The College Scam

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The College Scam

It is well known that the vast majority of the universities across this country have for many years now, at least since the 1960's and quite possibly for much longer, been hotbeds of atheistic, Leftist, Marxist outlook and thought. This is true for the Ivy League colleges such as Harvard and Yale as well as most of the rest of the colleges in America. In these colleges professors of Leftist / Marxist outlook who hate our system and want to bring it down indoctrinate impressionable young minds into radical Leftist assumptions, beliefs, and outlooks. These troublemakers, instigators program young minds much as some religious cult leader programs people. Students are taught to question and challenge our system and everything we believe in — question all of our assumptions and values. As a result, the general atmosphere in these colleges is highly hostile to anyone of conservative outlook. The end result of all this is a continuing stream of indoctrinated, brainwashed graduates of modern liberal Leftist outlook and sentiment flowing out of our colleges and into positions of power in government and industry. These brainwashed graduates of our colleges and universities people the highest positions in our local and national government, court system, press, entertainment industry, churches, teacher’s colleges, etc. This is the game plan of our modern intellectuals for overthrowing our system and we are now seeing the consequences. Everything we believe in is being challenged and our world is being turned upside down.

We live in a world that is filled with angry people. That is the way it is in this country and I imagine that is the way it is in many countries. Maybe most countries. It has probably been true in most countries throughout the history of man. Perhaps it is just part of human nature. I think envy has a lot to do with it. People just don’t like to see others have more than they do. It really bothers them. They would prefer that everyone be dirt poor and equal than to have plenty but have a neighbor who is rich. In addition, some people just don’t like themselves very much and don’t like anyone else either. People are complicated and many are afflicted with mental problems. Many sense they are failures and blame all of their problems on others or society. How does a government deal with malcontents, troublemakers, agitators, mischief-makers — people who just want to bring the system down? In our country we have had, on different occasions, angry riots, people out looting stores, burning down cities, etc. How should a government respond to this kind of thing? Appeasement or by harsh responses?

I have been reading “The College Scam” by Charlie Kirk, Founder and President of Turning Point USA. A main theme is that for most students, those majoring in the humanities, college 1) is ridiculously overpriced 2) provides a poor education 3) is a hotbed of radicalism that twists and perverts young minds, corrupting ability to think logically.

See The college experience

Following are some excerpts from the book:

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According to the National Center for Education Statistics in 2020 the six-year graduation rate for full-time undergrads seeking a bachelor’s degree is 62 percent. That means that, even if you give a student an extra two years to complete a four-year college degree only 62 percent achieve that goal; 38 percent fail to graduate. p. 29

According to EducationData.org four out of ten college dropouts left school with a GPA of 3.0 or higher. And 39 percent of dropouts said that their college didn’t give them their money’s worth.

p. 29

In July 2021, the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy and shocking expose’ on the higher education racket, with a special focus on the Columbia University film program. According to the Journal recent graduates of the Columbia film program carried a median debt of $181,000. Yet two years after earning a master’s in filmmaking, half were earning less than $30,000 a year.

One of those Columbia graduates, twenty nine year old Zack Morrison, is carrying almost $300,000 of student loans. Though he landed a studio job in Hollywood, he only earns between $30,000 and $50,000 a year, which he supplements with side gigs as a photographer and videographer. He told the Journal, “There’s always those 2 a.m. panic attacks where your’re thinking, “How the hell am I ever going to pay this off?”

And then there’s Matt Black, who graduated from Columbia in 2015 with a master’s in film. He left school owing $233,000 in student loans. In 2021, he still owed $331,000 — almost $100,000 more than his original debt. He’s on an income-based plan, and when he can’t make payments, the interest keeps accruing. His most lucrative year as a writer-producer brought in $60,000. He describes his finances as “calamitous,” adding, we were told by the establishment our whole lives this [an Ivy League education] was the way to jump social classes. He considers himself “hobbled for life” by debt. Marriage and home-ownership seem permanently out of reach. p. 44

The Journal concluded, “Highly selective universities have benefitted from free-flowing federal loan money, and with demand for spots far exceeding supply, the schools have been able to raise tuition largely unchecked.” Many students have no idea what a huge financial obligation they’ve taken on. Some of our most prestigious universities are taking advantage of naive young people in a way that’s not just inexcusable — it could be viewed as criminal fraud. p. 45

Today college graduates are struggling — and failing — to achieve their dreams while straining to scale a mountain of student loan debt. p. 46

People who fall behind on student loan payments suffer severe consequences. Defaulting on student loans can wreck your credit score and result in wages and tax refunds being garnished. But few people realize that, in some states, a student loan default can cost you your professional license and your career. p. 46

From the time a toddler enters kindergarten, that child is bombarded with college propaganda. By the time they reach the fourth grade, students are continually told, “You need to apply yourself in school so you’ll be able to go to college and have a successful life.” When they reach high school, no one asks if they are going to college but where.

At the same time, students are inundated with loan offers — and what eighteen-year-old can resist the offer of all that money for just a few mouse clicks? And the lenders don’t even require parental consent. So young people are enticed into a long-term debt agreement, seduced into borrowing money they don’t have at interest rates they can’t afford to study subjects that don’t matter to prepare them for jobs that will never exist. From then on, they are shackled in a twenty-first-century form of indentured servitude. p. 60

According to the U.S. News and World Report, the average tuition in 2021-2022 for a private college is $38,185; average tuition for an in-state college is $10,388. So a four year college education would cost, on average, between $41,000 and $152,000. p. 62

__________________________________________

This brings us to Count 4 of our ten-count indictment of the college industry: “Colleges do not educate anymore.” Students literally go through the college system and emerge having learned nothing at all. As a result, employers are concluding, “We can’t hire college grads. They can’t do the job. College had ruined them as employees.”

A few years ago, the chancellor and football coach at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill were fired. The chair of the school’s African Studies department was indicted for felony fraud — though the criminal charge was dropped because of his cooperation with the investigation. What happened at UNC Chapel Hill?

