Triggered

  Writing about the phenomenon in The Atlantic, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt warned against the dangers of helicopter parents and social media. As they put it, “it’s not hard to imagine why students arriving on campus today might be more desirous of protection and more hostile toward ideological opponents than in generations past.… Social media makes it extraordinarily easy to join crusades, express solidarity and outrage, and shun traitors.” They also pointed out, correctly I think, that “social media has fundamentally shifted the balance of power in relationships between students and faculty; the latter increasingly fear what students might do to their reputations and careers by stirring up online mobs against them.”

  For me, that made sense. I can only imagine what my life as a college student would have been like if we had had Twitter and Facebook. Today, I wake up and thank God we didn’t have social media or cameras on our phones back then. So do all of my friends. For me, life was a little different. During my freshman-year move-in day at Penn, I was the only student in my building who came alone to the dorm and unpacked my own stuff. After my mom’s wine at Taco Bell incident, I was relieved to be 100 percent solo at Penn.

  By that time, I had already done the whole move-in, say-good-bye routine about five times at boarding school. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I could unload the car and have my bed made with military precision in about six minutes flat.

  But for young people who’ve gone to college in the last few years, things are very different. All their lives, their parents went with them everywhere, and all their friends knew where they were at all times. They were living through some of the most volatile emotional years of their lives, and they had a massive audience at their fingertips. All they had to do was tweet, and the whole world would move for them. That’s the kind of power you shouldn’t have at any age.

  Time and time again on the campaign trail, I saw their tactics in action. Even when I wasn’t the target, I heard countless stories of speakers being disinvited from campus, conservative professors being “outed” by the online outrage mob, and college administrators—who are supposed to be the adults—acquiescing to crazy demands from the SJW crowd. The examples could fill a whole separate book, but here’s one.

  Just before Halloween in 2015, faculty members at Yale sent out an email telling students to avoid “offensive” costumes on Halloween. The email forbade students from wearing anything that included “culturally appropriative” elements, including sombreros, fake mustaches, and traditional Asian dresses. (If it was Harvard, would they have retroactively put Elizabeth Warren on notice?) A few days later, a lecturer named Erika Christakis wrote an email to students she supervised raising the question of whether the college should be telling students what they could and could not wear. She suggested that they figure it out for themselves—you know, like grown-ups do.

  After all, who is the arbiter of what is considered “offensive”? Is something offensive just because a person who complains says so? Is there some kind of scale? No one seems to know.

  Christakis seemed to have noticed that problem, and she did what she could to point it out. She was an adviser to all those students. It was her job to give them guidance on issues such as this.

  “Talk to each other,” she wrote. “Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society.” The email was very diplomatic, written in the spirit of conversation and debate. Obviously, the woman was not looking to start a fight.

  But the mob got hold of it, and they gave her one. The email spread like brush fire all over Twitter and Facebook, and soon there was a whole mob of people trying to get Erika Christakis and her husband, Nicholas, both of whom live on the Yale campus, to resign. Just days later, in a scene that would become famous and go viral, a group of hundreds of students gathered outside their house. They wrote vile messages on their house in chalk and screamed at them. When Nicholas came out to speak with them, the mob demanded that he apologize. They accused him of “stripping people of their humanity” and “enabling violence.” They demanded a “safe space” where—I’m guessing—there would be no offensive Halloween costumes. They also demanded that he apologize for his wife’s email, which he refused to do.

  In a particularly chilling moment, the lead crazy person got into his face and started screaming. “Who the fuck hired you?” she demanded. “You should step down!… It’s not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! It’s about creating a home here.… You should not sleep safely at night. You are disgusting!”

  The faculty at Yale did nothing to help. Although some expressed sympathy in private, they were all too afraid to incur the wrath of the mob—which was made up of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old students—to speak out in support of Erika Christakis. Eventually she resigned from her position and her husband took a sabbatical. Once again, the mob won.

  A professor of math education at the University of Illinois wrote a paper declaring that math—that’s right, just good old math—was actually racist because it “operates as whiteness… and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as white.”

  Not long ago, 1,300 students at Oberlin College in Ohio signed a petition that would make a C the lowest grade that a student could receive in classes there. That was done, according to the letter, so that “no student would be made to feel less than ‘average.’” Sort of defeats the mathematical notion of “average.” But, remember: this is 2019, and math is racist. Another student demanded that before his class read Antigone, a classic Greek play that includes rape and violence, the professor should give “trigger warnings” so that no one would be “traumatized” by the violence in the play.

  Everyone seems to have accepted the notion that college students need to be protected from ideas that make them uncomfortable. Instead of going to college to be challenged, they go to college to be coddled and sheltered from things they don’t like.

