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Remember when The Wall Street Journal generally held respectably conservative opinions? Good times. But a recent opinion piece – “The Alienated ‘Knowledge Class’ Could Turn Violent” – betrays a curiously Left-wing argument that smells suspiciously of blackmail.
The article’s fear-mongering teaser line reads, “Societies that exile their intellectuals risk turning them into revolutionaries. It happened in the 1970s.” Jukka Savolainen, a professor of sociology at Wayne State University, begins his piece by noting that violent Left-wing radicals of the ‘70s such as the Weather Underground in the U.S., West Germany’s Red Army Faction, and Italy’s Red Brigades were composed largely not of “the oppressed proletariat of Marxist theory, but the disillusioned children of privilege and university lecture halls.” He writes that the radicalization of such academic domestic terrorists (my label, not his) as Barack Obama mentor Bill Ayers and his literal partner-in-crime Bernardine Dohrn “stemmed not from poverty but from moral outrage and estrangement from institutional power.”
That’s being rather generous. To be more precise, the Weather Underground’s radicalization stemmed not from “moral outrage and estrangement from institutional power” but from the Marxist imperative to “kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents,” as Ayers put it. That doesn’t bespeak “moral outrage”; that bespeaks a desire to smash morality itself.
But let’s move on. Savolainen warns that a “similar dynamic” is emerging in the U.S. today. The Trump administration’s dismantling of university DEI programs and slashing of academic research funding, he writes, “risks producing a new class of people who are highly educated but institutionally excluded. History suggests this group may become a source of unrest—and possibly violence.”
This may come as a surprise to Prof. Savolainen, but the reality is that the radicalized educated class has long been institutionally entrenched, not excluded, and it has already turned violent. Witness, for example, the number of teachers and professors who populate the brownshirts of Antifa, an explicitly violent network. Or the students and professors who dominate pro-Hamas protests on campuses all across the country and through the West, which have targeted Jewish students and even Jewish professors with violence and intimidation. Educated subversives like these weren’t radicalized because they were pushed to the margins of an oppressive society but because they were privileged elites at the most prestigious institutions of higher learning, indoctrinated to hate everything about their own civilization and to tear it down by any means necessary.
These revolutionaries integrated into these institutions and others over the course of decades precisely in order to undermine them – or more accurately, to capture and repurpose them. I once had a professor confess to me that he and his fellow Left-wing radicals gave up on marching in the streets to make the “long march through the institutions” instead, by becoming professors. “We didn’t see it as ‘selling out,’” he said. “We saw it as ‘buying in.’”
Anyway, Savolainen argues that such “status frustration is building” among the “knowledge class,” who have been “disproportionately harmed” by the Trump administration’s agenda. And so their radicalism is escalating:
President Trump’s policies could intensify this dynamic. By hollowing out state infrastructure and devaluing educational institutions, the administration risks creating a surplus of ideologically driven people with no outlet for their talents… Most won’t resort to violence, but history shows that a small, committed vanguard can inflict enormous damage.
He goes on to warn that
Defunding and demonizing higher education may offer short-term political gains, but doing so carries long-term dangers. By targeting perceived left-wing strongholds, some on the political right may cultivate the very radicalism they fear.
Perceived left-wing strongholds? Maybe the fact that more than 80% of Harvard professors identify as “liberal” and only 1% as conservative has something to do with that perception. Or the finding that professors donating to Democrat candidates outnumber those giving to Republicans by a ratio of 95 to 1. They’re not perceived left-wing strongholds; they’re undeniably so.
“Societies that exile their intellectuals risk turning them into revolutionaries,” Savolainen concludes. Gee, this feels like a thinly-veiled Left-wing threat, or blackmail – from the Wall Street Journal, no less: try to purge universities of violent, radical intellectuals and you just might end up with – wait for it – violent, radical intellectuals.
On a related note, Harvard Law professor emeritus and Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Laurence Tribe claimed last Monday on MSNBC’s The Last Word that Trump “is a president who hates intellect, who despises the symbol of excellence in the world of higher education around the world.”
This is patently ridiculous, and exactly what one would expect from the propaganda outlet MSNBC and the unhinged Tribe. Contrary to professors Tribe and Savolainen, the Trump administration and its MAGA supporters aren’t unfairly “demonizing” a politically neutral, noble-minded professorial class; we are calling them out as the far-Left subversives that the overwhelming majority of them are. We aren’t salivating at the prospect of tearing down higher education; we are trying to restore the educational mission of once-respectable institutions that have degenerated into indoctrination mills and launching pads for foreign spies, DEI operatives, and violent, Jew-hating radicals.
