Beyond the blatant double standard against Jews, scratch the surface of the campus rage and you’ll see a temper tantrum from whiny kids who are used to getting their way.

There was a stunning video clip last week of a UCLA provost meeting with protesters at their encampment. He had come in good faith, wanting to discuss their grievances. What he got instead was sheer animosity, as students chased him away with insults.

We’ve seen this kind of chutzpah spread through college campuses in recent weeks, with demonstrators ransacking buildings and destroying university property. There seems to be no fear whatsoever of consequences.

How did college students get so brazen?

A good place to start is with a movement that started about 10 years ago and revolved around protecting college students from “microaggressions.” Suddenly, any student with the smallest grievance became empowered — as long as they were part of a group considered “oppressed.”

“Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt wrote in “The Coddling of the American Mind,” a seminal 2015 essay in The Atlantic. “A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.”

This scrubbing has come at a price, as the movement to protect feelings, culminating in the pervasive, victim-driven DEI bureaucracy, came to dominate the primary mission of a university — the pursuit of truth.

We’re seeing the inevitable result of this ticking time bomb in the current protests — zero interest in pursuing truth and every expectation that feelings will be protected and demands will be met.

Most of us have seen the video of a protest leader holding a press conference outside a building at Columbia University where students had barricaded themselves. She was wondering why food was not being brought in. The student was so ridiculed on social media she will probably go down as one of the faces of the movement.

Students like her have been taught by feckless college leaders that victimhood is where the power lies. Except for Jews, who have typically been put in the privileged “oppressor” group, a victim from a marginalized group is always right. It’s no wonder that instead of seeking truth, those students now seek victimhood.

“A lot of college students in this generation, there’s a sort of paradigm they use, or lens they use to kind of evaluate the world,” New York Times columnist Frank Bruni said in a recent interview. “And it’s one in which people who have less money, people who have less power, sometimes people who have darker skin, must inherently be wronged and are therefore most likely to be in the right.”

Yes, even terrorists.

We saw that play out right after the massacre of Oct. 7, when, as Bruni said, “you saw a lot of young people not even take a moment to really acknowledge what had happened in Israel, and how horrific that was. They just kind of immediately applied this paradigm and began advocating not just for Palestinians, but in a perverse way, at times for Hamas.” The same people obsessed with “microaggressions” were indifferent to, or celebrated, terrorism against those deemed “oppressors.”

Beyond the blatant double standard against Jews, scratch the surface of the campus rage and you’ll see a temper tantrum from whiny kids who are used to getting their way. Those entitled kids have been conditioned by universities who coddled them while indoctrinating them in anti-Israel classes and abandoning their mission of truth.

In another Atlantic essay titled, “American Universities Are Post Truth,” Josh Barro argued that “A lot of the research coming out of [elite universities] does not seem to aim at truth, whether because it is politicized or for more venal reasons. The social-justice messaging they wrap themselves in is often insincere. Their public accountings of the reasons for their internal actions are often implausible. They deceive the public about the role that race plays in their admissions and hiring practices.”

In other words, as they were treating students with kid gloves and putting feelings before the search for truth, elite universities were loath to admit it, and for good reason. Instead of nurturing curiosity, they nurtured rage.

Now, as the rage has turned violent, many college leaders are panicking. The truth has caught up with them. Some are trying to appease the protesters, while others are calling the police. As commencement ceremonies are being canceled, hysterical protesters continue to make absurd and unrealistic demands.

The campuses of 2024 have been hijacked by the coddled generation.

Yes, these protests are anti-Israel and anti-America and anti-Western. But let’s not forget that they are also anti-truth.

It’s what happens when you teach kids that they are the most important people in the world– as long as they represent a favored victim group— and you will do everything you can to address their tiniest complaint to make sure they never get hurt.

Who’s getting hurt now?

David Suissa is publisher & editor-in-chief of Tribe Media/Jewish Journal, where he has been writing a weekly column on the Jewish world since 2006.