For weeks, students at hundreds of schools across the country have walked out of class to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions. At Rincon High School in Arizona, leaders of the Latino Student Union organized a walkout to oppose the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

The next week, some of those same students demanded the removal of a Turning Point USA club from the Tucson Unified campus. Members of the Latino Student Union petitioned the school board to bar the conservative club from meeting on school property, claiming its presence made them feel “unsafe” and accusing it of a “track history of presenting hate and presenting fear.”

As American life grows more polarized, young people face mounting pressure to treat opposing speech not as something to answer, but as something to silence.

Arizona was not a one-off.

Last fall, students at Royal Oak High School in Michigan walked out over the formation of a Turning Point chapter. One protest organizer complained that the club “spreads conservative views … and those aren’t things that we promote in our school.”

That statement tells you plenty. Students increasingly invoke the language of safety and inclusion not to protect their own right to speak, but to suppress the speech of others.

Royal Oak Schools says the district aims to provide “an inclusive, diverse, safe, and student-first environment” in which students will be “embraced, accepted, challenged, and prepared.” Yet schools cannot claim to challenge and prepare students while teaching them that disagreement itself amounts to harm.

These incidents may still be relatively few, but they point to a broader problem: the spread of speech intolerance from college campuses into K-12 education.

A report released in September by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found alarming attitudes on college campuses. Among roughly 70,000 students surveyed, 34% said violence to stop someone from speaking can be acceptable, while 72% supported shouting down speakers in rare cases.

College pathologies do not stay on college campuses for long.

Through social media, ethnic-studies curricula, school speech codes, and the influence older students exert on younger ones, the campus habit of treating dissent as danger has moved into elementary and secondary education.

The results have already turned ugly.

RELATED: How liberals let America’s colleges collapse into illiberalism

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

After a walkout at Hayes High School in Ohio in February, one senior said the protest “went as peaceful as it could have gone with the amount of anger that we have.” In reality, an altercation between several protesters and one dissenter ended with three students charged with disorderly conduct. The confrontation appears to have begun when walkout participants repeatedly blew whistles in the student’s face.

In Kansas, student counterprotesters from Olathe Northwest High School were attacked while demonstrating across the street from an anti-ICE protest. Their offense? They merely supported the administration and current immigration enforcement.

Thankfully, these incidents remain uncommon. But the trend should concern parents, teachers, and communities. As American life grows more polarized, young people face mounting pressure to treat opposing speech not as something to answer, but as something to silence.

Whatever one thinks of school walkouts, defenders of these protests usually justify them as exercises in civic engagement and First Amendment expression. Fine. But civic engagement does not mean demanding a microphone for yourself and a muzzle for everyone else.

Students need to learn that free speech cuts both ways. They have every right to voice their convictions. They also have a responsibility to defend the rights of people whose views they dislike, distrust, or even find offensive.

If they do not learn that lesson now, student activism will become less about persuasion than coercion. And young Americans will be trained not to practice liberty, but to imitate the tyranny they claim to oppose.

​Opinion & analysis, Leftism, The left, High school, Student activism, Immigration and customs enforcement, K-12 education, Turning point usa, Tpusa, Violence, Censorship, Safe spaces, Conservative students, Liberal students, Latino student union, Anti-ice protests, Speech codes, Ethnic studies 

A mother and daughter from Kentucky have a simple message for artificial intelligence companies: Go away.

Ida Huddleston and her daughter Delsia Bare say their land has fed the United States for generations, and that isn’t going to change.

‘I’ll stay and hold and feed a nation.’

The quiet family are making headlines over their farmland, which they say has been in their family since the 1860s, after anonymous bidders have made plays to scoop up their property to erect a sprawling data center.

According to Bare, the potential buyers “will not reveal who they are,” telling local Lexington, Kentucky, outlet WLEX that the anonymity of the offer is a huge red flag to her.

The family have been offered $60,000 per acre for Huddleston’s 71 acres and $48,000 per acre for Bare’s 463-acre portion. This puts the total offer at roughly $26 million. WKRC says this is approximately 10 times the going rate for farmland in the area.

Huddleston said she has rejected multiple offers and that she’s not budging.

“What they’ve proposed and have carried on with us is not a business deal; it’s mind harassment,” the 82-year-old told WLEX.

“I said I don’t want your money; I don’t need your money. But I do feel sorry for everybody around us that they’re going to be affected by it.”

RELATED: Sam Altman tells BlackRock he wants AI on a meter ‘like electricity or water’

The economic development director for surrounding Maysville-Mason County previously told WLEX that the potential data center would create 400 full-time positions and over 1,500 construction jobs.

“As far as jobs would go, they would become, if not our largest employer, definitely top three,” director Tyler McHugh said.

However, Huddleston disputed the number of potential permanent jobs, saying, “My guess is you won’t have over 50, and they won’t even be there at this building when it’s said and done.”

The narrative surrounding the family’s lineage has remained very consistent throughout news reports, as have Bare’s reasons for refusing to sell.

“I’ll stay and hold and feed a nation,” she told WKRC. She added that for generations her family has “paid taxes on it, fed a nation off of it, even raised wheat through the Depression and kept the breadlines up in the United States of America.”

RELATED: Data centers are a hidden tax on your burger

Data center in Louisville, Kentucky. Tom Uhlman/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Much of the sentiment was the same for Huddleston, who said she recognizes a sinister pattern.

“They call us old, stupid farmers, you know, but we’re not. We know whenever our food is disappearing, our lands are disappearing, and we don’t have any water. And poison: We know we’ve had it.”

Her message to those who claim it will bring jobs: “I say they’re a liar and the truth ain’t in them. … It’s a scam!”

WLEX had previously reported on a different family who turned down offers of nearly $8 million for their land. In December, Andy Grosser and his father, Timothy, said they were also approached about selling their cattle farm to make way for a data center.

“We do not want to sell,” Grosser said. “The farm is my dad’s, and it means everything to him.”

As for Bare, she compared her love for her land to Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone with the Wind:”

“As long as I’m on this land — as long as it’s feeding me, as long as it’s taking care of me — there’s nothing that can destroy me if I’ve got this land.”

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​Return, Farm land, Farmland, Kentucky, Big tech, Data center, Ai, Ai data center, America, Patriotism, Tech