  And this isn’t only an inference. The students have admitted it themselves. In a survey done in 2017, just after my father was elected and the fervor on campus was at its worst, 58 percent of college students said it was “important to be part of a campus community where I am not exposed to intolerant and offensive ideas.” When you narrow the respondents down to the ones who identify as “liberal,” the number goes up to 68 percent. In June of that year, a liberal professor named Lisa Feldman Barrett from Northeastern University published an op-ed in the New York Times titled “When Is Speech Violence?” Now, you might think, as I do, that the whole text of the article could have run about two words—“It isn’t”—but Professor Barrett went on for about eight hundred. “If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech—at least certain types of speech—can be a form of violence,” she wrote.

  It’s no wonder that students, with professors such as Barrett and publications that are willing to print their nonsense, act like babies in places that are all too willing to treat them that way. In fact, since the “great aWOKEning” came to college campuses around 2010, the number of administrators—whose sole responsibility is to coddle students and make sure they feel safe—has multiplied by a factor of five.

  In the period between 1975 and 2008, the number of full-time faculty in the University of California system (of which Berkeley is the most famous member) barely increased at all, going from around 11,614 to 12,019. In terms of growth, that’s actually on the low end. But the number of university administrators in the system spiraled out of control, from about 3,000 to 12,183. A massive percentage of the increase was “diversity officers,” people whose job it is to make sure that students do not feel offended and that they aren’t exposed to “microaggressions.”

  If you’ve never heard of these things, allow me to define “microaggression” for you. Coined by a professor at Harvard University in the late 1970s, the term refers to harmless questions and statements that, although pure or benign in intention, are offen
sive to members of certain minority groups, such as Asian Americans or African Americans. The list includes things such as “So where are you from?” or “You must do well in school.” It also includes things such as “I like your hair” and “What kind of music do you like?” Apparently, these questions and statements make members of minority groups feel “other” and “excluded,” and they reveal that the person asking the question or making the statement must be some kind of racist. I mean, think about it. Who hasn’t done this, just wanting to start a conversation? When I was a kid, questions like these were just considered common courtesy. Like common sense, however, common courtesy is out the window. Maybe you’re stuck in an elevator with someone, and you think a quick icebreaker might make the ride go faster. Well, not so fast, say the liberals. Next time you’re in an elevator with someone of a different ethnic group, put your head down, shut up, and think about your white privilege.

  Not only is the term ridiculous, it’s also based on a bad premise. It assumes that the intent of the speaker doesn’t matter and labels things as “aggressions” that actually aren’t aggressive at all. When you stop thinking that the intent of people matters, you take away all incentive to talk things out like adults. All of a sudden, you stop thinking that you can understand people by talking with them. As someone who talked with people for thousands of hours during the 2016 campaign, I know that this is incredibly dangerous. It also accepts the premise that speech is violence, making it seem perfectly fine that any violence you do in return for that speech is justified. It’s no wonder that students have decided it’s okay to throw rocks, turn over cars, and beat “Nazis” with flagpoles.

  I mean, if speech really is violence and accusing someone of a crime counts the same as punching someone in the face, there are a whole bunch of reporters at CNN I’m sure my family and I would love to see brought up on charges. Do you think anyone would complain if we threw cuffs on Jim Acosta for all his “word violence” against me and my family? Maybe Chris Cuomo or Rachel Maddow?

  Just a thought.

  We’ve been treating college students as if they were fragile little babies for so long that they break down the second they hear something they don’t agree with. This is the wrong way to think, and it should stop now.

  If I’ve learned one thing about children—and human beings in general—it’s that they can thrive only when they’re challenged. Just as your muscles won’t grow if you don’t put them under the stress of weight lifting and your mind won’t expand if you don’t fill it with difficult thoughts, books, and arguments, people can’t grow if they’re not made uncomfortable, or at least challenged, sometimes.

  According to an economist named Nassim Nicholas Taleb, there are three ways an object can be in the world: fragile; not fragile; or a third category, antifragile. When something is fragile, it breaks under stress and you can’t use it anymore. A glass vase is fragile; so are light bulbs. When you expose them to the stress of hitting the ground, they break and become useless. Other things, such as steel and rocks, don’t break no matter how much pressure you apply to them. On college campuses today, students are demanding to be treated as if they’re fragile. They say that if they’re exposed to too many bad ideas, they’ll break and cease to function. But human beings are not fragile, they are antifragile.

  Things in this third category actually become stronger the more pressure you apply to them. They can’t survive without stress and tension. This is the way human beings are, especially as children. The more stress we endure—to a point, of course—the stronger we become. And if we live a life that is completely free of stress—say, stretched out in bed for a year watching television—our muscles break down and we become useless. This is the reason we get sick so much as children and then not as much as adults: we’re building up immunities to things, getting used to living in the world. Since they were young, I’ve taken my kids up to our cabin so they can play outside in nature. I let my sons ride around the property on their quads, and if they fall, they’ve learned a lesson. I think it’s good to let them make their own mistakes and get their own bruises.