Well, it seemed that as many as 200 classes listed by the African Studies department didn’t exist or were only taught on an irregular basis. Predictably, many of these courses were very popular with UNC athletes, many of whom could barely read or write. ... this scandal went on for 18 years p. 66 - 68

In June 2017, the Wall Street Journal published a report titled “Exclusive Test Data: Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills.” The report was based on an extensive study of students in their freshman and senior years, between 2013 and 2016 — a full four-year span of college experience. The test used was an updated version of the CLA known as the College Learning Assessment Plus (CLA+).

The results, the Journal concluded, “are discouraging ... At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.” ... some of the biggest gains occur at smaller colleges p. 69, 70

The report also cited a survey by PayScale, Inc, which showed that fully half of all employers they surveyed complain that college grads simply aren’t prepared for the workplace. The most often-cited reason college grads are poor hires: they lack critical-reasoning skills.

According to CLA+ test results, three-quarters of seniors at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette demonstrated “basic” or “below basic” mastery — the two lowest of five CLA+ rankings. The Journal interviewed one graduate of that school who happened to be working at a Lafayette coffee shop. “I wasn’t as focused as I should have been,” the barista admitted, “but in a lot of classes, we just watched videos and documentaries, and then we would talk about them. It wasn’t all that challenging.” p. 70 - 71

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, only 27 percent of college graduates end up in a career related to their college major.

Let’s be clear: professional and doctoral degrees are obvious exceptions to this rule. If you are intently focused on a career in medicine, law, engineering, or some similar profession, higher education can add both academic and financial value to your life.

If you want a college education that delivers real return on your investments, forget about majoring in the humanities, Liberal Arts, History, or Sociology. Those majors won’t improve your critical thinking ability, nor will they enhance your lifetime savings. And unless you plan to become an academic and teach future generations how to be easily offended and perpetually angry, don’t even think about the “grievance majors” like Women’s studies, Gender Studies, or Ethnic Studies.

However, there are still areas of emphasis in American universities that frequently deliver a bang for your education buck. I am speaking of the STEM fields — Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. If you want a career in a STEM-related field, you’ve picked a field where many universities in the United States still excel.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, only half of college graduates with STEM degrees are employed in STEM occupations. p. 76

This brings us to Count 5 of our ten-count indictment of the college industry: “College ruins the ability to think and reason.” So-called “higher education” teaches students to abandon common sense, defy science, and embrace a delusional view of reality.

A college campus is a laboratory of lunacy. No idea is too radical, irrational, or downright insane for academia to disseminate.

You’ve probably heard of the “Grievance Studies Affair,” a hoax designed by James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose. The purpose of the project was to expose the absurdity of academic thinking in several supposedly “scientific” fields, such as race, gender, queer, and fat studies. Over a 12-month period in 2017 and 2018, Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose wrote twenty academic papers and submitted them to peer-reviewed academic journals. They deliberately larded the papers with bogus ideas, obvious illogic, and academic jargon, dressing up the most outrageously nonsensical claims in scholarly clothes.

This hoax was amazingly successful. By the time the three authors were outed by a Wall Street Journal report in October 2019, seven of the fake papers had been accepted by peer-reviewed journals, seven more were being reviewed for publication, and only six were rejected.

One paper published by Gender, Place & Culture, claimed that dog parks are “petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture’ and called for a greater awareness of “the different ways dogs are treated on the basis of their gender and queering behaviors, and the chronic and perennial rape emergency dog parks pose to female dogs.” The paper posed the question, “Do dogs suffer oppression based upon (perceived) gender?

Another paper, accepted by Affilia: Journal of Women ad Social Work, was titled “Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism.” The paper consisted of a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf reworded in feminist jargon. James Lindsay believes it was just days away from being published when the Wall Street Journal exposed the hoax.

Yet another paper attacked “Western astronomy” as sexist and asserted that physics departments should include “feminist and queer astrology” as a normal part of teaching astronomy. The paper was undergoing peer review at the time the hoax was exposed, and according to an account by Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose in Areo, the reviewers “were very enthusiastic about the idea.”

p. 83

Today, the students and faculty at Harvard are completely consumed by racial and gender politics — and only the most extreme far-left viewpoints are tolerated.

Sproul Plaza is the student activity hub of the University of California at Berkeley. ... On February 19, 2019 Hayden Williams, a field representative for the Leadership Institute and Turning Point USA, had set up a recruiting table on Spoul Plaza. ... While Williams was at the table, a man in his late twenties approached and shouted, calling Williams a “racist” and unleashing the most vile, obscene threats and insults imaginable. Williams remained calm as both he and a bystander recorded video of the unfolding scene. The video shows the aggressor, a non-student named Zachary Greenberg, shoving Williams and screaming just inches from his face — then brutally sucker-punching him in the right eye. Then Greenberg strides away without a backward glance. Greenberg was arrested for the assault about two weeks later by the University of California Police. ... Greenberg was charged with one misdemeanor and four felonies (including assault with “force likely to produce great bodily harm,” which the California classifies as assault with a deadly weapon). Greenberg pled not guilty to all counts. As I write these words, two and a half years have passed since the assault and Greenberg still has not faced trial for the crime. p. 119

The media blackout of the Berkeley attack isn’t surprising. The so-called “mainstream media” is not “mainstream” in the sense that it represents the mainstream of American thought. Rather, the “mainstream” of media outlets — from the New York Times, to ABC, NBS, CBS, and CNN — all lean way to the left of the true mainstream of American opinion. And there is a reason for this: The journalists who decide what is and isn’t news are all products of our colleges and universities.

The leftist “mainstream media” are part of an overall movement bent on tearing down traditional American values — belief in God, the sanctity of the family, belief in hard work and freedom and personal responsibility, and the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. These traditional American values are conservative values. They are not the values of the left.

The narrative that grips both academia and the “mainstream media” derives from Marxist ideology. According to this narrative, there are victims and there are oppressors. And the left views traditionalists and conservatives as oppressors, as the enemy. Hayden Williams is part of the oppressive system. He’s one of the bad guys. Leftists are the good guys.

