Professor says liberal college campuses could be breeding ground for Antifa ideology
President Trump and several police officials have blamed Antifa for the recent looting and vandalism that have occurred amid peaceful protests over the death of George Floyd. Some experts say the most common place to find political correctness and Antifa is on college campuses.
Antifa, the far-left extremist group that is widely known for its violence and disruptive nature may be a product of academia, specifically "grievance studies." Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor at Portland State University who teaches philosophy, said the ideology that is fueling the rise of Antifa is coming from college campuses.
“Our universities are teaching people totally deranged ideas, anti-democratic ideas. And it's not just that they're far-left ideas, they're ideas that are untethered to reality, dealing with race and gender and trans issues, for example, things that revolve around identity. They're teaching people these ideas. They're not hearing other sides of the coin," Boghossian told Fox News.
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“Almost all of them are explicitly involved in it. It's less so universities and it's more so particular departments within universities. We call these grievance studies departments that teach students to look for grievances everywhere, racial grievances, gender grievances, any kind of perceived or historical injustice," said Boghossian. "But when you look at it in terms of race or gender and you train people to perennially think about grievances... you create some very unhappy, very dyspeptic people who manifest that through physical violence and silencing others.”
Colleges and universities have come into the spotlight in recent years when liberal students started protesting conservative speakers who were scheduled to give speeches on their campuses. In February of 2017 violent protests broke out at the University of California Berkeley when conservative speaker Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to give a speech on cultural appropriation.
When interviewed by Fox News Digital in December of 2019, students at the University of California Berkeley had mixed thoughts on the purposes and methods of Antifa. One student said, “I don't really have any strong feelings toward them or against them as a group. It's about some of the individuals that act out in extreme ways, especially in regards to reacting with violence."
When it comes to the group's violence, another student said, “I guess, I agree with their message that neo-Nazis should be stopped, but I don't know if I really agree about violence.”
Some students also didn't fully understand Antifa’s message or full ideology, saying, “On one hand, I'd say hit the Nazis, go for it. On another hand, I think I would probably want to go on a case by case because I don't know the context of Antifa to that degree."
Boghossian, who is also widely known for the "grievance studies hoax," where he and two of his colleagues wrote 20 fake papers and managed to get seven of them published at peer-review journals, said, "These are not open-minded people who like to listen to you and engage ideas. We are creating activist students."