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President Trump’s campaign to restore Constitutional order and common sense to our government has rightly targeted our educational institutions, keeping the pledge he made on the campaign trail “to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left.” These institutions, like a fish, rot from the head down, and so the corruption of our universities must be reduced by starting with their administrations and faculties.

That corruption became obvious during the campus protests celebrating Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. The despicable anti-Semitism of the students and faculty of some of our most prestigious universities, as well as violence directed at Jewish students, replete with genocidal chants and rhetoric, were tolerated by campus authorities and met with shameful appeasement, if not encouragement, rather than arrests and expulsions.

Trump has responded by garnishing some of the billions of dollars that taxpayers provide to universities, which use these funds to finance politicized or dubious research, create anti-American programs, and graduate majors rife with leftwing curricula filled with postmodern “higher nonsense,” but lacking any prospects of employment other than political activism. Indeed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Wall Street Journal reports, “You have a higher chance of being unemployed these days if you go to college.”

In response, these institutions have been caterwauling like a spoiled, entitled brat whose rich father has reduced his exorbitant allowance. Typical are the comments of Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, who blustered, “The attack on Columbia is a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research . . . Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.”

So how did private universities with multi-billion-dollar, tax-free endowments get a “right” to taxpayer money? And how did the common-sense wisdom that “He who pays the piper calls the tune” disappear? Aren’t there conditions the feds impose on how public funds are spent? Are not politicized curricula, programs, and majors verboten?

But the left-wing’s “long march” to politicize universities is just one example of the left’s corruption of our schools. Postmodern and poststructuralist ideologies––the idiot children of Marx’s malign ideas such of “false consciousness” –– incorporate other sophistic ideas such as the simplistic, radical materialist determinism and relativism.

All three comprise the essence of postmodernism and Cultural Marxism: the notion that everything we believe is real, good, and true are mere illusory “constructs” of the plutocratic powers of capitalism, which ensure that the citizenry trained by families, churches, schools, tradition, virtues, and morality––all manifestations of “false consciousness”–– are conditioned to believe that capitalism and free markets, rather than collectivism, redistribution policies, and dirigiste economies, create and distribute wealth more widely and justly.

Postmodern ideology, moreover, adds radical epistemic relativism to this toxic Marxist brew–– meaning, facts, knowledge, truth, rights, morality, even personal identity itself are all constructs serving the power of those who own and shape the means of production. The aim is to justify and mystify the oppressive social, political, and economic power and privilege of the capitalist hegemony. In the West, the chimeras of false consciousness also comprise the foundations of Western Civilization––rationalism, Christianity, patriarchy, freedom, democracy, masculinity, heterosexuality, and “white supremacy” that begets racism and predatory genocidal colonialism and imperialism.

Of course, there exists little empirical evidence, and few sound arguments for these ideologies that are internally incoherent. If “truth” is merely a fable of power and its “discourses” that no one can escape, then why should we believe Karl Marx or the epistemic nihilism of Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault? Aren’t these poststructuralist malignant fads just more “constructs,” a spectacle of pampered, privileged academic savants sawing off the civilizational branch they’re sitting on?

Orwell knew where that leads. Speaking of the West, in 1940 after the appeasement of Hitler ignited World War II, he wrote that for two centuries “we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on.” But when the branch finally broke, it didn’t land us “in a bed of roses,” but a “cesspit full of barbed wire” ––also a fitting description of utopian communism and its mass slaughter, show trials, and dreadful gulags.

Next, the transgender movement shows us how much mischief can happen when patently absurd ideas wrapped in postmodern sophistries present themselves as facts established by science. But the core idea that biological sex is a personal choice from among multiple variations of “genders,” did not began in scientific research, but in university “soft” disciplines like Comparative Literature, Women’s Studies, Linguistics, and English. It reflected the influence of postmodernism and poststructuralism, which in turn adopted one of Marxism’s most pernicious ideas––“false consciousness,” the notion that our culture, beliefs, virtues, morality, science, truth, and personal identity itself are fictions of capitalism’s political structures and “discourses” that promote its ideology by how it shapes our minds, “truths,” social identities, and even “genders,” so that we accept their unjust power and tyranny of the plutocrats.

