I have a friend, who is a typical moonbat in that he repeats all the current opinions in The Hive, but insists he reasoned his way to these positions. On more than a few occasions I have pointed out to him that his “reasoned opinion” is identical to what is in the lefty media, often word for word. The result is silence as members of a cult just filter out anything that contradicts the faith.

This is a common feature of mass movements. The people inside don’t think of themselves as members of cult. They think the opinions and beliefs they adopted from the movement were arrived out by reason. They don’t notice that their opinions are identical to their coreligionists. They just think the people who think like them are smart like them. This insider/outsider mentality is a feature of every cult.

You see this in the Cult’s never ending fear of The Backlash™ that has become a staple of modern news stories. After 9/11, all of the moonbats were wringing their hands, fearing that the sight of the Trade Center in rubble would cause those evil white men in the provinces to go bonkers and attack innocent Muslims, who just want to live in peace because Islam is the religion of peace. After all, nothing is worse than The Backlash™.

This obsession with The Backlash™ was on display with Clock Boy in Texas. The narrative says Texas is the epicenter of evil white men so they must really hate Muslims. If The Backlash™ is going to appear anywhere, it will be Texas, or maybe South Carolina, when they are not busy hanging negroes. That’s why the Cult was so easy for Clock Boy’s old man to troll. He grew up around fanatics. He knows how they tick, pun intended.

The frustrating thing about The Backlash™, from the point of view of the Cult, is that there is no such thing as The Backlash™. It’s imaginary. That’s why it fails to show up and do its thing as all the prophesies predict. The solution is to simply fake it so the faithful will not lose faith and there is no better place to do it than the college campus.

The American college campus is a land of make believe where every sort of lefty lunacy is celebrated and indulged. Professors who are not sufficiently enthusiastic for the latest fads are hounded mercilessly. Those who are not of the One True Faith keep their heads down and avoid notice, fearing the lunatics in the same way people avoid the Religious Police in Saudi Arabia.

That’s why the list of college hoaxes is so long. You have the highest density of fanatics, absolutely convinced The Backlash™is going to appear at any moment, so it is conjured.

A coalition of interest groups wants the U.S. Department of Education to require colleges to monitor social media and protect students from threatening and offensive comments.

The request was made last week by 72 women’s and civil rights groups, who claimed that harassment and threats on anonymous apps like Yik Yak are an emerging Title IX issue, according to Inside Higher Ed. “Students on college campuses throughout the country have with increasing frequency used anonymous social media applications, such as Yik Yak, to target women students, students of color, and sexual minorities with harassment, threats, and other forms of intimidation with impunity,” the coalition said in a press release. “Earlier this year, students at the University of Mary Washington (UMW), for example, were threatened through Yik Yak with rape and murder after they spoke out against rape culture.”

The groups complain that the typical response to such incidents by university administrators has been “to disclaim responsibility for harassment and threats that occur on that platform” because the site is anonymous and accessible without using university servers.

In the UMW case, Feminists United on Campus (FUC) and Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF), both members of the coalition requesting federal intervention, filed a Title IX suit against the school, charging administrators with a “systemic failure to protect students from a sexually hostile school environment, from sex-based cyber assaults, and from threats of physical and sexual violence.”

The pattern is always the same. The lunatics make a nuisance of themselves and then say they are the victim of The Backlash™, claiming death threats or now, rape threats. In this case we have two imaginary bogeymen, The Rape Culture™ and The Backlash™. The Social Justice League is real, but it’s enemies are not as there is no such thing as a rape culture or a backlash.

These prurient scolds calling their group Feminists United on Campus (FUC) cannot see how this looks to normal people. They lack that capacity. They think they are being provocative, when they are simply being vulgar. The insider/outsider logic, however, only sees the outsider as an undifferentiated other. The people inside the group all think it is funny and meaningful and that’s all that matters.