In my youth, fraternities were seen as a ridiculous anachronism by my coevals. We knew one guy in a fraternity and he was a raging douche bag. Part of this is private school culture, where the Greek system has less of an impact on college life. Big state colleges have been the most fruitful campuses for fraternities. Then there is the fact that Jesuit schools tend not to have Greek life at all. This is what’s called a statement of interest. I’m indifferent to frats and maybe a bit hostile to them.

The war on frats we see on the college campus provides a window into the internal evolution of Progressivism. It’s where back benchers in the Cult apply the lessons they learned from the most recent sermons. For instance, the unhinged story peddled by the mentally disturbed coed about being gang raped at a Virginia frat is obviously learned behavior. The girl was marinating in anti-male, anti-white hysteria on campus so her natural girl-drama manifested as a feminist bodice ripper. She responded to her training.

The war on college fraternities is an example how feminized the Left is today. Every day there is a story about how white bros are in trouble for being white bros doing what bros tend to do. It is a deliberate campaign to criminalize normal, middle-class white guy behavior. Fraternities are the consummate bourgeois activity. The fraternity is a semi-adult version of the tree house, where boys can learn how to be males with a degree of adult supervision. This behavior is no longer tolerated because males are no longer wanted.

Almost always, the behavior that gets the frat in trouble offends the delicate sensibilities of the homely girls on campus. A few years ago, Penn State had a meltdown over the KDR fraternity making ugly girls sad. Basically some bros talked some hot girls into posing topless. Now the school is trying throw a frat in jail for a hazing related death. Given the age of fake news, the truth will be nothing like the reports. That’s not to excuse criminal behavior, but the reaction is extreme even if the reports are accurate.

The war on fraternities is also a good study of how the Left operates to undermine traditional institutions. It used to be that frats were self-funded, independent organizations. In many cases, they operated off campus to avoid trouble with college authorities. Those Penn State frats, for example, are off-campus in privately owned houses. This arms-length relationship started to end when colleges “offered” to help the frats collect dues and enforce their rules. Fraternity payments became a part of the tuition bill.

What was pitched as a goodwill gesture to help fraternities, quickly turned into a beachhead for Progressive nutters to impose their rules. The Prog mind always seeks to first gain entry into the organization. From there, they begin to agitate for changes that open the door for their coreligionists. In the case of fraternities, they imposed rules on how the frats select members and maintain discipline. Colleges are now beginning the process of forcing fraternities to admit women, thus eliminating their reason to exist.

There are two lessons to be drawn from the jihad against white men on campus. One is that there can never be any negotiating with the Progs. A negotiation means both sides seek a resolution, but Progs seek only one end and that is your death, even if it means their death. Whatever American Progressivism was in the past, it is now a nihilistic death cult. The Progs sitting down with the campus frats to work out rules, do so with a singular goal and that is the elimination of white males from the college campus.

The other thing is Progs enjoy their own hypocrisy. They relish it, so pointing it out to them has the opposite effect from what is intended. The defenders of Greek life point out that male sportsballers tend to go rapey on campus, yet no one is trying to shut down the football team. Progs find this energizing. It means they are in control and therefore can arbitrarily enforce the rules. Appeals to administrative consistency are blood in the water for the Progs. It makes them more vicious.

Within the next decade, the Greek system will be dismantled. Sororities will exist, mostly for the homely girls and the lesbians. Fraternities will be “normalized” which means they will be re-engineered to Prog standards, mostly out of spite. They will be for homosexuals and feminist fag-hags. The names will be maintained to piss off the old white guys who remember their days in the frat. In time, the whole thing will collapse as the Progs run out of reasons to celebrate their victory.

That’s ultimately the lesson here. Progressives like to use utopian language about multiculturalism and egalitarianism, but their movement is just a death cult now. It is the ideology of the arsonist. To be a Prog today is a laundry list of complaints about the various hobgoblins in Progressive mythology. There’s no affirmative identity, just a negative one. Once the bogeyman is slain, though, they have to reason to exist, which is why a Prog from fifty years ago would not recognize the modern Prog.