There isnt much to be said for those who loot and riot in the name of racial equality. But what do we say about the far larger number of young middle-class Americans who genuinely believe that America is a fundamentally racist project?

You probably know one or more educated 20-somethings who regard cops as cogs in an oppressive machine and who consider nearly everything in American life irredeemably racistordinary words and phrases, great works of literature, the flag, the mascots of sports teams, the names of buildings and cities. Why do they believe this?

Educational indoctrination plays a role but doesnt explain it all. Todays youthful radicals appear to despise precisely the consensus liberalism their education system was designed to advance.

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Liberals find this hard to grasp. When statues of men who achieved great victories for racial equality were torn down by radical agitatorsUlysses S. Grant in San Francisco, Frederick Douglass in Rochester, N.Y.media reports treated the incidents as unthinking excesses or maybe retaliation by White supremacists. But these werent mistakes.

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Nobody who has spent time among politically attuned high school or college students over the last decade or two will find it difficult to believe that, in the minds of some young radicals, Grant and Douglass are representatives of a racist and xenophobic regime now at last getting the disrespect it deserves.

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These young Jacobins are the product of an assortment of social and economic forcesparental coddling, lassitude born of affluence, the need for some kind of righteousness in the absence of religion. But they have a point, and its not the one their sympathetic liberal interpreters think.

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Barton Swaim: Young radicals are right that liberal orthodoxy on race has failed - Fox News