In short: in 2016, on the day after the Presidential election, someone shoplifted some booze from Gibson’s Bakery in Oberlin, Ohio. The proprietor gave chase, caught the thief and the cops showed up and arrested the thief and two of his friends, all of whom eventually pleaded guilty to various crimes. THE END. Right? Well, no.

Keep in mind, this was Current Year Clown World, the thief is of a Protected Class and the bakery in question was right across the street from a Liberal Arts College (Oberlin College, appropriately). So, naturally, students began protesting outside the bakery, claiming that it was a racist establishment because it had the audacity to try to prevent a black person from stealing. Up till this point… well, it’s a nuisance, but whatreyagonnado. But things very quickly got more interesting when the college administration decided to get involved. The college cancelled business contracts it had with the bakery, but, more importantly, issued emails that defamed the business and continued the allegation that the place was racist. There were also apparently efforts by the administration to provide assistance to the protestors, including the printing of libelous fliers, suspending classes to allow the outrage mob to do their thing, and giving them free food and drinks. In this age of wokeness, none of this is really all that surprising anymore. College administrations are bending over backwards – and, often enough, forwards – to try to appease the outrage mobs that colleges and universities seem to be breeding grounds for these days.

But something a little different happened: the bakery sued the college for libel. Something a lot different happened: the jury agreed with the bakery happened. Something wonderful happened: the jury awarded the bakery $11 MILLION on compensatory damages and more than $33 MILLION in punitive damages. Ohio law only allows punitive damages to be twice what the compensatory damages are, so the total will likely be restricted to $33 million.

Market awarded $44M in racism dispute with Oberlin College

The guiltiest people here are of course the leaders of the outrage mob. But they are, in the end, mere non-playable characters in the story of modern wokeness, simply carrying out their malicious programming. But the college that allowed this cancer to fester? They’re taking it in the shorts. Their funding will take a hit. Their reputation will take a hit. Some of their alums and other funders might decide that Oberlin, as it’s currently set up and run, is not the best place for their money. So the school might well wind up losing far more than $33 million.

More importantly, now that the precedent is established that schools are financially on the hook for the bad behavior of their students when they actively support those students in their bad behavior, schools not only may start being held to account (watch out, Berkeley!), they may also start changing their ways as a purely defensive measure. At the top of their to-do list will of course be “stop providing aid and comfort to outrage mobs,” but the wiser schools might start realizing that they themselves are to a very large degree responsible for them in the first place. If schools start realizing that having Grievance Studies on campus could cost far more than they’re worth, these useless fields of “academia” might finally start getting relegated to the dustbin of history.

Amusingly, extreme leftists like “Salon” are suddenly terribly interested in freedom of speech, and think that a massive lawsuit over defamation will have a chilling effect on future attempts by outrage mobs to hound businesses, individuals and college administrations into kowtowing to their fascistic and racist agendas. The college could have avoided all this by:

1: Not actively participated in the smears, such as various paid faculty publicly calling the bakery racist on zero evidence

2: Not aided the outrage mob in their attacks.

A rational school would have said nothing, done nothing. If the students wanted to protest… fine, you go do that. But if you miss class, that’s on you.

An important lesson here is that freedom of speech is important, slander and libel come with a cost. There are those who should be paying very close attention to this.