ASHE SCHOW: Hating Hate Speech.

College students across the country are finding offense in the most inane things — but we already knew that.

Newsweek’s cover story, entitled “The battle against ‘hate speech’ on college campuses gives rise to a generation that hates speech,” takes a look, in great detail, at the state of free speech at today’s universities. It also notes the effects the current “war on free speech” will have for recent graduates.

“Graduates of the Class of 2016 are leaving behind campuses that have become petri dishes of extreme political correctness and heading out into a world without trigger warnings, safe spaces and free speech zones, with no rules forbidding offensive verbal conduct or microaggressions, and where the names of cruel, rapacious capitalists are embossed in brass and granite on buildings across the land,” wrote Nina Burleigh. “Baby seals during the Canadian hunting season may have a better chance of survival.”

Burleigh explains that many are to blame for the current assault on free speech, including students, administrators, feminists and the Education Department. That’s because the Education Department has been cracking down on speech — or “verbal conduct,” as some are now calling it — as a potential violation of the rights of women and minorities. Of course, the speech need not be objectively offensive, it merely needs to offend the most significant among us (or those looking for money or attention) for schools to step in to “protect” someone from words.

If some evil right-wing conspiracy were trying to destroy higher education from within, it couldn’t do a better job.

MESSAGING: Trump asks why Obama didn’t mention Pearl Harbor during Japan trip.

HE WAS EXPENDABLE: “California refuses to honor John Wayne, but the state lavishes tributes on liberal-friendly figures guilty of similar (or worse) sins,” Matthew Hennessey writes at City Journal:

For example, in 1988, the California legislature voted unanimously to declare April 21 John Muir Day. The Sierra Club founder, according to current governor Jerry Brown, was “a giant of a man” whose “scientific discoveries, engineering innovations and writings still inspire us today.” Presumably, Brown hasn’t read Muir’s reflections on “negroes” as “easy-going and merry, making a great deal of noise and doing little work.” It’s shocking to the modern ear to hear the celebrated naturalist declare that “one energetic white man, working with a will, would easily pick as much cotton as half a dozen Sambos and Sallies.”

Muir—the “great man”—evidently also had little regard for Native Americans. As The New Yorker’s Jedidiah Purdy surmised last year, Muir and other early environmentalists viewed communing with the American wilderness as “a way for a certain kind of white person to become symbolically native to the continent.” Yet, John Muir Day endures in California, celebrated with an official proclamation from the governor’s office every April 21, presumably because Muir’s status as the granddaddy of the environmental movement trumps his racist views.

On March 31 of every year since 2000, California formally celebrates Cesar Chavez Day, in honor of the founder of the United Farm Workers. “I ask all Californians to join me in continuing to build on his dream of a world where all workers are treated with dignity and respect,” Brown says in his annual proclamation. Countless California schools, parks, monuments, and public buildings bear Chavez’s name. And in 2014, President Obama declared March 31 a federal commemorative holiday in Chavez’s honor. All this for a man who, in a 1972 interview, called strikebreakers from Mexico “wetbacks,” a term widely considered racist and unmentionable today.

Not to mention Chavez’s later years leading a Jim Jones-like cult, as a left-leaning, Berkeley-born Atlantic author discovered much to her chagrin, in a 2011 piece appropriately titled “The Madness of Cesar Chavez.”

SO IT’S COME TO THIS: Rubio Personally Apologized To Trump For Implying He Had A Small Penis.

THE GRAFT REMAINS THE SAME: The Clintons’ First Email Scandal, Project X 1996-1998.

Related: Why the “scar tissue” excuse for Hillary’s document destruction fails.

AND THE ROLE OF PAULINE KAEL WILL BE PLAYED THIS WEEK BY… Anti-Trump NYT Columnist Frank Bruni: My Goal’s to Avoid the Truth About Trump Voters Until Election Day.

Flashback: The Actual Pauline Kael Quote—Not As Bad, and Worse

THE PERILS OF “PERFECTING:”

“A Spectre is Haunting Europe” – again. Now, as in Marx’s proclamation, an idea generated in Europe has had consequences elsewhere that threaten modern civilization…

• Islamism regards democracy as un-Islamic because it enacts laws other than Sharia; the EU from its inception has acted assiduously to prevent people from governing themselves democratically.
• Islamists, like Machiavelli, know that armed prophets are victorious and unarmed prophets are destroyed; the EU has deliberately diminished its capacities to defend itself or to back its diplomacy with strength.
• And while Islamists declare religion to be the answer the EU has seen religion as the problem. As Pierre Manent has pointed out, had Europeans maintained their identity as sovereign states with a Christian heritage, the assimilation of Muslims could have been possible on the basis of comity whereas now it lacks an answer to “assimilation to what?”

Americans need to understand that the Modern Age with its pluralistic structures, societies, and beliefs is under assault and that the enemies of modernity are uniate, unwilling to accept others on an equal basis. In this context America’s involvement in the Middle East must take the side of pluralistic states and parties compatible with the international system.

Related: “British Christianity Death Watch…Britain is way ahead of us, but we are on the same downward course.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE — ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE A 20-SOMETHING POLITICAL REPORTER — Travelgate to Furnituregate: a guide to the Clinton scandals of the 90s. It’s a bit Clinton-friendly, but at least you’ll know what people are referencing. And note stuff like this: “But in 1998, Clinton did admit in a deposition with Paula Jones’s lawyers (more on that later) that he had had a one-night stand with Flowers in 1977.”

AWESOME! THE ROLLING THUNDER RUN ROARS INTO D.C. [PHOTOS, VIDEOS.]

CNN: TRUMP WANTS A SPORTS STADIUM FOR HIS ACCEPTANCE SPEECH: “Shades of 2008. Remember how we mocked Barack Obama for hauling out the styrofoam Greek columns onto Mile High Stadium’s field for his acceptance speech as a demonstration of both his hubris and his supporters’ cult of personality?,” Ed Morrissey asks. “How many of us pointed out that a major-party convention venue provided plenty of glitz and spectacle without turning it into a circus? We laughed at Obama’s arrogance, and hauled out this picture every time he derided showmanship over substance… And, er … remember how Obama won two elections anyway?”

“Anyway?” It’s a reality TV show world; tough to fault Trump for playing by the rules the DNC-MSM established.

IT’S ALWAYS NICE to make Twitchy.