This brings us to Count 7 of our ten-count indictment of the college industry: Colleges and universities breed violence and hate. Violence against conservatives is commonplace on campus — and leftist school officials routinely side with violent campus radicals instead of protecting the free-speech rights of all students. p.123

A week after the Sproul attack, I went to the campus to encourage our Berkeley TPUSA leaders and members. During my talk, I asked them what the media response would have been if a conservative activist had punched a leftist on campus? We all knew the answer: it would have made front page news. The story would have dominated the cable news coverage for days. Why? Because that’s the false “mainstream media” narrative: conservatives are the oppressors, leftists are the heros and victims. As a rule, the media only covers stories that fit the narrative.

Another theme in the media narrative is that people on the left are “tolerant” and welcoming of “diversity,” whereas people on the right are “racists,” “homophobes,” “misogynists,” and “bigots.” How do leftists define “tolerance” and “diversity”? They refer only to skin color, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, economic class, and physical disabilities. They don’t believe in tolerance and diversity when it comes to conservative ideas and values. Leftists claim to be “open-minded” but their minds are closed to other viewpoints.

And here is the paradox: most conservatives are every bit as tolerant and welcoming of diversity as those on the left claim to be. We hold no prejudice against other people of other races or genders or sexual orientations. We want all human beings to have their God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We want all human beings to have their full First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion, freedom of speech and the press, the freedom to peaceful assembly, and the freedom to petition the government. We want to prevent the American Dream from becoming a socialist American Nightmare.

The left doesn’t believe in a free market of ideas and freedom of speech. The left labels any speech it disagrees with as “hate speech”. The left labels people with opposing viewpoints as “racists” or “bigots”.

Not all leftists will go to the extreme of physically punching a conservative in the eye. But most leftists don’t hesitate to smear us as “racists” or “white supremacists.” Once those on the left have caricatured their ideological opponents as evil people, as the enemy, all bets are off. It becomes an easy thing to move from merely cursing us to physically assaulting us. Zachary Greenberg is the inevitable result of the same hateful mindset that pervades liberalism, progressivism, and radical leftism in America today — and especially on American campuses.

At colleges and universities across America, the violent tendencies of the American left are on full display. p. 124

A bike lock to the head

On April 15, 2017, conservative groups held a free speech rally in Civic Center Park in Berkeley, just three blocks from the U.C. campus. Video taken at the rally shows a conservative activist in a red shirt and backpack surrounded by a leftist mob. He is talking to the mob with his hands raised. A companion behind him is holding up a phone and taking video. Two masked women in the mob swat at the yong man’s upraised arms as others in the crowd taunt and curse him.

Suddenly a man lunges forward from the back of the crowd. He’s dressed all in black like a comic-book supervillian — black mask, shades, hoodie, pants, and gloves. He slams a U-shaped bike lock against the conservative’s skull with a sickening thud. The victim puts his hands to his head and staggers away, blood streaming down the side of his face. It’s a tough video to watch.

Treated at the scene, the young man was able to walk away from the park.

Police later identified the black-clad assailant as Eric Clanton, a former professor at Diablo Valley College in the East Bay. Rolling Stone identified him as “an ethics professor who taught philosophy and critical thinking.” According to his OkCupid account, Clanton described himself as as a “gender-nonconforming” sapiosexual eager to “precipitate the end of civil society.” Raised in a conservative family, Clanton graduated from a private evangelical school, Bakersfield Christian High School, where he said he felt like an”oddball” because of his belief in what he called “embryonic anti-state communism”. He became increasingly radicalized during his undergraduate studies at Cal State Bakersfield and post-grad studies at San Francisco State.

Court records show that Clanton assaulted at least seven people at the rally, always aiming for the head. One person required five staples to close the wound. Another person, who wore a helmet, was struck so hard that part of his helmet broke off.

It took more than a month for police to locate and arrest Clanton. Tips from the public were key to his capture. A police search of his Leandro home turned up evidence linking Clanton to “Anti-Fascists and Anarchy political groups” according to court records. Police pinged his cell phone to locate him at a West Oakland house, where they arrested him and found flags and literature connecting Clanton with Antifa and other anarchist groups. The search also recovered black apparel and bike locks, along with a camera containing selfies of Clanton geared up like the assailant in the videos. Clanton’s phone records also placed him at the scene at the time of the attacks.

Clanton eventually struck a deal in which he pled “no contest” to a single misdemeanor charge, and felony charges were dropped. He was placed on three years’ probation, which ended August 8, 2021. For a series of brutal assaults, which easily could have resulted in death, this violent “ethics professor” barely received a tap on the wrist. p. 126

Whether in the “free speech zone” on Sproul Plaza or at a “free speech rally” at Civic Center Park, leftist radicals aren’t interested in anyone’s free speech rights. They have no respect for the First Amendment. If they think you stand in the way of their socialist pipe dream, they will throw a fist or swing a bike lock at your head.

As Michael Curry said in a statement to The College Fix, “Over the last semester myself and the members of the Chico State Republicans have been spat on, battered, assaulted, followed around campus, sexually assaulted, and even mobbed by 300 students at once. This is the kind of environment that has been created by the modern day college campus.”

Turning Point has more than 1000 chapters on campuses across America. Again and again, our TPUSA volunteers have been assaulted by leftist students and even by professors. They have been yelled at, cursed, punched, and pelted with feces and other objects. Why? Simply because they uphold conservative, constitutional values of free speech, freedom of religion, limited government, and respect for the family. These used to be bedrock, unassailable values that all Americans believed in. Today colleges and universities teach young people to hate everything America stands for. And they are encouraged to respond with violence.

For years, conservative commentators laughingly referred to emotionally fragile students as “snowflakes”.

When the “snowflakes” leave campus and enter the real world, they take their rage and violence with them. That’s why, in the summer of 2020, we saw rioting, looting, and murder in the streets of Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Washington D.C., and New York. We saw “snowflakes” braving tear gas, lasering cops in the eyes, burning buildings, and pulling down statues. They belonged to Antifa and Black Lives Matter, and they were the products of our finest schools.

