If you spend time at conservative news outlets you might learn that discrimination against conservatives — especially white, straight, male conservatives — is an epidemic on college campuses. Indeed, nothing gets the folks at National Review and The Daily Wire and the New York Post animated like a story of right-wing martyrdom.

In 2007, conservative filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney produced Indoctrinate U, a documentary about liberal intolerance of conservative ideas at universities. Maloney even went so far as to defend white frat bros who dressed up in blackface, framing well-deserved accusations of racism as political correctness run amok.

In the most recent example of alleged conservative victimization, Lake Ingle, a conservative college student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, was removed from his religious studies class early this month for alleged “classroom misconduct.”

The agreed upon facts appear to be that Ingle’s class watched a TEDx Talk by Paula Stone Williams, a transgender pastor, about gender discrimination. Following the video Ingle voiced his opinion that gender is a rigid binary and that the gender wage gap is not caused by discrimination, citing sources like Ben Shapiro and The Economist.

At this point Ingle’s story diverges from that of his professor’s, who claimed he refused “to stop talking out of turn,” had “angry outbursts” in response to listening to a transgender speaker, and made “disrespectful references” to trans identity. Ingle maintains his objections were civil.

As a punishment, Ingle was barred from that particular class until he issues a formal apology to the class. Ingle refused to do so, and retained legal counsel to assist him in a disciplinary hearing. The class is a requirement for Ingle to graduate in May.

On March 9, 2018, the right-wing website Campus Reform picked up the story, revealing screenshots of Ingle’s “Academic Integrity Referral Form,” which lays out the alleged offenses, and a letter from the university to Ingle informing him he would not be permitted in his religious studies class effective March 2nd, 2018.

According to the article, entitled “Student barred from class for claiming there are two genders,” Ingle actually spoke with Campus Reform, which is run by the Leadership Institute and monitors college campuses for “professorial bias against conservative students or policies.”

Ingle told Campus Reform that he “objected to the use of the anecdotal accounts of one woman’s experience to begin a discussion in which they were considered reality” and that his professor “attempted to silence me because I am not a woman.”

He added that he’s not fighting to “prove that I am right about gender wage gaps or transgenderism.” Instead he claimed to be fighting for the free speech rights of other students to express unpopular ideas. This is, of course, if one accepts the premise that Ingle was wrongfully removed from the class in the first place.

From Campus Reform the story moved to other, more extreme media outlets. The infamously stupid website Gateway Pundit picked up the story and, in typical Gateway Pundit fashion, misspelled Lake’s name. The Unification Church-owned Washington Times also reported on it.

At The Ralph Retort, Gamergate supporter and cop assaulter Ethan Ralph whined that Ingle was being punished by a “nutty leftist professor” for using “facts and figures” to dispute the “wage gap myth” and assert there were “only two genders.”

Ralph went on to call Ingle’s professor a “loon,” a “complete nutbag,” and an “unhinged, man-hating shrew.” He also pondered about how many “psychotropic drugs” she takes, suggesting that “perhaps the dosage needs to be altered.”

One commenter called the professor a “wretched hag” and said if she had removed her child from class the “sadistic, evil bitch” would be “dead and buried in a landfill!” She added, “There honestly should be open season and no bag limit on liberals. I am deadly serious.” Ralph said that “killing the nutter” is “a bit drastic,” but that it’s “completely insane” that she’s allowed to teach.

Ingle also made a pair of alt-right media appearances. On March 9th he was interviewed by white supremacist Henrik Palmgren for Red Ice TV. Palmgren compared the university’s actions to those of the Stasi — East Germany’s secret police — and claimed Ingle was reprimanded for “wrongthink.”

After playing a clip from Paula Williams’ TEDx Talk, Ingle told Palmgren that at this point in the video he leaned over to a classmate and “made a remark about the fact that [the professor] was gonna use this to push a certain view in class.” Palmgren bemoaned the lack of diversity of opinion in higher education, especially in regard to “transsexuality and LGBTQ stuff.”

Ingle asserted that the humanities are “incredibly left-leaning” and that if you’re a “right-leaning” student you run the risk of being “called a number of names, you’ll be called transphobic, you’ll be called intolerant, and uninclusive [sic], and unwilling to hear other viewpoints et cetera.”

Additionally, he said he “built a reputation” for enjoying arguments, and admitted to having been called “racist” on prior occasions by other professors. He did give specifics on those other incidents, but stressed that he had never before been accused of disrupting a class.

Ingle was also interviewed by Vincent James, the founder of the alt-right Red Elephants media collective. The video, which was posted to the YouTube channels of The Red Elephants and Vincent James, was linked to by The Daily Stormer, which praised Ingle for “spread[ing] hatefacts in class.”

During that interview, Ingle told James that, with respect to the wage gap, he cited publications such as The Economist which have “debunked the gender wage myth” that women earn an average of 77 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earn.

“And people like Thomas Sowell and Ben Shapiro and all these other characters debunk it a number of times, and it seems that they have to keep debunking it,” he said. James claimed that the wage gap is real, but that it is not primarily caused by gender discrimination. Instead, James chalks the gap up to “motherhood” and women quitting their jobs.

On top of that, James trotted out the shopworn argument popular with academic racists and misogynists that men are just more likely than women to have the highest IQs. It is a “scientific fact,” he said, that “the very high end of the spectrum of the IQ, the very furthest end of the curve — the IQ curve — there are virtually no women.” He concluded that this explains why so many CEOs are men.

Ingle also told James:

What my position is is to not attack the sharing of views, obviously. If a cultural Marxist professor has views to share, obviously they are more than willing and have the right to do so. But when it tampers with the learning process of a student, [when] it asks other students to alienate people who have views that do not coincide with theirs — specifically in my case, conservative views of a white male — when that takes place, that’s something that I won’t stand for, and I believe that your position as well wants to eradicate that.

Vincent James must have appreciated Ingle’s use of “cultural Marxist,” a far-right buzzword with anti-Semitic connotations that’s often bandied about by alt-right figures.

And James echoed Ingle’s remark about white males being “alienate[d],” alleging that in campuses “all across the country” “we see people ridiculing men for being white, we see men being told that they have white male privilege on a daily basis…even though that’s completely 100% false.”

In fact, James said, “the white males are the most oppressed, especially on college campuses.” Ingle agreed with James, and said something about a fear being instilled in the “hearts and the minds” of white men, especially “if they’re straight or Christian.”

Obviously institutions of higher learning must maintain an environment that fosters dialogue between students and professors of different backgrounds. However, we should distinguish between good faith efforts to have such a dialogue and making derogatory remarks about transgender people.

Time will tell which category Lake Ingle falls into. Until then we can expect this story to be relentlessly hyped by The Daily Caller, Breitbart, and other outlets that make up the Internet’s white grievance industry.