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There was a time when conservatives told themselves that safe spaces, trigger warnings and speech bans would stay on campus. “Just wait until those kids get out into the real world and discover that they can’t get jobs studying critical race theory,” they would snicker.
Not only can they get jobs, but their job in government and corporate DEI is purging you.
There’s no real world anymore. We live in a giant totalitarian campus in the University States of America whose administrators are government officials and corporate leaders in which elections matter much less than catering to the whims of a young and wealthy post-student workforce.
College students went from pulling classic novels from college reading lists to rewriting them entirely as ‘sensitivity readers’ employed by major publishers like Penguin Random House.
Campus protests against controversial speakers and iconoclastic professors evolved into cancel culture. When colleges failed to hold the line on academic freedom, everyone lost theirs. The small-scale student clashes in the oughts exploded into nationwide race riots by 2020. The violence was lubricated by the evolution of campus doxxing and snitch culture into viral videos that ‘canceled’ random individuals or falsely framed clashes with police as racial oppression.
Within a decade, the old liberal institutions, including the ACLU, abandoned free speech and dedicated themselves to fighting ‘hate speech’ with all the eagerness of the campus activists who now staff them and set their agenda. The old argument, refined by college students on Tumblr, that everything was a microaggression and that microaggressions caused health problems, was adopted by governments and public health organizations which declared that racism was a public health crisis. Speech, words, not only hurt, but they could potentially kill.
Why did the old liberal institutions buckle so easily? The answer is also found on campuses.
Obama was our first college president: glib, entitled and ignorant of anything except the need for radical change. Certain of his own genius, he never had to learn how anything worked or what the laws and norms were. Biden, a former establishment opponent turned puppet, was every college president, ancient, clueless and with a career of repeating things that sounded good.
Like college presidents, Biden’s job is to preside over a radical institution while lending it a fig leaf of moderate credibility. Every institution, whether it’s Evergreen College or the United States government, needs an old white guy out front to reassure the donors that it’s not as crazy as it looks. But now the donors watching the place burn to the ground happen to be the American people.
College presidents easily fell to the radicals because their fossilized liberalism was devoid of conviction. The same was true of the Democratic Party which had come to believe in little except big government and the evil of Republicans. Talking to DNC delegates in Philly in 2016, I met men and women who were nervous of the Bernie Left, but had nothing to counter them with. American liberalism was already ossified when it was being challenged by Boomer radicals in the sixties, by the eighties it was meaningless, by the oughts no one believed it and by twenty-twenties, it’s a marginal belief held by a few college professors at odds with society.
There are probably more zoroastrians than liberals today. And those who answer surveys claiming to be liberals rarely have any idea what liberalism means or they wouldn’t say so.
The radicals of the sixties and today learned on campuses that the power structure that seemed so impressive at first glance, the stone buildings, high offices and grand traditions, were pathetically weak and could be intimidated into appeasing them with some yelling, crying and word games. This was the same lesson those brats, some now in their eighties, had learned from their parents, which they had practiced on college administrators and then society at large.
One difference though was that the sixties radicals had wanted more from life than a world-girdling college campus. Contemporary radicals who were educated on campuses that had been retooled to cater to every possible student whim (funded by massive amounts of institutional debt and extortionate student loans) want more of the same thing.
Their vision of 15-minute cities where everyone bikes to work and the only eating option is vegan, where all your needs are free, you are constantly being “educated”, unfulfilling ideological sexual experimentation is encouraged and there’s someone to tattle to when your feelings are hurt, is just a college campus. Having come of age at some Ivy League nest, they can conceive of no other lifestyle that they or anyone else should be able to exist under.
What they never understood was that this extended adolescence was subsidized by hundreds of thousands in student loans and credit card debt. Behind the cafes, the understanding professors, and the townies seeing to all their needs was the invisible hand of a market economy even if it had been buried under a pile of soy lattes and courses on Noam Chomsky.