They saw themselves as warriors for social justice, and they struck fear in the hearts of mayors and city councils and everyday Americans. They shouted “Defund the police!” and local governments across the nation surrendered to the mobs, sparking a nationwide crime surge. The “snowflakes” fully believe in their right to loot and assault and burn cities down. They’ve been taught that whoever is declared the most oppressed victim gets to be the meanest bully.

And they learned it in their college classrooms. p. 136

On August 6, 2018, at around 8:30 in the morning, Candace Owens and I were having a chicken-and-waffles breakfast at the Green Eggs Café in Philadelphia. We saw Antifa patches on the clothing of four people at another table, and figured they probably wouldn’t recognize us.

But they did.

After a while, we heard shouts and chants. We looked out the windows and noticed a crowd on the sidewalk. We could see the restaurant servers and patrons becoming alarmed, so Candace and I got up, paid our bill, and told the servers that we’re conservatives and this kind of harassment happens all the time.

I turned to the restaurant patrons, who were staring open-mouthed at the commotion, and said, “Have a wonderful day. Enjoy your capitalist breakfast.”

We walked outside to face the protesters. They were almost all young white people, the pampered product of our leftist university system. They encircled us so we couldn’t leave, chanting, “One, two, three — f*ck the bourgeoisie! Four, five, six — f*ck the bourgeoisie!

I hate to be critical, but that is a pathetic chant. “Six” doesn’t even rhyme with “bourgeoisie”. Plus the poetic meter was terrible. At least they included “bourgeoisie” to show their Marxist bona fides.

They shouted and waved with one finger. We smiled and waved with all five fingers.

They switched to another chant: “F*ck white su-prem-a-cy! Again, terrible poetic meter and no rhyme — and since neither Candace nor I are white supremacists, what was the point?

When they got tired of chanting, they switched to an even less rational tactic: they gathered around us, blew whistles, and screamed in our ears. Thy didn’t scream slogans. They just screamed like banshees. Or like Yoko Ono.

It was amusing, and we smiled and recorded the festivities with our phones — until a blond young woman stepped forward and squeezed a bottle of water on my head and chest.

I am always eager to have a conversation with people who disagree with me. But Antifa radicals — these mostly white, indoctrinated trust-fund kids — have no interest in a conversation. Their “conversation” is incoherent screaming, dumping a drink on someone, or in some cases, a bike lock to the head.

Moments after the young woman threw water on me, Philadelphia police stepped in to move the protesters back. The police officers were mostly black and Hispanic, and several were female. The protesters — mostly white — started chanting, “No good cops in a racist system!”

These privileged protesters were completely oblivious to the irony; they were self-proclaimed “anti-facists” using textbook fascist tactics, and they were the very “bourgeoisie” they were protesting. Their parents obviously had money, because these kids had plenty of time to protest and obviously didn’t need jobs. Their “bourgeois” parents paid the bills and made the sacrifices to send them to college, where they learned to despise the hand that fed them.

Candace and I went to each of the police officers, shook their hands, and thanked them. Our gratitude to the police prompted a young woman with a bullhorn to bellow, “They are not protecting us! They are not protecting you! They are not protecting anyone! They are protecting money and their salaries and their pensions!”

“This is so bizarre,” Candace told a female officer. “These white people are saying ‘no racists’ and ‘no good cops’ when every cop here is black or Hispanic. We were just having breakfast. We’re just conservatives. That’s our crime.”

Philly Antifa took credit for the incident. I hope their parents realize what a wise investment they made in sending their little darlings to Indoctrination U. p. 159

This brings us to Count 9 of our ten-count indictment of the college cartel: “Colleges and universities have unleashed waves of woke, anti-American radicals.” One of the most dangerous waves of radicals the college industry has let loose on America is Antifa — a decentralized radical group engaging in both violent and nonviolent action to achieve its goals.

Antifa thugs commit acts of vandalism, bullying, and violence against people they brand as “fascists” “Wh is a “fascist,” according to Antifa? Literally any mainstream conservative or libertarian speaker, or anyone who attends a conservative event.

Some Antifa members are even tenured professors.

In 2021, Roger Archer, senior pastor of Motion Church in Puyallup, Washington, invited me to speak at his church. In addition to preaching the gospel, Motion Church is deeply involved in providing food, shelter, counseling services, addiction programs, and education.

My speaking appearance was scheduled for May 2. As soon as the word was out that I was coming to Puyallup, Antifa terrorists sent anonymous threats to the church and the news media. They vowed not only to burn the church to the ground, but to burn down the neighborhood, assault church members, and run riot through the streets of Puyallup. They threatened arson, assault, murder, and domestic terrorism.

Pastor Archer called me and said that, out of concern for the community, he had to cancel my appointment. He told me that the Puyallup Police Department was supportive of the church’s right to have me speak, but the police lacked the resources to contain a terrorist threat that could hit multiple locations at once. I told him I fully understood his decision.

Some of the blame for the rise of Antifa rests with Washington’s far-left governor, Jay Inslee, who has hamstrung the police while making excuses for rioters, looters, and arsonists. Some of the blame rests with Jenny Durkan, the far-left mayor of nearby Seattle. She tolerated the radical takeover of six city blocks and a park by radical activists of the so-called “Capital Hill Autonomous Zone.” The actions — and inaction — of the governor and mayor led to the resignation of more than 200 Seattle police officers from 2020 to 20211.

But most of the blame for the rise of Antifa rests with the universities that breed and indoctrinate these terrorists. Professors like David Palumb-Liu and Bill Mullen, with the Campus Antifascist Network, are just the visible symptoms of a much more widespread and metastatic cancer in our university system. All of academia is hopelessly riddled with Marxism, radicalism, and the teaching that violence is a justifiable response to opposing opinions. p. 162

Academia trains people to bully people in the name of anti-bullying, to oppress people in the name of freedom, and to commit fascist acts in the name of anti-fascism. One of the defining traits of a fascist is the forcible, violent silencing of opponents and opposing ideas. Antifa may claim to be “anti-fascist,” but if it looks like a fascist and bullies like a fascist and it suppresses like a fascist — well, Antifa just might be a bunch of fascists.