The Right isn’t anti-intellectual; we aren’t the ones intentionally dumbing down the younger generations. We are the ones who value education and want to preserve and build upon the glorious legacy of “the best that has been thought and said,” as Matthew Arnold put it. It’s the so-called intellectuals, or a disproportionate majority of them, who have perverted higher education and sought to dismantle the grand edifice of Western greatness. Ever since the Frankfurt school of cultural Marxists in the early decades of the 20th century, universities have been Ground Zero for propagating and/or conceiving the worst, most destructive ideas that humanity has ever produced, from socialism to Critical Theory. These citadels of hateful frauds have turned their back on the cultural giants of the past, and devoted themselves instead to brainwashing impressionable young minds into despising and violently sabotaging their own heritage.
Sorry, Wall Street Journal, but in MAGA America we don’t negotiate with subversives and terrorists. It’s the beginning of the end for the neo-Marxist “knowledge class.”
There is no such thing as a “liberal intellectual.”
…or a “Black intellectual.”
..or a “Muslims intellectual.”
HOWEVER, is you dose any person who describes himself as such with enough LSD — 350 micrograms should be enough — you CAN show such persons their self-delusions.
word
These are the nerds and cowards that run from physical confrontation in the street. “knowledge class”? A degree in art history specializing in the use of “Light in Low Country painting? “Sexual Response in Marmosets”? Very impressive! The only thing lower is a journalism major.
They are suckers who got loans to subsidize the DIE hires that were fortunate enough to come before them. Now the bill is due thanks to Trump. It does not matter that they maybe terrorists. The numbers are tiny compared to a Chicago weekend. They can wash cars, pick cotton or serve coffee and never work off their debt. Their betters are laughing all the way to the bank and pensions.
They sure as hell aren’t learning to code, coding needs you to be able to think logically and coherently.
Let me understand this… be accepting of Nazis and they won’t oppress you.
“The road to hell is paved with Ivy League degrees.” – Thomas Sowell
“In every disaster throughout American history, there always seems to be a man from Harvard in the middle of it.” – Thomas Sowell
“A PhD in Economics from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thin g.” – Elon Musk
Thomas Sowell used to be deserving of respect but not anymore, He criticized Trump’s tariffs and for that this RINO needs to never be read, or alluded, to again,
The Beatles were the thing, in my day. I never cared much for Elvis until I heard the some “Poison Ivy League” a few years ago.
Thanks for mentioning this song. I had never heard of it until now. Absolutely accurate and fitting.
Hail to thee old Ivy League
Poison Ivy League
The ra-ra boys are sitting round the table tonight
The ra-ra boys have lots of plans in view
They’re gonna have panty raids and make their own lemonade
They’ll live it up just like the big boys do
Poison Ivy League, boys in that Ivy League
Give me an itch, those sons of the rich
That Poison Ivy League
The ra-ra boys will go to bed so early tonight
Before exams they need a lot of rest
They gotta make good for dad, they gotta make good so bad
They’ll even pay someone to take that test
Poison Ivy League, boys in that Ivy League
How can they flunk, they’re so full of bunk
That Poison Ivy League
The ra-ra boys are being groomed for business some day
For better things to college they were sent
And you can bet they’ll be the head of the company
As long as dear old daddy’s president
Poison Ivy League, boys in that Ivy League
So loaded with cash, they give me a rash
That Poison Ivy League
So let it be told, I won’t touch them with a ten foot pole
That Poison Ivy League
Thanks for mentioning this song. I had never heard of it until now. Absolutely accurate and fitting.
Hail to thee old Ivy League
Poison Ivy League
The ra-ra boys are sitting round the table tonight
The ra-ra boys have lots of plans in view
They’re gonna have panty raids and make their own lemonade
They’ll live it up just like the big boys do
Poison Ivy League, boys in that Ivy League
Give me an itch, those sons of the rich
That Poison Ivy League
The ra-ra boys will go to bed so early tonight
Before exams they need a lot of rest
They gotta make good for dad, they gotta make good so bad
They’ll even pay someone to take that test
Poison Ivy League, boys in that Ivy League
How can they flunk, they’re so full of bunk
That Poison Ivy League
The ra-ra boys are being groomed for business some day
For better things to college they were sent
And you can bet they’ll be the head of the company
As long as dear old daddy’s president
Poison Ivy League, boys in that Ivy League
So loaded with cash, they give me a rash
That Poison Ivy League
So let it be told, I won’t touch them with a ten foot pole
That Poison Ivy League
Thank you. I thought this comment was a joke but ol’ Elvis was right on the money (or whoever wrote this tune). He saw through the class structure in its baseness. Wow. Little did I know.