Expelled from paradise at graduation and suddenly discovering what student loans look like when they’re coming out of your paycheck for the next twenty years, they wanted to crawl back into the academic womb and escape adult responsibilities. Conservatives saw all of that coming. What too many did not see coming was that the real world would accommodate them.
Corporations lured talent by building ‘campuses’ that resembled college campuses. While those practices were pioneered in the tech industry which aspired to build a young and disposable workforce that never left its premises, they soon spread across the corporate world. Recruiters told companies that employees wanted to work for a place that aligned with their values. Advertisers told them that their brands also had to reflect those same values.
CEOs, like college presidents, quickly folded and went woke. And having gone woke, they refused to look back. Corporate offices unleashed the affinity groups that had defined college life for minority student activists with employees pressured and rewarded for joining the black, ‘latinx’ or gay groups. Advertising, already the domain of a woke crowd, pushed companies to be more daring, to flout family values and embrace radical causes to ensure brand loyalty. Along the way, brand loyalty became political allegiance to the endless agendas of the Left.
Government proved even easier to ‘campusize’. The activist base of the Democrats was drawn from the most politically active college students who were almost invariably the farthest to the Left. Billionaire megadonors like George Soros had already spent millions funding networks of activist groups to employ them. When the Democrats needed inexpensive and experienced young people willing to work on campaigns, they injected the Left directly into their veins.
The Obama campaign and the Center for American Progress turned campus activists into a generation of political appointees. By 2020, it was virtually impossible to find young non-leftist Democrats working in any significant position in Washington D.C. And those young leftists are invariably ‘woke:, using identity politics as a status symbol while knowing nothing.
Radical politics is so popular with some of the young because it is a rebellion not only against physical, but intellectual authority, that delegitimizes it and dismisses it as cruel and oppressive on the most specious of grounds. Identity politics, even more than class warfare before it, offers a seductive rationale for burning everything to the ground so that no more needs to be learned.
Campuses have always been fertile ground for glib radicalism that allows the students to replace education with activism, to declare that no more needs to be known because all that came before was bad, and that the only way to fix society is to embrace total change.
A new generation of leftists runs everything and knows nothing. Foreign policy is based on Obamaesque ideological abstractions with no understanding of the actual motives of other nations . The media closely resembles college papers which never understood the difference between reporting and editorializing. Its members denounce journalistic objectivity without having the faintest idea of what objectivity even means. Corporations alienate their customers by championing wokeness in place of developing long-term business models for their brands.
Piles of debt and the wealth of a nation can only soften the inevitable collapse for so long. The college bubble has become a national bubble. And when it bursts, America goes with it.
Many conservatives made a catastrophic mistake by treating college as an aberration rather than the coming norm. Sixties radicalism did not stay on campus, there was no reason to think that its more contemporary incarnation would. And with a larger slice of the population being processed through the academic abattoir, the social effects would be much worse.
And they are.
The University States of America is a great place if you’re a socialist member of an oppressed class whose great dream is to dwell on a campus for the rest of your days attending protest rallies, experimenting with your genders, while refraining from having a family, and working on your vision of utopia until you eagerly accept a euthanizing injection rather than live with the indignities of old age and then get turned into mulch. It’s a really bad deal for everyone else.
Unfortunately we all live on a campus now. Even if you’re on a farm with only dirt roads for miles in every direction your life is being governed by rules created in a campus government. The trends on campuses will soon show up in your regulations, federal and local, in the culture and in your schools. Its totalitarian grip is weaker in some places than others, but it is never absent.
On the great national campus, some of us are students and others are townies, there to serve and be sneered at by institutions that no longer represent us or answer to us. But after all the student rebellions, it might be time for an anti-student rebellion, for an uprising of the townies against the gownies. The student rebellions showed us how weak institutional authority is. The day may be coming when the students who taught us that lesson will have to learn it instead.
One thing I watch for now is who does that actual physical work that requires muscular strength.
JoseA and JoseB.
Originally they needed a white male boss to make sure they did the job right, but lately I’ve seen Spanish-speaking bosses who have mastered the job and are able to make them do the job right.