Wokeism is a mindset of self-righteous hyper-vigilance against offenses, real or imagined. Woke sanctimony was on full display during the summer of 2020, when radical mobs tore down statue after statue — and not just statues of Confederate generals. Woke rioters also toppled statues of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Frederick Douglass, assorted abolitionists, assorted poets, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Hiawatha, Mahatma Gandhi, and an elk, to name a few.

Look up the mission statement of just about any college or university in America and it will read something like:

University of _______ mission is to educate the student body to become citizens of the world.

Today, colleges teach students that nothing matters except deconstructing and destroying everything around them. Radical professors are indoctrinating a generation into a nihilistic way of thinking and teaching them to hate America, reject their American citizenship, and become “citizens of the world.”

In January 2020, the Yale art history department announced it was eliminating one of its most popular courses, “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present.” For decades, this course was the quintessential survey course. Its demise made news across the nation.

The original course was created by the world-renowned art historian Vincent Scully, whose lectures were famous for stirring emotions and summoning applause. That course was replaced by a new course created and taught by Tim Barringer, current chairman of Yale’s art department. Barringer cited all the “politically correct” woke reasons for canceling the course. The Yale Daily News reported:

This change is the latest response to student uneasiness over an idealized Western “canon” — a product of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists .... The course’s instructor Tim Barrington told the News that he plans to demonstrate that a class about the history of art does not just mean Western art. Rather, when there are so many other regions, genres, and traditions — all “equally deserving of study” — putting European art on a pedestal is “problematic,” he said ....

The class will also consider art in relation to “questions of gender, class, and race” and discuss its involvement with Western capitalism, Barringer wrote. Its relationship with climate change will be a “key theme” he wrote.

Notice how easily Professor Barringer is able to transform an introductory art history course into an indoctrination session on gender, race, and “Western capitalism”. And how does the history of art intersect with the “key theme” of climate change? Here we see in unmistakable terms how the mission of academia has changed. It has veered sharply away from education toward indoctrination. p. 166

College used to be a place where professors would introduce you to a world of truth, beauty, and goodness.

Today, college is a place where your professors tell you there is no truth, beauty, or goodness — such ideas are mere “social constructs,” and you shouldn’t waste your time searching for them.

Instead, they say, become an angry activist, join the revolution, and help tear down our civilization.

The old academic model has been swept away. In its place is the new academic model of the university indoctrination camp.

Today’s campus is where young people go to become woke — and weaponized. p.167

The origin of Critical Theory — and “Wokeism”

Wokeism is a creation of Critical Theory, which encompasses Critical Legal Theory, Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Studies, and on and on. Critical Theory had its origins in the ideas of Herbert Marcuse, Paul-Michel Foucault, and other Postmodern thinkers. From Critical Theory in its many forms comes what I call the “Diversity-Industrial Complex.” p. 167

In his 1961 farewell address, President Eisenhower warned against the “Military-Industrial Complex,” an unholy alliance between the military and the defense industry. In much the same way, the “Diversity-Industrial Complex” is an unholy alliance among the woke, “diversity”-obsessed professors, administrators, journalists, leftist politicians, entertainers, and social media entrepreneurs who control the commanding heights of our culture.

The term “woke” can be traced to a colleague of Herbert Marcuse, a Brazilian neo-Marxist named Paulo Freire. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire coined a term in Portuguese: conscientizacao, or “critical consciousness.” A person reaches critical consciousness when he or she achieves a Marxist understanding of the world. A person who has reached critical consciousness is ready to join the revolution against the world’s oppressive systems. Reaching critical consciousness is like waking from a dream. Once “awakened” to critical consciousness, a person is said to be “woke”.

For decades, Black America had been making steady progress, according to the liberal Brookings Institution. In a 1998 study, “Black Progress: How Far We’ve Come and How Far We Have to Go,” Brookings found that 60 percent of black females worked as domestic servants in 1940 versus 2.2 percent in 1998 (in fact, 60 percent of black female employees in 1998 held white-collar jobs). In 1964, the year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, 18 percent of whites had a white friend versus 86 percent in 1998; also in 1998, 87 percent of blacks claimed to have white friends. Many other statistics told a similar story of steady improvement in race relations over the past half-century.

But while race relations were improving in society, university and college campuses quietly kept racism on life support, decade after decade. Now we see racism, in the form of Critical Race Theory and wokeness, vomited forth from the deep recesses of academia to be injected into American society.

At the beginning of 2020, hardly any Americans had ever heard of Critical Race Theory (CRT). But after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, there are few people who haven’t heard of CRT. Yet much of the talk about CRT in the media, both right and left, is riddled with misunderstanding, hyperbole, and lies. Most conservatives only know that CRT is a scary idea and we don’t want it in our schools. And most progressives claim (either ignorantly or dishonestly) that CRT is merely a conversation about racism and the legacy of slavery in America. To clear away the misunderstanding, let’s see where Critical Race Theory began.

Critical Theory was founded by Herbert Marcuse and other “Frankfurt School” Marxist theoreticians. Marcuse emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1934. In the 1950's he taught political science at Columbia University, later at Harvard University, then at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. Marcuse’s neo-Marxist writings and speeches at student protests strongly influenced the student movement of the 1960's, earning him the title “Father of the New Left”. p. 168

In October1962, during a campus rally protesting the Cuban Missile Crisis, Marcuse met eighteen-year-old Angela Davis. She was a black student studying French at Brandeis. Marcuse invited her to join his philosophy class and encouraged her to become a revolutionary activist. When Marcuse moved to University of California at San Diego in 1965, Davis moved, too, and Marcuse served as her doctoral advisor. Davis went on to teach at UCLA, San Franisco State University, and UC Santa Cruz.

Angela Davis achieved infamy in 1970 as a fugitive from justice. She was wanted by the FBI for supplying guns used in a Marin County courtroom siege that killed a judge and three gunmen. After a two-month pursuit by the FBI, she was captured, tried, and acquitted (prosecutors couldn’t prove she knew the guns would be used in a crime). Davis ran twice for president on the Communist Party USA ticket and has been preaching “abolish the police” and “overturn the capitalist class” since the 1960's. She continues to teach at UC Santa Cruz and lecture at Yale and elsewhere.

