Mark Parent
Opinions Editor

Trigger warning: I am about to say something very offensive. In fact, it’s so offensive that you’ll be tempted to type a mean-spirited, hateful tweet — which actually happens to me, occasionally — that demeans my political positions, while simultaneously calling me childish names.

Of course, these hateful comments will have no bearing on my conscience; after all, I suffered irreparable emotional damage last fall at the Bernie Sanders rally in the Greensboro Coliseum. His divisive rhetoric, cloaked in political correctness caused me to enter a temporary, severe depression that left me horribly pessimistic about the intellectual capacity of our generation.

Put simply, the absence of a conservative safe space did not allow me to escape Sanders’s idiocy; instead, I was forced to sit through his hour-long stump speech, full of racial pandering, unattainable promises and vicious attacks on his Republican political opponents.

So, I’d like to take a cue from Hammurabi — or the First Amendment — and return the favor: the biggest threat to the US is the rise of radical leftism, which is currently enjoying free reign in the Democratic Party.

Sadly, college campuses — including our own — are part of this problem; or, better yet, feed the monster.

Many students on campus consume news and ideas in an incomplete fashion; for instance, the tendency of students to follow only a few news sites — like, God forbid, the Huffington Post and Slate — that present current events through the prism of bias and partisanship.

Then, to make matters worse, many students feel the need to either conform to the political views of the majority to fit in or adhere to a radical ideology in order to stand out.

In college, fitting in politically almost always means becoming a liberal. After all, who wants to be labeled as a bigot, sexist, racist, homophobe, xenophobe, or something even worse? And, thanks to the utter stupidity — and race-baiting — of the UNCG College Republicans, you’ll probably be labeled a moron, too.

Then, of course, there are those students on campus who profess to be anarchists, socialists and communists. Curiously, these individuals seem to be oblivious to the intellectual bankruptcy of their newfound set of political ideals.

I mean, it is convenient that the horrors of Soviet Russia, Maoist China and the southern half of Somalia are all forgotten by these students. On the other hand, it’s probably more likely that they’re simply unaware of those periods of history — or any history, for that matter.

But, despite these varying degrees of lunacy, you can expect all college leftists to agree on one common ideal: capitalism sucks.

And I’ll agree with them. If you’re lazy, lack ambition, feel entitled, constantly complain and feel spite for those who are successful, then capitalism does suck.

The great thing about capitalism is that people who showcase these pathetic qualities — yes, they’re pathetic — will be forced to embrace and utilize their own talents and skills.

I know this is anathema to many students on campus, but, quite frankly, I don’t care.

Often, college activism reeks of entitlement and tone-deafness. Common demands made by college-aged protesters include students need free college; the rich need to pay more in taxes; whites need to accept their privilege; straight men and women need to bash society for being heteronormative; and offensive speech needs to be outright banned.

To put it bluntly, leftists wrongly believe conservatives envision a society like Lord of the Flies while conservatives repeatedly fail to point out that leftists are currently advocating for a society like 1984.

At the current rate we’re going, the intrinsic value of individual accomplishment will be supplanted by the mediocrity of the majority. We’ll become so caught up in defending the mere possibility of an alleged injustice that we’ll destroy any notion of free speech and innovation.

Unfortunately, leftists don’t care about what you think; they only care that you think the same way that they do. That’s the real purpose of political correctness. It’s about creating political conformity and destroying individualism.

Everyone understands what truly offensive language is, and it is both impolite and indecent to use it in either public or private. So don’t buy into the falsehood that political correctness is only ridding us of the prevalent coarseness scattered throughout our vocabularies.

Just remember that the ultimate goal of leftism is control.

This is true everywhere from the former Soviet Union, where speaking ill against the Communist Party was a criminal offense, to the high-tax state of Norway, where everything from an individual’s personal address to their income is posted on a public, online database.

The more I think about it, leftists in the US are a lot like the Boxers in late-nineteenth century China.

The Boxers held a rigid ideology, based on their hatred of Westerners and Christianity that became so prominent that it clouded their own sense of logic.

Accordingly, the Boxers began to preach that proscribing to their form of mysticism and martial arts was the key to invincibility and utopia, and would free the Chinese people from the clutches of the West.

As Niall Ferguson points out, “the Boxers believed that after one hundred days of training in martial arts, they would be impervious to bullets. After three hundred days they would be able to fly.” Suffice it to say, European, Japanese and American forces defeated the Boxers rather quickly.

But the moral of the story remains the same: leftists preach of utopia and perfection, with minimal attention paid to the logical details of their plans.

Eventually, an ideology can become so uncompromising and fantastical that the only way to derail it is through the indiscriminate nature of reality.

So, let me be clear: the path that we’re on is incredibly dangerous, and it can only lead to the utter ruin of mankind. And since the US is the world’s engine of innovation, cultural change and ideas, we are, without a doubt, humanity’s last bastion of liberty and individualism.

If we do not stand tall and confront the genuine threat posed by those willing to divide us on petty matters, then we will surely crumble quickly — and the rest of the world will follow suit.