If Tumblr kids did the French Revolution, it would be exactly like Evergreen State College.
The campus erupted in protest a two weeks ago when biology professor Bret Weinstein emailed a student criticizing their plans for the “Day of Absence.” Usually the event is conducted by students of color leaving the campus for the day, but this year they wanted to coerce all white students and faculty to leave instead. Weinstein called this an act of oppression of its own, and was pilloried by hundreds of students who in effect took over the campus in Olympia, Washington.
Since then the school’s administration and faculty have capitulated to almost all the protesters demands and are completely humiliated on a regular basis. It’s all filmed and uploaded to YouTube. The protesters are effectively running the campus, which has been shut down since Thursday due to a violent anonymous threat made to police.
But not all students are giving into the tyranny of mob rule.
A freshman at Evergreen, Nolan (he preferred not to publish his last name), has started a polite, subversive, Limp Bizkit-themed resistance against the gaggle of protesters.
Nolan and a few friends are writing relatively uncontroversial messages in chalk around the school, like “we want to learn,” and “college is not a safe space.”
The first time he went out to chalk, Nolan was assaulted by members of the mob, who poured water on him and ripped off his glasses. The confrontation began when he was covering graffiti calling for Weinstein’s firing with the message, “Limp Bizkit did nothing wrong.”
“I wrote it to prove these guys aren’t here to have a discussion, they are here to violently bully the campus into submission,” Nolan said by phone. “It wasn’t the most intimidating bunch and I felt I was in control of the situation.”
While Nolan chalked in protest, his friend secretly recorded the confrontation. They responded to the mob’s threats with apolitical Limp Bizkit references. Although the group physically assaulted Nolan, he didn’t fight back in any way.
“Being a white male,I felt if I was to attack back it would be very bad,” he said. “That situation could be flipped very poorly in my direction.”
After the incident, Nolan became a persona non grata on campus. He was called a “Nazi” and a “white supremacist” on the school’s closed Facebook group. Former friends turned against him, and used their former relationships to spread rumors about him.
“One of my SJW friends sold me out to the crowd,” Nolan said. “One of these nights I woke up to 16 texts calling me cis scum and a white supremacist.”
But Nolan kept chalking with a group of about five people. They would draw Pepe the Frogs and write bullshit about Limp Bizkit.
Meanwhile, the president of Evergreen, George Bridges, won’t even raise his hands while speaking to students for fear of committing a microaggression. Professors are told to “go fuck themselves” on a daily basis. Only Chalkman and his merry band of chalkers are brave enough to stand up to the protesters.
Last Thursday, Nolan and his friends were accosted again by “the mob.” He was on his way to the bus to get dinner, and a group of about 20 people, one of them holding a bat, began following them. Many of the same characters from the first encounter were present at the second one. (See video below.)
Nolan said it appeared like the group was waiting for him outside his dorm room, like they knew were he lived. “They were all a bunch of walking stereotypes,” he said. “It’s like Tumblr was attacking me.”
Nolan’s friend Andrew, who is not an Evergreen student but was visiting from out of town, got the encounter on video. When he began filming, they started screaming, saying it was illegal to film them in public.
“It’s illegal to assault people,” Andrew replied when a member of the mob bull-rushed him and tried to grab his camera.
“It was all perplexing, I just wanted to get it on tape,” Andrew said over the phone. “It was real immature, like on a middle-school playground.”
According to Nolan, the group were hurling insults, saying things like “all crackers love mayonnaise.”
You can see from the end of the video, the student holding the bat.
The group even posted a picture on Instagram were they’re all holding bats and yet somehow still don’t look intimidating.
This is where we are now. Evergreen is under mob rule by baseball bat-wielding, dyed-haired, gender studies majors who get triggered by Limp Bizkit. And the villains, according to this mob, are white liberal college professors and a teenager with chalk.
Follow me on Twitter @William__Hicks