Campus jackboots at Claremont base their position on the idea that actual truth is an abstract construct designed to press

You probably knew about the Manhattan Institute's Heather MacDonald's experience in trying to speak at Claremont McKenna College. It was fairly typical of the way mobs have used brownshirt-style violence to prevent conservative figures' appearances from taking place.

 . . . angry students surrounded the building, screamed obscene words and banged on the windows. Mac Donald ended up giving the speech to a mainly empty room via live video-streaming and then fleeing the university under the protection of campus security. 

But the kicker is the "reasoning" the organizers of the violence used:

The letter to university authorities from "We, few of the Black students here at Pomona College and the Claremont Colleges" loses no time in libelling their subject:

"If engaged, Heather Mac Donald would not be debating on mere difference of opinion, but the right of Black people to exist. Heather Mac Donald is a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live."

Needless to say, none of this is true. Nowhere has Mac Donald suggested that black people or any other type of person has "no right to exist". The accusation is levelled without evidence. But as with all anti-free-speech activists today, the line is blurred not merely between actual words and violence, but between wholly imagined words and violence. Thus the students write:

"Advocating for white supremacy and giving white supremacists platforms wherefrom their toxic and deadly illogic may be disseminated is condoning violence against Black people. Heather Mac Donald does not have the right to an audience at the Athenaeum, a private venue wherefrom she received compensation. Dictating and condemning non-respectable forms of protest while parroting the phrase that 'protest has a celebrated' place on campus is contradictory at best and anti-Black at worst."

Amid the semi-literacy, linguistic ostentation and intellectual dishonesty, it is hard to single out what is worst about this letter. But, against stiff competition, what is worst is that the whole thing is built on one massive misunderstanding which might also be described as a false premise.

"Historically, white supremacy has venerated the idea of objectivity, and wielded a dichotomy of 'subjectivity vs. objectivity' as a means of silencing oppressed peoples. The idea that there is a single truth--'the Truth'--is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples."

As the English philosopher Roger Scruton wrote in his book Modern Philosophy, "A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't."

This is horrifying. The fact of objective truth is no longer merely being mocked. It is being called a tool of tyranny by those imposing actual tyranny - and it's all taking place on what until recent years had been sanctuaries of the free exchange of ideas.

We are at an unprecedented juncture. We are about to find out what happens when our civilization's outposts of higher learning and preservation of foundational assumptions are utterly ruined, rendered worthless, destroyed.

The darkness has clearly not receded in post-America.