True. Originally, Taiwanese manufacturers needed ideas, blue prints and guidance. Now they conceptualize, design and build.
Every workman who come here talks about how hard it is to find young men to hire and how the ones they do hire don’t know anything and have a poor work ethic.
I’m finding that with contractors I know, too, some of whom are friends of my own age who have gratefully retired, with nobody to hand over their businesses to. And now the younger men who have become contractors are having problems of their own finding men to work as apprentices or journeymen. It’s frustrating. What used to be the American Dream of starting a business is becoming increasingly difficult.
Patriot Acadademt.com offers a Free curriculum for k thru 12 easily assimilated into a college format. Let’s demand it!
We must have a seat at the academic table. The left conquered the universities and are now moving down to K-12 Don’t forget-before a person of influence can become a reporter or a teacher they must first pass through a university. Do all come out as leftist dingbats-no-but the left are smart enough to know that it is a numbers game.,
Could we win the game-yes, in one year.. All we have to do is demand an alternative CORE curriculum. These are the set of courses all students have to take. This used to always include two courses in Western Civilization, but no longer do.. We used to believe that learning about Western Civilization and passing it on to the next generation was our duty. We could include books by people like Thomas Sowell and others.
We can demand an alternative core . We can have the joy of saying ‘You believe in choice don’t you?”
In no time the word would go out that the best students take the Western Civilization core. We could bring in speakers like the ones who write for Commentary.
George Zilbergeld
From your keyboard to G0d’s “eyes”.
Why are Muslim countries Muslim? Because that’s what they teach at the schools. A society is ultimately shaped by its dominant philosophy or religion (religion is an early form, a precursor, of philosophy). Who teaches philosophy? The philosophers at the universities. From there the philosophy spreads throughout the society.
By themselves Americans will not be able to save America not if the philosophers at the universities hate and are determined to destroy the ideas America is founded on. Little by little, drop by drop, as has been happening in America since right after the Civil War, the importation of German-Kantian-Hegelian philosophy has been eroding and destroying the philosophical ideas America was founded on.
“The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” – Abraham Lincoln
“The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them—from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handful of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default….
The present state of the world is not the proof of philosophy’s impotence, but the proof of philosophy’s power. It is philosophy that has brought men to this state—it is only philosophy that can lead them out.” – Ayn Rand
“It is often asked: Why was capitalism destroyed in spite of its incomparably beneficent record? The answer lies in the fact that the lifeline feeding any social system is a culture’s dominant philosophy and that capitalism never had a philosophical base. It was the last and (theoretically) incomplete product of an Aristotelian influence. As a resurgent tide of mysticism engulfed philosophy in the nineteenth century, capitalism was left in an intellectual vacuum, its lifeline cut. Neither its moral nature nor even its political principles had ever been fully understood or defined. Its alleged defenders regarded it as compatible with government controls (i.e., government interference into the economy), ignoring the meaning and implications of the concept of laissez-faire. Thus, what existed in practice, in the nineteenth century, was not pure capitalism, but variously mixed economies. Since controls necessitate and breed further controls, it was the statist element of the mixtures that wrecked them; it was the free, capitalist element that took the blame.
Capitalism could not survive in a culture dominated by mysticism and altruism, by the soul-body dichotomy and the tribal premise. No social system (and no human institution or activity of any kind) can survive without a moral base. On the basis of the altruist morality, capitalism had to be—and was—damned from the start.” – Ayn Rand
What is not considered here is the roots of the problem in family life. IF there is immorality, if there is ignorance of God and the Bible. With ignorance of God is failure to form sound marriages and family life. Strong family life is led by strong patriarchal fathers and matriarchal mothers who are people who know what it means to obey, and to teach children to obey, With worship of God and obedience to parents a child has finds its way through a sea of spiritual evil and moral perversion with private and inner glowing love. The way to peace is very quiet, just like God.
This is why as Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff accurately notes Christianity prepared the ground for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three fundamentals in the western mind, the worship of the supernatural, the reliance on faith, and the reverence for self-sacrifice.
