When I meet my liberal friends for coffee, I concede that the right is getting crazier and crazier. But I maintain this is partly in reaction to the left also getting crazier and crazier. How so?

The typical headlines one finds on the conservative College Fix website, news rarely ever reported by the mainstream media, defy what most Americans accept as moral and legal standards of behavior, not to mention sanity. 

For example, check out the following items on Dec. 13:

• To access the “Students of Color Alliance Lounge” at Pomona College, an elite West Coast school, students must show that they are not white since the latter would violate “safe spaces.”

• Successful candidates applying for an economics professor position at Toronto Metropolitan University, a public institution in Canada, must identify as “African and African-American people from the Caribbean, Americas, or Europe,” that is, skin color determines hiring qualifications.

• Eighty-seven percent of students say “college is too difficult” even though surveys show over 70% of today’s students are studying less than 10 hours a week and 87% less than 15 hours a week. (Maitland Jones, professor of chemistry at New York University, recently was fired for being too tough in terms of assigned workload and grading standards.)

• “About one in three Kansas students fails college algebra the first time around. Some take it several times before they pass. Others get so frustrated that they drop out altogether. And that cuts into university graduation rates,” NPR reports. Thus, the Kansas Board of Regents is considering eliminating the requirement.

• Fifty-three percent of U.S. college students feel “intimidated” in sharing opinions different from their classmates, and 58% feel “intimidated” in sharing opinions that differ from their professors.

There is nothing terribly unusual about these reports — they are now every day, commonplace happenings in academia — but they nonetheless represent increasingly crazy developments that never used to exist and that call into question the moral, legal, and sanity foundations of our culture. They are all driven by the left, and they reflect changes that are occurring both on and off campus. 

I agree with Bill Maher (Variety, Sept. 21) that “the biggest problem with the Democrats is their woke baggage . . . Stop talking about pregnant men and stuff that makes people go, ‘Who are these f_____ people? What are they talking about? Men don’t get pregnant.”” 

Maher (Deadline, Jan. 28) contends that “the party of FDR and JFK” has become “the Looney Left” and “turned to LOL and WTF moments, where congresspeople talk of canceling rent and mortgages, canceling Lincoln and Dr. Seuss, and making Mr. Potato Head gender neutral, among other sins.”

Maintaining he is still a liberal despite his frequent criticism of liberals, Maher (Newsweek, March 10) says “I haven’t changed . . . at all. My politics haven’t changed. They’ve changed. . . Five years ago, no one was talking about defunding the police. . .   Letting 3-year-olds decide what gender they are. This wasn’t something five years ago. Free speech, you know, used to be a left-wing thing that we were proud of and owned and now that seems to be under attack [from the left].”

Maher (Fox, Nov. 7) concludes, “The left has gone super-crazy with lots of s___ that the average American just never voted for, doesn’t recognize in this country, doesn’t want.”

I never thought I would agree with Bill Maher, since I consider him an anti-religious bigot and guilty of many hateful comments against various groups. However, I find his equal criticism of not only many contemporary conservative politicians but also many liberal politicians very cogent. He is absolutely on the mark. 

In past op-eds, I have tried to call attention to the nuttiness of the left and how it is undermining our most basic principles (for example, the New York Times music critic who urged the elimination of blind, “behind the curtains” auditions for symphony orchestra applicants, since they were “unfair” in not producing enough “diversity” or the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History website that associated such things as “rational thought,” “hard work,” “self-reliance,” and “the nuclear family” with “whiteness” and thus inviting racism).  

I will continue to call out insanity in our politics and culture when I see it. If I seem inclined to do so far more on the left than the right, it is not that the latter is undeserving of criticism, only that I am trying to balance the scales in these pages. I wish all of us would be more willing to recognize and speak up about what is wrong with the direction the country is going in, whether from the left or the right.