moral Neanderthal.

  This is how universities communicate passive aggression. This is how they become complicit in the stifling of free speech.

  And the fact that it happened at Berkeley, the supposed bastion of free speech, is insanely ironic.

  Back in the early 1960s, when students were marching for civil rights and trying to organize against the Vietnam War, the campus of UC Berkeley became the source of the Free Speech Movement. In those days, it was the university, not the students, that was trying to shut down certain speakers and stifle the free expression of ideas. In fact, the students had to hold peaceful protests to defend their right to express ideas that might be offensive or “triggering” or dangerous. They were willing to sit for hours, be arrested, and be ridiculed just to stand up for their right to free speech, no matter how disgusting or inflammatory that speech was.

  Before the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, discussing politics on campus was all but forbidden. You couldn’t have a rally or hold an event unless it was sanctioned by the university, and the university wouldn’t sanction anything it thought was too inflammatory (read: interesting). After the Free Speech Movement, colleges became what they had always been supposed to be: places where your ideas are challenged, your mind is tested, and everyone is free to express his or her beliefs without fear of retribution from crazy people.

  Sadly, that’s usually not what happens anymore. Today, free speech is no longer free. Berkeley spent $600,000 for security for Shapiro.

  At the start of the campaign, I didn’t plan on visiting a whole lot of college campuses. I assumed that stump speeches happened mostly in parking lots and diners, all the places where middle-aged working-class voters hung out and talked. But after the first few events I did in support of my father, we started to notice that the people coming to see me were pretty young. Some were still in high school and college. I don’t know whether it was my use of social media or my boyish charm and good looks, but within a few weeks, I had become one of the most requested speakers by campus groups all over the country. When I really started traveling for the campaign, giving several speeches a day, I decided to add a few campuses to my agenda, just to see what all the fuss was about.

  I had barely been back on a college campus since I had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. I had seen a campus only on the rare occasions when I had gone back to Wharton, where I would occasionally be invited to give speeches on business and my career in real estate. But then again, I had been talking mostly to the sane, well-adjusted portion of the student body. I’d had absolutely no idea what was lurking in the halls of the other buildings: the gender studies offices, the counseling centers, the microaggression prevention rooms.

  Needless to say, I knew little of the way things worked on campus anymore, but I knew from friends and the news that they had changed a whole lot. According to stories, the kids were protesting anything they didn’t agree with, refusing to read books that contained violence—which, in my opinion, excluded some great classics—and disinviting speakers they deemed “dangerous.” I had no idea what I was in for, so I decided to enlist some help with my “youth outreach” operation.

  A few months earlier, I had met a young guy named Charlie Kirk. We’d been introduced by an old college friend of mine. From what I could gather in those first brief conversations, Charlie was a bright young guy who was focused on all the right things. He’d founded his own political organization when he was only eighteen years old—Turning Point USA—which fought liberal bias and the discrimination against conservatives that was happening in colleges all over the country. Long before anyone saw that those things were a problem, Charlie did. And he was trying to do something about them.

  Anything I encountered on a campus, Charlie had already seen it and knew exactly how to handle it. Over the years, Charlie had had everything from Coca-Cola to chairs thrown at him. More than once, as I’d be giving a speech and protestors would try to shout me down, Charlie would get his Turning Point USA supporters to shout “USA! USA! USA!” until they filled the auditorium and Antifa or the social justice warriors (SJWs) would lose their willpower. He also made sure that everyone on campus knew where the speeches would be held and ensured that all the events began on time and without a hitch. But Charlie was also instrumental in helping me understand the crisis that was building in our nation’s colleges. Without him and the experience of seeing things play out and hearing stories from real students, I don’t think I would be as alarmed as I am.

  I don’t think I was ever called a “Nazi” to my face, but I certainly heard the word more than once. These days, as Charlie and the rest of the Turning Point USA crowd explained, anyone the left doesn’t agree with is a “Nazi.” But I also heard other things that were just as troubling.

  At one university, the protestors suggested that my words would “do violence” to marginalized communities on campus, such as people of color or members of the LGBTQ community. Apparently, those kids did not mean that word metaphorically. They really meant, with no hint of irony, that having to hear opinions they didn’t agree with would actually be a violent act against them, the same way a punch in the face—or a blow from a bike lock—would be. And by the way, I would never say anything derogatory about people in the LGBTQ community or people of color,
let alone try to do them harm.

  But in today’s climate, words have completely lost their meanings. When conservatives speak, it’s called “violence.” When liberals react to that speech by beating people up and throwing rocks through windows, it’s called “self-defense.” When a conservative says “America is a good country” or “God bless America,” that’s called hate speech. When a liberal says “all white people should be extinct,” as Sarah Jeong from the New York Times said, that’s called ironic protest. Suddenly, liberals classify whether something is a violent act based on how it makes them feel, not whether the person who committed the act—or, in most cases, spoke the words—actually intended them to be violent or controversial. Intent doesn’t matter; feelings do.

  To even begin to understand how we got here, it’s important to zoom out and look at all the factors involved.

  Although it goes back many years, the problem seems to have ramped up around 2010 or so, when a generation of kids who’d been raised with phones in their hands and participation trophies on their shelves first entered college. Their whole lives, those kids had been taught by their helicopter parents that feelings are the only things that matter and that they shouldn’t have to be exposed to anything they don’t like. Instead of playing outside and scraping their knees, those kids stayed on social media and got a 24/7 mainline of garbage and outrage beamed right into their brains.

  It’s no wonder they came out soft and unable to function.