In order to claim that "institutional responsibility" is what's going on here, you again have to equate the gay person talking compassionately about their life and the white supremacist fomenting murder.

In your argument, the content simply doesn't matter at all. Your claim is that the school can suppress absolutely any speech it feels like, and what that speech is makes no difference at all.

Under your theory, the school could prevent a holocaust survivor from talking about the holocaust, or simply prevent a Black student from talking about anything at all, and there is no recourse.

In this world view, the "responsibility" is the same if one student is calling for racial genocide and the other calling for understanding between different people. Because evil people might not like the idea that gays are people, a speech saying, "Gays are people" is just as offensive as a speech saying "Gas the Jews and [negroes]".

As for the snowflake argument, well, absent even a single example I can't take it seriously.

Let me be blunt. There's only one real issue in our time. No one will remember Dr Seuss or trans acceptance a century from now.

The issue that our generations (you're probably a bit older than me but of a similar age) fucked the planet terminally through compulsive consumption and thoughtless waste. We believed in a magical place called "Away" into which we could just throw any filthy poisonous waste we wanted and it would disappear like dew in the morning sun.

Now tremendous changes that will remake every square centimeter of the planet are already baked into the CO2 level, and that level keeps increasing.

The recent leaked IPCC report said that we might be able to avoid human extinction if we went all out to stop it, and the IPCC is institutionally conservative at reporting science results. And we aren't actually doing anything significant to change our destiny.

You and I will die before the worst of it but kids alive today will see a million species driven to extinction and a human population that's a fraction of what it is today.

In that context, the idea of calling the kids who are going to have to clean up our messes for the next thousand years "snowflakes" is an obscenity.

Thanks for reading! I miss reading the Daily News, particularly the columnists and the comics, but I wouldn't move back from Amsterdam for it. :-D