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Understandable to assume the free speech crisis bollocks was a Trumpian creation but it came out of the mainstream press in the US & UK in the early 2010s. With nothing real to complain about, columnists had to look to student politics. theguardian.com/world/2019/sep…
The first big one I remember in the US was students disinviting Condoleeza Rice from their graduation ceremony, mainly because why the hell would anyone want to hang out with people heavily implicated in the gravest war crimes...
...And in the UK, it was mostly idiot Spectator columnists who started out screeching in terror at students politely declining some of Britain’s most tiresome columnists, before throwing their weight behind campaigns to ensure campus audiences for notable figures of the far right
The phenomenon is the same in both places though: Quite nasty right wing columnists with no real problems, require silly but controversial issue to enrage equally comfortable old-fart readership, preferably featuring very thin-skinned 19-year-olds to serve as hate figures.
And it worked, because a large chunk of political and cultural commentary is created by tubby, spiteful old tossers for an audience of same. The Times ran campus squabbles as an urgent national threat for about four years, no matter how embarrassing it was for their reputation.