Self-sacrifice translates to blind obedience. The Nazis, the Kamikazes, the Muslim suicide bombers, and 9/11 hijackers, were if anything thoroughly sacrificing their reasoning minds to a an authority other than their own rational minds, they were obedient, doing their duty. A rational person does not blindly obey and a rational parent does not demand blind obedience from his child but he shows his child how to think rationally and why he should obey not for the sake of obedience but for the sake of his own rational self-interest.
“Man’s mind is his basic means of survival—and of self-protection. Reason is the most selfish human faculty: it has to be used in and by a man’s own mind, and its product—truth—makes him inflexible, intransigent, impervious to the power of any pack or any ruler. Deprived of the ability to reason, man becomes a docile, pliant, impotent chunk of clay, to be shaped into any subhuman form and used for any purpose by anyone who wants to bother.
There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or “limited”) reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some authority.” – Ayn Rand
My God…I love it when you tell us what a rational person is supposed to behave and how a rational parent is supposed handle his kids.
For the love of God, please leave us alone and return to your Lotus Flower.
So smart guy….what are you prepared to do about it besides wring your hands and expound to the same 20 or so people on the comment board.
Unadulterated bull shiggety.
Must get lonely posting the same tired garbage everyday.
This is an excellent depiction of the long march of the far left through American institutions
The founders gave us the roadmap to try to save us from this. But, as the founders knew, man is weak and mailable by tyrants if not fully engaged and vigilant.
Yes, but now that they’ve marched through the institutions, where do they go? What’s at the end of their journey? Nothing. And that is exactly what they are demanding the world become — nothing. The end goal appears to be utter nihilism.
I was chatting with a friend a few years back when “woke” was becoming more visible to the mainstream culture. I told him it appeared to be a regressive instead of progressive ideology. I concluded our conversation by positing the belief we are, if this cult were to metastasize, being dragged back to the Stone Age.
Thanks Lightbringer. That was what I got out of reading Trotsky’s book on Stalin. The old Bolsheviks just prepared the way for Stalin’s dictatorship.
Mr Greenfield. Great article. You are intelligent and a very talented columnist. To go off topic, I would like to comment on previous articles you wrote. You seem to have bought into the fallacies of protectionism. I am puzzled as to how someone as smart as can not see the benefits of free trade (free trade, not fair trade). You would be a great advocate for free trade and be a great voice to challenge one of Trumps greatest flaws, his protectionist tendencies. More than just ‘tendencies’ actually, it seems to be the center piece of his agenda. A little application of logic and you’d be able to see how utterly meaningless trade deficits are.
Again, I know it’s off topic, but just an observation that surprises me about you.
I think Trump was levelling the free trade because the Chinese government subsidies anything and everything which is why tariffs work.
Thanks Mo. That helped me connect some dots.
China was playing the Mercantilism game while we were playing the Free Trade game.
The dot I just connected is that China is still playing the Mercantilism game while the Globalists are playing the Green Globalism game.
The country that plays “free trade” is always better off than the country that plays “mercantilism” . Protectionists can’t see that. They think trade deficits matter. Mercantilism is a form of big government central planning. Just cause other nations foolishly do it, doesn’t mean we should engage in it.
It kind of ceases to be free trade when our government imposes tariffs on us. I think you don’t understand the definition of free trade. When the Chinese or other governments subsidize certain industries, it is their taxpayers footing the bill. That doesn’t mean we should tax our citizens more by imposing tariffs.
What do you mean tariffs work? Tariffs are just another tax, we need to be taxed more you are saying?
He’s not so much attacking free-trade as much as he’s attacking Chinas’ place in it. China lies, steals and cheats and should be stripped of its Most Favored Nation status immediately. And, yes, its too bad that we can’t all be competitors and partners at the same time, but some people–like communists–want to dominate, not play by the rules for everyones benefit.
Free Trade was a peculiar Western concept of the time, but alien to the rest of the World.