In 1965 Herbert Marcuse released his essay, “Repressive Tolerance.” James Lindsay, America’s leading expert on Critical Theory and Wokeism, writes:

The logic of the left today is overwhelmingly rooted in a single essay published in 1965 by the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. That essay is “Repressive Tolerance”. The thesis statement of this essay can be boiled down to “movements from the left must be extended tolerance, even when they are violent, while movements from the right must not be tolerated, including suppressing them by violence.” This asymmetric ethic has been the heart and soul of left politics in the West since the 1960's and we’re living in the fruit of that catastrophe now.

(Lindsay has been a guest on my podcast. If you want an in-depth understanding of Critical Theory and Wokeism take a deep dive into his New Discourses podcast and read Cynical Theories by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose.)

Marcuse’s image of a perfect society is that brutally straightforward. He wants the political left to have all the power and privilege, and he wants the right to be silenced and ultimately extinct. Lindsay note that it’s easy to se how Marcuse’s argument “has set the stage for the totalitarianism we see today in Wokeism and from Big Tech.

Who gets to decide what is true and what is false? Who gets to decide what ideas are toleratedand what ideas must be suppressed? According to Marcuse, these decisions must be left to the Marxist Critical Theorists. As Lindsay observes:

In our own time, it is the high-powered elites in government, media, education, and law who have taken up this mantle of being able to decide, in the spirit of Herbert Marcuse, what must be tolerated, no matter how bad it is, and what must be suppressed, no matter how legitimate it is. The parallels to our own time are undeniable.... We live in the asymmetric and totalitarian logic of “Repressive Tolerance” today.

Nowhere is this atmosphere of “repressive tolerance” more shamelessly displayed than on American college campuses. p. 170

Replacing “Class Struggle” with “Race Struggle”

Classical Marxism — the economic and social theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — is a materialistic interpretation of history and society. Marx focused on the struggle between two classes — the “proletariat” (the oppressed people who sell their labor and add value to the goods they produce) and the “bourgeoisie” (those who own the means of production and who exploit the proletariat for profit). Marxism is a “good versus evil” fable with a victim and a villain. In the Marxist fable, the proletariat is the noble victim, the bourgeoisie is the wicked and villainous oppressor.

Since the founding of the Soviet Union in 1922, more than two dozen nations have tried a Marxist form of government, from the once mighty Soviet Union to the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. Of all the nations that have tried a Marxist government, how many are still Marxist today? Just five: China, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, and North Korea.

Why did all those other nations abandon Marxism? Because Marxism fails every time it is tried. The five remaining Communist states have had to violate Marxist dogma and adopt market-based reforms to survive. Pure Marxism only works in theory, never in reality. A system that does away with private property, market incentives, and human liberty inevitably leads to poverty, starvation, corruption, and political repression. Yet the Marxists keep trying to impose their failed ideology on us all.

One of the cleverest attempts to rescue Marxism from the ash heap of history is Critical Race Theory. Marx predicted that the proletariat would inevitably rise up and revolt against the oppressors — but Marx’s proletarian revolution never materialized. CRT theorists recognized this flaw in classical Marxism, so they adapted Marx’s victim/oppressor narrative, replacing “class struggle” with “race struggle”.

In neo-Marxist Critical Race Theory, victims are oppressed because of their race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. In CRT, the oppressive “bourgeoisie” have been replaced by a “white supremacist” power structure. CRT claims that racism is the fundamental organizing force in society, and that all of America’s founding documents, laws, education system, economic system, and society are founded on white supremacy.

Critical Race Theory was devised in the mid-1970s by a number of legal scholars, most notably Harvard law professor Derrick Bell and his student Kimberle` Crenshaw. Building on the Critical Theory of Herbert Marcuse, Bell and his colleagues hammered out a framework that viewed white supremacy as a social construct to empower white people while disempowering blacks and other minorities.

Around the time Derrick Bell was laying the foundations for Critical Race Theory, the U. S. Supreme Court heard a case titled Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. P. Bakke, a white Vietnam veteran and former NASA engineer in his early thirties, was rejected by the University of California, Davis, Medical School, even though less qualified nonwhite applicants were accepted. He filed suit, citing the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and fought the case to the Supreme Court.

The high court announced its decision in June, 1978. Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote the majority opinion which struck down the U.C. Davis minority admissions plan, and ordered that Bakke be admitted to the medical school. Powell wrote that the “guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color. If both are not accorded the same protection, then it is not equal.”

Powell’s opinion rejected racial quotas but did not ban sing race as a factor in college admissions. While Allan Bakke won the right to enter medical school, the practice of affirmative action — granting advantages to some racial groups by disadvantaging others — continues in college admissions today.

One of the dissenting opinions in the Bakke decision became a cornerstone rationale for Critical Race Theory. Justice Harry Blackmun (who famously wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade) defended his dissent: “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some people equally, we must treat them differently. Blackmun’s looking-glass “logic” has had an enormous impact on Critical Race Theory thinking over the years. Ibram X. Kendi quoted Blackmun’s words in How to be an Antiracist, and added this commentary of his own: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” In short, discrimination without end.

The Supreme Court decision in the Bakke case enabled Allan Bakke to overcome an unjust policy at U.C. Davis. But that decision also helped lay the philosophical groundwork for Critical Race Theory, which is tearing our society apart today.

Derrick Bell’s Totalitarian Mindset p. 173

Thomas Sowell is a black conservative economist and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford University. As a college student, Sowell was a committed Marxist. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1958, and earned a master’s at Columbia in 1959. While pursuing his doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago, he was mentored by free-market economist Milton Friedman. There Sowell questioned — and eventually abandoned — Marxism.

As a former Marxist, Sowell understands Marxism from the inside out. He recalls a long and disturbing conversation he had with Derrick Bell in the 1980's.

“There is this ideological intolerance that Dell has,” Sowell told an interviewer. “He really has a sort of totalitarian mindset ... He’s not a stupid man. But you have to understand, Derrick Bell was put in an impossible position. He was hired as a full professor at Harvard Law School when he himself said [he was not qualified].