  Sometimes, of course, kids really do get hurt. A few years ago, for instance, my son Tristan took a hard fall on a family ski trip in Colorado and broke his leg pretty badly. We had to fly him back home to New York for surgery that required pins and plates to be put in his femur. But he recovered just fine, and he was right back on his skis the next year.

  As a side note, the very first call I got when Tristan went into surgery was from Vice President Mike Pence—not a secretary, not the switchboard operator, but Mike Pence himself. The guy really is as nice as people say. This happens time and time again with Vice President Pence, whether the news is good or bad. But overall, I think a little mud is a good thing, especially for young people.

  This is why we go to college when we’re young. It’s our time to try out different ideas, talk things out with people our own age, and be exposed to all kinds of things we won’t see once we get out into the real world. For this to be effective, it has to include ideas that some people would consider “offensive.” Otherwise, there’s no opportunity for growth.

  If you’ve been paying attention to this chapter, you might get the impression that all college campuses are horrible all the time—that they’re all filled with SJW freaks who want to shut down all speech that doesn’t make them feel safe. But visiting colleges wasn’t all bad. In fact, we managed to have some fun.

  Here’s a good example.

  As you might imagine, the last Saturday in October is a big weekend for college football, especially in the SEC and the ACC. On that Saturday, the Florida State Seminoles were hosting the Clemson Tigers in a night game. Charlie had worked out a short appearance for me in advance in a frat house on Florida State University’s campus.

  “It could get a little rowdy,” he warned me.

  How bad could it be? I wondered.

  The event in the frat house was billed a “tailgate,” but that description doesn’t really do justice to what we walked into. Comparing it to the movie Animal House doesn’t do it justice. I might have been a few years out of my frat boy element, but I quickly acclimated.

  I had forgotten about how rowdy those parties could get. All of a sudden, I was back in the backyards and frat houses of my college years. I remembered all the kegs of beer, sleepless nights, and bad hangovers as though they’d happened only yesterday. Later, Charlie would tell me that there had been some 1,300 people there, and I don’t doubt him for a moment. You couldn’t move. Charlie and Tommy Hicks had to literally push me through a sea of students, most of whom had been drinking since early that morning. Obviously, clothing was optional.

  I had been there only a few minutes when I realized that the people who had organized the little get-together expected me to give a speech. Though the house had a fairly large backyard, there wasn’t a patch of grass or dirt or anything that resembled ground. Every inch of grass was covered by humans. Following Charlie, I felt as though I were swimming through the crowd. Luckily for us, the human tide seemed to be headed toward some picnic tables, which I thought would be as good a stage as any. I’m not going to complain about any of what happened to me that evening. Along with rooting for the Seminoles, I would say that nearly everybody there was rooting for Trump. Someone handed me a microphone attached to a small amplifier, like the ones you use for karaoke. As I got up on the table, the crowd reacted enthusiastically to me. Maybe a little too enthusiastically.

  As I began to talk, the sea of Seminole fans started to close in. At the front of the human tidal wave was a group of coeds who had taken the clothing-optional suggestion to heart and started to climb up on the table. Now, I consider myself a pretty handsome guy (Hey, I’m a Trump. What’d you expect?), but I had never thought of myself as girls-climbing-onto-a-picnic-table-to-get-at-me handsome. But I was that night. Very quickly, we realized we had lost any semblance of control over the crowd. Leaving the way we came in, however, was not an o
ption. For a moment, I thought I would meet an untimely end by being trampled to death by coeds. I guess there are worse ways to go. Luckily, Charlie noticed a fence at the back of the yard. Heads down as hands grabbed at us, we burrowed through the mass of flesh. I went over the fence like a recruit in Army Ranger School, though I think I lost a piece of my pant leg.

  Back in the safety of the car, I turned to Charlie. “Imagine if they didn’t like Trump?”

  We would get our share of those. We did an event at one of the campuses of the University of Michigan. It was a very aggressive environment—750 or more protestors. When we arrived, the Michigan State Police came up to us and said that they couldn’t guarantee our safety.

  “Where’s your security team?” one of the cops in charge asked.

  “What security team?” I asked, looking at Charlie and Tommy. “It’s just us.”

  Even some of the people with me said we should cancel. “Hell, no,” I told them. “If we cancel, they win.”

  As it turned out, it was one of the best events we did. The energy was electric, with each side trying to drown out the other.

  There were other times we got help when we didn’t even ask for it. About a week before the election, we went to Ohio State University for another packed event. After I spoke, I went into the crowd to shake hands and take selfies with people. Maybe once in a while someone in that situation would make a smart remark to you, but for the most part the people were great. The crowd at OSU was particularly so. In the sea of Trump fans that day, however, I noticed a guy standing by himself in the middle of the room. If I told you he was big, I wouldn’t be accurately capturing the size of him. He could blot out the sun. He stood there like an oak, not saying a word to anyone, just surveying the crowd. I had to find out what his story was before we left. I walked over to him.

  “Hey, what’s up?” I asked in a friendly tone.