Fairness and decency are peculiarly Western values and the rest of the world really doesn’t get them. But they find us fair game if they can be unfair and indecent in their trade relations with us.
You miss the point of free trade. Our government only has jurisdiction over us. Free trade means letting us trade freely with no tariffs regardless of what other nations impose on their people. They are hurting themselves. Trump doesn’t realize that trade deficits are meaningless and that tariffs on Americans mainly hurt Americans.
Actually he is attacking free trade. Trump has complained about the trade deficit with many allies and other non-hostile countries, not just China. Even with China, he doesn’t care if we trade with China, he just doesn’t like the trade deficit. The only way to hurt the evil Chinese gov is to place an embargo to end trade with them all together. That would be effective if many other free countries joined is as well.
As far as your comment: “want to dominate, not play by the rules for everyones benefit.”
Everyone chooses if they “benefit” or not. The countries that benefit most from trade are the ones that have free trade, meaning no tariffs or restrictions on what their citizens can import. What others do is essentially irrelavent. It is not a contest where the country with the biggest surplus wins. That is protectionists fallacy.
So why was Trump such a successful President wile puppet Beijing Biden is such a contemptible failure? There’s no such thing as free trade, only bending over for the countries which cheat, like China.
You’re full of shit.
So it;s meaningless if the murderous Chinese communists use the cash from their massively bigger share of the trade profits to arm and field huge military forces and buy up massive tracts of real estate worldwide and in the USA and establish military bases and other infrastructure control throughout the world while the USA sinks into multi trillions of dollars worth of debt and loses its industrial base entirely? Maybe when they will no longer extend credit to us they will be able to harvest and sell our organs as collateral like they are doing with their own people.
Then we should place a trade embargo on China and cease to do business with them all together. Though I don’t know how effective it would be if other free nations didn’t join in.
Perhaps then companies would be forced to move production to other non-hostile low labor nations like Vietnam or Mexico. But imposing tariffs on Americans hurts Americans. Trade deficits are meaningless after all as they show only one side of the ledger sheet.
Our debt is not because of trade deficits. Our debt is solely due to out of control federal spending. If Trump was as fanatic about debt reduction and cutting spending as he is about the meaningless trade deficit, I’d put him up there with the one of the best presidents ever.
You are correct about tariffs. But it is immoral-suicidal-altruism for a free country or a semi-free country (America today is only a semi-free country) to do business with an outright communist or fascist dictatorship. What Ayn Rand said about the Soviet Dictatorship applies to all totalitarian dictatorships. You don’t do business with totalitarian gangsters and thugs.
“It is immoral for the U.S. (and for all free or semi-free countries) to engage in any undertaking with Soviet Russia as a partner. It is particularly immoral if the undertaking is intellectual or cultural. Such a partnership necessarily implies and proclaims the acceptance of Soviet Russia as a peaceful, well-meaning, civilized country….
There is only one form of protest open to the men of goodwill in the semi-free world: do not sanction the Soviet jailers of [the dissidents]—do not help them to pretend that they are the morally acceptable leaders of a civilized country. Do not patronize or support the evil pretense of the so-called “cultural exchanges”—any Soviet-government-sponsored scientists, professors, writers, artists, musicians, dancers (who are either vicious bootlickers or doomed, tortured victims). Do not patronize, support or deal with any Soviet supporters and apologists in this country: they are the guiltiest men of all….
I would advocate that which the Soviet Union fears above all else: economic boycott. I would advocate a blockade of Cuba and an economic boycott of Soviet Russia; and you would see both those regimes collapse without the loss of a single American life.” – Ayn Rand
Free trade, to put it simply, can’t be a one way street. Free trade with European countries that heavily subsidize and rig the game was already debatable, but free trade with China is nothing of the kind.
It’s simply a process by which we turn over our economy to a foreign enemy oligarchy.
You don’t understand the definition of free trade. You are talking about so called ‘fair trade’, not ‘free trade’. Countries that subsidize industry, hurt the taxpayers of those nations. We get freebies in the form of cheaper products for it.