Artistic Director
The Great American Play Series
Intellectual Nit-Wits who try to fit the Round Peg in the Square Hole
In 1928 Julian Bender published the book The Treason of Intellectuals on how France’s Intellectual class was educating children on communism , treason & surrender. Twelve years later France surrendered to Nazi Germany virtually without a fight and collaborated with the Nazis thereafter during the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact – Hitler Stalin Pact. Karl Marx in 1844 published On the Jewish Question where he blamed the jews for worlds problems – the origin of the Shoal. Intellectuals who control the education system, educated both the Nazis and Communists into power and are responsible for all the worlds problems – as indicated by the BBC documentary Science and The Nazis. The education system has always been a vector of humanities problems all the way back to the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Knowledge and the snake, just like the Mosquito is a vector of Malaria. Intellectuals are another name for The Brandenburg Illuminati the dark side of The enlightenment and need the same punishment meted out to them as the Catholic Church and priesthood during The Reformation.
When individuals like Rashid Khalidi, Susan Rosenberg and Angela Davis (and a rogues gallery of others) are appointed to professorships at our leading universities, the violent revolutionaries are already here!!!
So glad I am not part of the “thinking about thinking crowd”. I have things to do.
Part Two of the WSJ article will be “Normalizing ‘Intellectuals’ Will Also Create Violent Revolutionaries.”
Now retired, I attended university in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of my fellow students weren’t seeking education, but draft deferral. Many of the faculty were allied with the anti-American forces at work in the land. I managed to learn what was necessary to perform well in my profession and got a real appreciation of our republic’s founding.
In my professional life, the most offensive label ever given me by management and peers was “intellectual.” Most of the time, the remarks concerned broad knowledge of the history and mechanics of my profession, and aptitude for seeing relevant parallels across a range of systems and practices to apply to problems we confronted.
Since I know a real intellectual, an older brother who chaired an obscure department in a big university who thinks I am a bumpkin, I have little regard for that appellation and for those who enjoy it. For my perspective, they have little grounding in the facts and values that made the USA uniquely free and rewarding for its citizens, and no concern for the Creator who endowed us with rights and gifts that make life worthwhile.
As a consequence, articles about intellectuals interest me as little as the content of MSNBC, CNN, or FOX News. I’ve been told that if you think you need a psychiatrist you must be crazy. It seems there is a corollary if you think you are an intellectual.
Educated subversives, more accurate description than “intellectuals”
“Conditioned” subversives.
Given a choice between the WSJ and Victor Davis Hanson, I’ll take Victor Davis Hanson.
An intellectual is simply someone who makes money by using his brains – not much different from a what an expert is. There is no test to assure the public that the expert or the intellectual has any idea of what they are saying other than a paycheck.
The WSJ is a forlorn and useless publication. Soon to be the next TIME magazine.
Sorry guys. The new editor of the Wall Street Journal is Emma Tucker, a mostly liberal English woman. Examples of change? They now accept information from the Hamas Health Ministry as true which does not need to be checked for veracity. So the Journal is going down the tubes with this DEI hire. There are very few outspoken conservative English women. They are afraid of the opprobrium of their leftist peers. Peggy Noonan types, always making sure they will be admitted to the best parties. It’s worse there than here
What a great slogan for the progressives. It’s perfect. “Be nice to us, or we’ll hurt you and damage your cities.” With that kind of logic you could say that keeping lots of money in bank vaults will create armed bank robbers.
Peter Turchin, although one of their sympathizers, already addressed this issue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
This can be solved either by reducing their numbers over time through fewer college attendees, or quickly by any means necessary.
We can’t but lose either way with these cultivated ‘anarcho-leftists’. Ostracize them or coddle them, their DNA still will yield the same eventual wild, vicious, and nasty animal. Ideally they would be exterminated like cockroaches, as they share a good portion of the same non-attributes of those ick-factor insects. A truly totalitarian society would do that, but then totalitarian societies can themselves eventually *result* from the nurturing of these disaffected intellectual types by institutions of higher learning, cheered on by a thoroughly corrupt fake mass media, and now also by social media. Mussolini did that, and both Hitler and Stalin to a lesser extent in part via an aristocratic elite that looked the other way as the two stomped through their respective countries with their antics. In a Republic, the only option is to suppress their influence. How that is to be done remains the tricky part, most of the time seeming to be thoroughly unknown to the powers-in-charge. The main question currently in our case is who might be the eventual standard-bearer leaders spawned in a future American political hellscape? An Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and/or a David Hogg? (The former being a Pied Piper, the latter a cross between a venomous snake and a subdued Tasmanian Devil.) Or someone else yet to appear, quite still well-off the radar for the time being?
”’ alienating intellectuals will create violent revolutionaries ” the same thing has occurred by accommodating them . as the recent history in america has proven.