In a 2012 newspaper column — written years before most Americans ever heard of Critical Race Theory — Sowell drew on his acquaintance with Derrick Bell to explain the origin of the race-based notion that is ripping our society apart today. Sowell described Bell as a professor whose writings on Critical Race Theory promote “an extreme hostility to white people.” But Derrick Bell wasn’t always an extremist.

For years, Sowell writes, Bell was a “civil rights lawyer, but not an academic legal scholar of the sort who gets appointed as a full professor at one of the leading law schools. Sowell describes Bell’s mindset: “He could not expect to command the respect of either faculty or students at Harvard law school — or, more important, his own self-respect. Bell himself admitted that he did not have the scholarly credentials that most full professors at the Harvard law school have.”

Derrick Bell had two options: he could live in obscurity as a minor legal scholar at Harvard — or, Sowell said, Bell could invent “some wild tangent of his own, and appeal to a radical constituency on campus and beyond.”

Building on the radical Marxist ideas of Herbert Marcuse, Bell constructed a new interpretation of social structures and power, viewed through the lens of racial grievance. Sowell notes that Bell’s previous writings had those of ”a sensible man saying sensible things about civil rights.” But once he invented Critical Race Theory, Bell’s writings were rife with irrational and incoherent claims, “the main drift of which was that white people were the cause of black people’s problems.”

Today, the woke violence of Antifa, the woke insurgence of Black Lives Matter, the radicalism in academia, the bullying “racial justice training” sessions at major corporations, and the coercive “anti-racist” agenda of Ibram X. Kendi — all of this corrosive societal idiocy can be traced back to the inferiority feelings of Derrick Bell. His ideas are poisoning our society and threatening to plunge America into a suicidal race war.

The Tenets of Critical Race Theory p. 174

Here’s a “quick start” summary of the basic tenets and themes of Critical Race Theory

● CRT claims that racism is present in every aspect of society; therefore, society can only be transformed by a race-conscious approach, not a “colorblind” approach

● CRT rejects the concept of “equality” (equal opportunity) in favor of a demand for “equity” (equal outcomes). We must take race into account at all times and equalize outcomes for all racial groups

● CRT rejects evidence and reason in favor of storytelling and speaking one’s “lived experiences.” This silences debate because no one is allowed to question another person’s “lived experience”

● CRT disregards science and reason as “white” ways of knowing. Storytelling and “lived experience” are “black” ways of knowing.

● CRT offers a revisionist interpretation of U.S. history, in which civil rights gains for American blacks only happened when it suited the self-interest of the white people.

● A key concept in CRT is “intersectionality (attributed to Kimberle’ Crenshaw) which states that your racial identity inersects with your other identities — gender, economic class, physical disability, and so forth — to create complex combinations of “privilege” or disadvantage.

● CRT segregates people into socially constructed groups according to the boxes they check. CRT does not recognize individuals or individual rights.

● CRT seeks to dismantle our free society and replace it with a controlled society (Guess who’s in charge)

●CRT bullies anyone who disagrees with CRT; if you disagree or deny, it’s because your’re a white supremacist (even if you are black conservative or black police officer, who is part of the “white” power structure). CRT is essentially totalitarian, demands absolute conformity, and punishes those who think for themselves.

Popularizers of Critical Race Theory include Robin DiAngelo, a white academic who has become extremely wealthy conducting corporate “diversity training” seminars. Her bestselling book White Fragility; Why it’s So Hard for White People to Talk Abut Racism is cleverly designed to put white people into a no-win situation, first demanding that they take part in a conversation about racism, then using anything they say against them. Deny being a racist, and it’s proof of your “white fragility.” DiAngelo doesn’t claim to be a CRT theorist, but she has built her “white fragility” argument on a foundation of CRT.

CRT Is Not a Fad p. 176

For more than four decades, Critical Race Theory was the subject of academic discussions in elite law schools, completely unnoticed by most Americans. In the leftist media, we heard CRT buzzwords like “equity,” “implicit bias,” “colonialism,” “implicit bias,” “colonialism,” and “white privilege,” but these theoretical conversations about race seemed far removed from our lives.

Sure we all knew that “people of color” faced tougher economic and employment challenges than the average white American. Yes, we all knew that racism was still a reality in twenty-first-century America. But we believed in Dr.King’s dream of a colorblind America, in which all people would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. And for a while, it seemed like we were moving toward that goal.

Then came May 2020 and the death of George Floyd. Black Lives Matter and Antifa unleashed waves of protests across the nation. Cities and states were unprepared for the onslaught of protests, riots, murders, and looting of the summer of 2020. Coming amidst the coronavirus pandemic, it seemed we were caught in an insane cultural moment. Soon everyone was talking about this idea called Critical Race Theory.

Some say CRT is a fad that will eventually burn itself out. Don’t believe it. Critical Race Theory is not a fad. Wokeism is not a fad. These ideas, though false and destructive, have staying power. They have been institutionalized as dogmas in academia and are gaining traction in all other institutions of our society. Major corporations, the government, and the military are already implementing “diversity training” programs based on CRT.

Critical Race Theory is a clear and present danger to our American way of life and our Constitution. Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University.

Kendi has put a serious and troubling proposal on the table: “To fix the original sin of rascism, Americans should pass an ‘anti-racist amendment’ to the U. S. Constitution.” Kendi’s amendment would make “racial inequality” unconstitutional. It would enshrine as a constitutional principle, “Racial inequality is evidence of racist policy.” In other words, if there are any differences in outcomes between any racial groups, that would be conclusive proof that racism is to blame. In Kendi’s words, his amendment would:

... establish and permanently fund the Deparment of Antiracism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state, and federal policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequality, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequality surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

In other words, “trained experts on racism” like Ibram X. Kendi himself would have totalitarian power over every public agency, every public official, and everylaw. That is the ultimate goal of Wokeism in America. And don’t take it lightly. Kendi is one of the most influential thinkers in American education today, and local school boards are buying his racist “anti-racism” book to indoctrinate your children in elementary schools and high schools.