A country that leaves its people alone and doesn’t impose tariffs (which is just another tax) on it’s people is said to have free trade regardless of what other nations do.
I don’t know if the topic interests you enough. But instead of me boring you here with a lengthy explanation, read some articles of Thomas Sowell on the foolishness of Trump’s protectionist tendencies. You are advocating for protectionism, not free trade. Protectionism is just a form of big government central planning.
Again, if your’e interested, check some of Thomas Sowells writings on the subject, he can explain it better than I can.
You are correct about tarrifs but it is immoral and suicidal for a free or semi-free country to do business with a totalitarian dictatorship like the Soviets, the CCP, or Adolf Hitler and his Nazis.
“In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins…. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube . . .” – Ayn Rand
“In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins….
Like Israel and the Palestinian Authority?
“Free trade” is RINO bullshit. It doesn’t exist and the attempts to pretend it does fucked America straight up our asses.
Nothing is free.
Yup, we are well and truly fuqued. I don’t know how we could come back with all of the institutions in the hands of these horrible people. Social media and the surveillance state will keep opponents from organizing and getting their message out. Our “justice system” will punish deviance from the State. I just don’t see it. The only thing that can save the U.S. in my opinion is that, as with the USSR, it will collapse of its own incompetence and regard for ideology over reality. But it won’t happen in my lifetime.
It might happen in your lifetime and/or in mine and I am old. It looks imminent to me.
Better if it does happen. Its like an illness that needs a fever to flight the infection.
The loss of God and the assumption of his power by man has never worked out. Nothing rules the fate of nations than being ruled by narcissistic megalomaniacs whose hubris is only outweighed by their ignorance. This isn’t new. The lesson of history is that we don’t learn from history..
It certainly has not worked since it all started with the French Revolution. It will not work this time, no matter what the “Enlightened” believe.
Replacing God with false idols we see the false idols to the false gods of ancient pagan false religions the Aztecs is just one there is also the Incans and Myhans and the Native Americans to as well as the cults
”If Fascism ever came to America it will come disguised as Liberalism”… Ronald Reagan.
FYI… It has arrived.
Conservatism is the new Counter Culture…
We grew up after the radical excesses of the 60s-70s…. Im 75.
Where have we seen this movie before? Sodom and Gomorrah.
Daniel Greenfield is the most brilliant political writer we have. And it’s completely simple and clear in style.
He occupies a space once taken by someone named Joel Carmichael and FPM is similar to the Israeli publication he edited, “Midstream Magazine”. Judaisms sources notwithstanding, if you want to see things through Daniels’ eyes, read what he so clearly read and was deeply impacted by: Eric Hoffers’ brilliant, “The True Believer”.
the longshoreman philosopher is certainly one of my proud influences
I’d never heard of Hoffer before today. I had to look him up online. I’ll have to read some of his books.
thank you so much
Apt corollary to Shakespeare’s life is a stage.
Universities are porous, perfect places to indoctrinate and to propagandise because of one key factor – they purposely lack moral oversight in an environment of mostly uninformed, insecure young adults trying to define themselves in every which way. And it’s a business in and out.
Apparently it is a scientific fact that synapses in the brain are still not fully developed in adults in their 20s, which means that their ability to make sound judgments might be naturally impeded.
So, we’re waiting for mature synapses to kick in. Rough going in the meantime.
Ever look up the mottos of universities? So much Latin, light and truth……..
Shaping your identity takes a lifetime of experience.
The university experience is one small part of existence that remains frozen in its time.
Inter generational family, on the other hand, when not a victim of abuse and dysfunction, is a constant, fundamental bastion of moral oversight.
This will endure.
Communist revolutions are often started by teachers and students, and generally, very wealthy ones. I can think of many examples – Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge, Abimael Guzman of the Shining Path, Ho Chi Minh of the Viet Cong Army,, Mao Zedong, who initially organized his revolution from student groups at Peking University, Today many Antifa and BLM members are teachers and students, both lower grades and university. It’s much easier to indoctrinate people before they have any real world experience.