In the lust to destroy free speech (as well as other God-given rights recognized in the United States Constitution they find “problematic”), the Left has systematically implemented a Maoist strategy of indoctrination, disinformation, and weaponization of race, gender, and sundry “isms” to turn America into a college campus, wherein those projecting totalitarian, iron-fisted rule brook no dissent (or wisdom).
It begins with a perverse inversion of how human beings traditionally have categorized and addressed issues based upon an individual’s age and/or maturity. The Left indoctrinates with their secular religion on matters such as race and gender throughout the educational process, even including kindergartners in many school districts. Foisting such indoctrination and decisions—and often deliberately hiding it from the child’s parents—is despicable, and deliberately done to destroy the children’s innocence.
Then, as these abused children matriculate to higher education, the indoctrination continues from the orientation process through graduation. The Left’s insidious twist, however, is that their higher education is not designed to foster critical thinking, maturity, and independence. Having treated children as adults to begin their brainwashing, they now treat college students as children to stunt their emotional development. It is a toxic brew of inculcated ignorance, intolerance, and irrationality that spawns intellectual cowards. As a friend observes, the result is that Leftist academics “are raising a generation that is unwilling to and/or incapable of defending their ‘ideas’ or to engage in critical thinking.”
In sum, the Left has turned these students’ brains into left-wing bumper stickers. Still, when out on the street one can try to voice one’s opinion at a bumper sticker, though all one receives in retort is the same glib, annoying sophistry as it speeds away. On a college campus, the free speech-loathing Left has instituted “safe spaces,” “speech codes,” et al., and eviscerated due process to ensure one can’t even voice a contrary opinion to the bumper sticker, let alone try to deprogram the student to which it’s been affixed.
Oh, and when the car bearing the bumper sticker speeds away and runs you over in the shadow of the ivory tower? You get the ticket.
The students who most readily take to the Left’s secular religion end up in getting degrees in sundry “studies” programs that prepare them, not for productive livelihoods, but for positions as hectoring American commissars within government, corporations, the media, and—coming full circle—academia. The symbiosis of these entities has crafted a mandatory and revolving door for these American commissars. In this full employment scheme for the miseducated, their lack of productivity is not a bar, because they exist on the productivity of others in government and academia. It is a bit more difficult in for-profit entities, but this is why the Leftists in government demand the universal placement of their American commissar comrades in businesses and organizations, and provide subsidies to media and corporations.
For instance, academics flimsily or baselessly allege a new “ism” is infecting American life and must therefore be eradicated. Of course, these American commissars cannot and do not feel the need to provide any accurate or persuasive metrics as to what has caused the problem or how anyone will know the new societal evil has been vanquished. Their comrades in the media echo their allegations until leftists in the government, both the elected ones and, most importantly, the unelected bureaucratic ones (a.k.a., other fellow American commissars) demand corporations and other institutions must obey the latest dictate to combat this new societal injustice. Finally, the government weaponizes the “ism,” ascribes it to the regime’s political dissidents, and uses the police powers of the state to attack them. (If one doubts, ask Elon Musk.)
Lather, rinse, repeat . . .
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we knew the administration and faculty were disproportionately liberal in relation to the rest of the country. We knew that echoing the liberal line was not mandatory in most classes, though it could facilitate a higher grade in some instances. For their part, the liberal faculty was content to profess their ideology hoping it would fall upon fallow ground; and the administrators were committed to due process for all students. But the warning signs were there, as Allan Bloom foresaw.
The days when liberals ran the higher-ed roost are gone. These liberal academics have been cowed and/or purged by the radical Left (including tenured domestic terrorists). Yet it is not only happening in academia, but also in the media, corporations, and government, especially in the bureaucracy. The Left is transforming America into a college campus, where terms such as “liberty” get a trigger warning; freedom of conscience is subsumed beneath the Left’s secular religion; “whiteness” is the gravest societal sin; dissent is heresy; undue process is the rule; and the ultimate punishment is expulsion from society. The Left and its American commissars have as their immediate aim the closing of the American mind. Their ultimate aim is the cancellation of our free republic.