Yesterday, at a Starbucks near campus, I overheard a couple of colleagues talking about recent violent protests at another university. One chalked up students' aggressive behavior to impulsivity. It made me chuckle. 

These days, what underlies their behavior is not primarily impulsivity. Their rallies and protests are planned and orchestrated for and by them. Their choices of chants and tropes are purposeful. This is not the behavior of the impulsive. Of the useful idiot, perhaps. But not the impulsive. 

College students have also been taught single factor theories, and rationalizations for them, presented as a worldview by authority figures like their professors. So, the protesters among them are literally being given an intellectual foundation for their planned protests. Further, students exist in the context of a college, where the professor’s classroom is notorious for being an echo chamber. The reinforcement is extensive. 

What are they taught? Here’s some of the ugly political theory that many college and graduate students are repeatedly hearing.

Anti-colonialists (now anti-occupiers) prescribe and facilitate the death of much of their own people. They believe this arouses enough of the revolutionary spirit in the survivors to motivate them to kill all the 'colonizers'. (I give you Hamas.) Read Fanon; he was the first to fever dream up this claptrap filled apologia for resistance by any means. (Though to be fair, famous antisemite JP Sartre was the first to use the phrase “by any means necessary” in a book of fiction written to illustrate existentialist political philosophy.)

As a group, anti-colonialists make up a cynical, nihilistic, antinomian, rageful death cult. Professors explicitly or implicitly advocating such theories are rarifying the choice to anger and hopelessness or violence. This perspective is ubiquitous on campuses, which further reinforces and normalizes it. Simply said, many students are desensitized to, and accept, the supposed necessity of using violence to reach political goals. This has nothing to do with impulsivity. 

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For whatever it’s worth, I don’t subscribe to single factor theories (colonized-colonizer, occupied-occupier) that purport to explain everything. This is especially true for single factor theories that call for the amount of violence those of Fanon and his iterations do. In my opinion, these intellectually seductive, pseudo academic theories actually operate as creeds and identities for dolts, anarchists, and angry people with daddy issues.