Equally destructive is the influence of scientism on our political policies regarding transgenderism, a non-scientific idea inflicted on neurotic children and young adults. It also features a simplistic model of human behavior that ignores our complexity and the “complexity horizon,” which mathematician John Allen Paulos defines as “that limit beyond which social laws, events, and regularities are so complex as to be unfathomable, seemingly random.”

It’s a sign of how far gone our educational institutions are that such anti-scientific nonsense could so successfully colonize our society that scientifically trained medical doctors today poison troubled, delusional neurotic children with cross-hormone and hormone-blocking treatments, and perform irreversible, mutilating surgeries, violating their profession’s foundational ethic to heal and improve patients, or at least do them no harm.

The influence of Marxism on our educational institutions has deformed them with other questionable, dangerous ideas. There’s the simplistic economic determinism that claims impersonal social forces shape and control individual choices and actions, all for the benefit of the rich and powerful. But individualism––the high value placed on the unique, individual person with a mind and free will, who possesses the innate instinct for freedom and unalienable rights––is the foundation of our Constitutional freedoms, and the source our humanity that collectivist ideologies deform by denying our moral agency and accountability for our freely chosen actions.

Another destructive Marxist influence on our universities, also buttressed by postmodernism, is the fetishizing of violent revolution, which justifies the amoral rationale for the tactic “by any means necessary,” which in turn justifies violence–– as we are currently witnessing with leftist protestors vandalizing Teslas, and throwing fire-bombs at dealerships and charging stations; or anti-Trump riots and protests celebrating murderers and terrorists. Moreover, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn has pointed out, violence is fueled by Big Lies: “Anyone who has once proclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose the lie as his principle.”

That link is particularly corrosive to the university and democracy alike, which require truth to survive. As political philosopher Jean-François Revel has written, “democracy cannot thrive without a certain diet of truth. It cannot survive if the degree of truth in current circulation falls below a minimal level. A democrat regime, founded on the free determination of the important choices made by a majority, condemns itself to death if the citizens who have to choose between various options make their decisions in ignorance of reality, blinded by passions or mislead by fleeting impressions.”

Marxism and the postmodern “higher nonsense,” in contrast, both preach the relativism of truth and its reduction to a “construct” that serves capitalism’s oppression. Of course, both ideologies make exceptions for their “truths,” despite the monstrous incoherence that vitiates them, but still leaves them efficient political tools, especially in our schools that are serially failing to educate students in foundational skills that equip us for the necessary task of sorting truth out from the mendacious obfuscations of destructive, anti-humanist ideologies.

Finally, we must acknowledge how long and how tenaciously Marxist ideology has occupied our culture and politics. In 1976, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his speech “If One Doesn’t Want to Be Blind,” compared our political culture and ideology to those of Soviet-era Russians who were living through communism’s bloody tyranny:

“What we see [in the West] . . . is still the same [as the Soviet Union]: the universal reverence of adult society for the opinion of children; the feverish infatuation, on the part of many young people, with vanishingly worthless ideas; the timorousness of professors to find themselves outside the latest trends; the failures of journalists to take responsibility for the words they fling so readily; the universal sympathy for revolutionary extremists; the muteness of people with serious objections; the passive defeatism of the majority; the feebleness of governments and the paralysis of society’s defense mechanisms; the spiritual dismay leading to political cataclysm.”

Fortunately, President Donald Trump is making remarkable progress in reforming the corrupt educational institutions that have been the most important facilitators and enablers of this assault on our Constitutional order and its Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian roots. But, to quote Winston Churchill, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” We still have a long way to go.