Intolerance and witch hunts haunt college campuses in US

Mark J. Perry and Sean Kennedy:

Appropriately, on Halloween night, the University of California-Berkeley’s ghosts returned to its hallowed halls.

A well-meaning and earnest student senator, Isabella Chow, unleashed the specters of Berkeley’s past — the contest between conscience and conformity — by daring to dissent.

Her punishment has been swift: stripped of her student political party’s backing, denounced by the student newspaper, subjected to calls for resignation and recall, and expelled from nearly every student organization she led or helped to lead for the last two years.

Chow’s offense? She stood up in a public meeting and voiced reservations about condemning proposed Health and Human Services guidance defining a scientific, biological fact — sex (not gender) — as such. She rooted her concern in her Christian faith, after a lengthy preamble empathizing with transgender individuals and condemning anyone who would use her faith to bully, harass, harm, or discriminate against them.

Chow did not even oppose the final vote and submission of a letter from the Associated Students of the University of California, Berkeley’s student government. Instead, she abstained. But the backlash from the mob and its groupthink came immediately. That same night, she was booted from her political party, Student Action, and given notice that those affiliated with her pet project, promoting student publications, wanted nothing to do with her.

The Queer Alliance Resource Center, led by the student senator and letter’s author, has collected thousands of signatures to demand her resignation from the ASUC while others work to initiate a recall of the Christian junior.

A “meme” page, popular with Berkeley undergraduates, has been overwhelmed by ad hominem, personal attacks on Chow of the sort that one expects from Internet trolls. The irony is that supporters of a resolution purported to defend against bullying are its primary perpetrators. The trolls call her a “mental imbecile” and “horrible person.” Chow now needs to be escorted around campus after dark for her safety.

When Chow asked that the student newspaper, the Daily Californian, publish an op-ed she authored to explain her decision, it refused. But they’ve run numerous editorials condemning Chow, demanding her resignation, and saying her Christian beliefs "dehumanize" and call for "explicit erasure of [the transgender] community."

The deep irony of the campus mobs devouring one of their own is not the what or the why, but the where. Berkeley was the home of the 1964 Free Speech Movement — where the unlikely bedfellows of leftists, anarchists, and even arch-conservative Barry Goldwater backers, came together to stand up for students’ right to protest, speak up, and actively participate in the campus discourse.
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There is more.

At the University of Texas at Austin tragic consequences of students acting like a mob with pitchforks led to the suicide of a distinguished pharmacy professor who had been involved in a domestic dispute.  He became a victim of the out of control mobs pushing the MeToo agenda led by the Austin American-Statesman.

These mobs remind me of the scenes from Frankenstein where groups seek to attack the "monster" with mob action.  They could be Antifa or some other leftist groups who seek to ignore the rule of law and the Constitution and intimidate those with whom they disagree,  They are also reminiscent of lynchings in the past.