CHILD SOLDIERS.

 I have unlocked today's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, recording a meeting of the University of Northern Virginia at Condo Corners First Amendment Therapy Group. 

I'm going to flip over all the cards, as they used to say on "What's My Line," and tell you that the episode is partly inspired by the latest cancelculture atrocity: A guest essay in the New York Times by one Emma Camp, a senior at the University of Virginia and a Reason magazine contributor, who tells us that she and all the UVA kids are horribly cancelcultured -- that is to say, they are sometimes criticized by other students, or else they get a vibe that they're being disagreed with, and so they "self-censor," which apparently differs from other-censorship in that it sometimes leads to guest essays in the New York Times. The solutions she offers are so amorphous ("encourage professors to reward intellectual diversity and nonconformism in classroom discussions") that I assume in practice they would amount to treating rightwing white kids as a protected class (just like they did in the old days!). 

As we saw with Jane Kitchen back in January, the Cancelcultured Student Essay is by now a familiar grift, and Camp's is no exception. But its defenders have learned a new trick! When people made fun of Camp's essay, pointing out, reasonably, that having an essay published in the Times is the opposite of censorship, self- or otherwise, her defenders cried how dare you, can't you see she's just a lit-tle girl: 

I seem to remember rightwingers beating the shit out of David Hogg and X née Emma González, survivors of an actual violent attack at their school, when they became gun control advocates. But in the land of IOKIYAR, I guess it's only conservative columnists who get the Kids Fly Free treatment. I can't wait until they publish a seven-year-old's "How Come They Can Say the N-Word and I Can't" and denounce its critics as child-haters (or pedophile groomers, as seems to be their latest shtick).