Kendi’s proposal is a naked plan for seizing power and brutally suppressing all opposition, especially from conservatives. It would dismantle the Bill of Rights, starting with the First Amendment. You might say, “That’s ludicrous! It will never happen! Our leaders would never let things get that far.”

But look at all the other social changes we once believed would never get this far — a wide-open border, driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, biologically male people destroying women’s sports and invading women’s restrooms, American social media companies censoring a sitting American president, and on and on. Could you have imagined twenty years ago that America could decline so steeply and rapidly?

And consider the ultimate goal of Ibram X. Kendi for his “Department of Anti-racism.” He once said, “In order to truly be anti-racist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.” Kendi’s goal is to impose Marxism on us all, including our children and grandchildren.

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Back in the late 1980's a friend of ours told us her son was attending New York University. She and her estranged husband were paying for his tuition. I was a little surprised that he was attending college. We had known the lady and her boy for a number of years and we knew she had had a lot of behavioral problems with him (like stealing, carrying knives, etc.) and I had had the idea that he wasn’t a very good student. She told us he was majoring in drama. I thought, “Drama! What a waste of time and money! He is not going to get any kind of good job after he graduates with a degree in drama!” I thought it was probably costing his parents a lot of money and it was sad that he wasn’t majoring in something more sensible and practical. Anyway, it is now more than 30 years later and he must be in his 50's and he has never had a decent job. He has worked at selling cars at an auto dealership, as a waiter in restaurants, as a salesman selling replacement windows for houses, and as an instructor in physical training. They have all been jobs that I would call bottom-of-the-ladder type jobs. His mother was a Latin lady who cleaned houses for a living. I am sure all of that money she paid for his education didn’t come easy. I don’t know how much it cost them but I am sure it was a lot. What has he received for all that money that was spent on him? A diploma and the ego boosting knowledge that he has a degree from New York University.

We know a couple who are around 70, neither of which have more than a high school degree (I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the fellow didn’t even have that), who live in our area. The fellow is from West Virginia and a sort of jack of all trades, handyman, short-order-cook, etc. The lady is a hairdresser. They have owned a couple of restaurants and a beauty shop over the last 40 years and have made some good property investments having purchased old properties from people anxious to sell — and at good prices. They are both hard workers and smart. The land values where they bought have since increased sharply and their net worth is now in the millions.

My wife is a hairdresser. She never went to college. She went to hairdressing school when she was 26 and started working as a hairdresser a year later. She is now 83 and has been working for 57 years. She is working not because she needs to work but because she likes the work and doesn’t want to stop.

Today the cost of college tuition is high. The reason it is so high is all about the law of supply and demand. When the demand for something is high, prices go up. Young people have all been told that college is the way to go, that it is the way up to good jobs and high salaries, and so all of our high school graduates want to go to college. And the government has facilitated them going by making sure they can easily borrow all the money they need to go. So with easy access to financing they are going by the millions. That is behind the high demand. And the colleges take advantage of all of this high demand by continually raising the tuition.

When you go to college you 1) lose four years of time when you could have been working, making money, and building up experience in some trade 2) acquire a large debt that you must pay back.

The big mistake that young people make is that old one that everyone makes all the time — believing what you read and what everyone tells you instead of questioning and thinking for yourself. People follow the crowd and do what everyone else does. That is a big mistake. The end result is that they go to college, graduate from college, and then suddenly realize that they have piled up a gigantic mountain of debt that they now have to pay back. It is a little like going crazy with a new credit card and then discovering that you have a mountain of debt to pay off. And as with a credit card, if your payments are not large enough to pay both interest and also some of the capital, the amount you owe will increase instead of decrease with time, creating a sort of nightmare situation. If after you graduate you cannot find a job that pays well enough to handle these high payment obligations, that is where you can find yourself.

I would say that a person ought not go to college unless he has in mind getting a degree in some well paying profession such as law, medicine, engineering, etc. And before he starts he ought to have some kind of idea of what kind of income he can expect to receive and how much demand there is for people of that profession. If, for example, he is thinking of getting a degree in civil engineering, he should ask himself how much civil engineers make and how much demand there is for civil engineers. If there is little demand for civil engineers at the time he graduates then he might find himself in the bad position of having to pay back a big loan and unable to find a job in his profession. The demand cannot be assumed to be there. I can remember a period back in the 1980's or 1990's when there was a big unemployment problem in Great Britain. I read about a fellow with a PhD degree in Chemistry there who wasn’t able to find a job in his profession and was working at a car wash washing cars to support his family.

See On intellectualism, liberalism and the Left. Thomas Sowell.

I will make a final comment. The kind of behavior that is occurring on our college campuses of leftist students harassing conservatives is outrageous. It is behavior that should not be tolerated. Not for one second. Common sense requires a zero tolerance for it. It is the sort of behavior which if not immediately stopped will only grow and become worse. Students guilty of it should be arrested and go to jail. The fact that it has gotten so bad in our colleges shows the degeneracy of our college system. When I attended college in the late 1950's there was nothing like that at my college (I went to an engineering college). The behavior is reminiscent of the anarchical and depraved conduct of the hippies in the late 1960's and early 1970's with all of their drugs and free sex and I wonder if that period is the origin of it. It occurs because leftist college administrations condone it and probably encourage it.

I think that all that is occurring in America today does call into question the workability of all of the ideals espoused in the American democratic experiment. I believe in strict law and order. I am not sure that the kind of disparities of outlook and belief that one finds in America today can continue without a violent explosion. I live in a very corrupt system of falsehoods, false narratives, lies and these falsehoods and lies are coming from the Left. The Left has taken over our educational system, mass media, and all of the centers of power. The Left is totally intolerant. It is pushing for Marxism. It is trying to divide our society, fragment our society, bring it down. Marxism has been tried many times and it doesn’t work and is very ugly.

One simply cannot allow school children to be indoctrinated in the way ours are being indoctrinated and expect the system to endure. Most people are just too gullible. Far too few people have the habit of thinking, questioning, challenging. Few people put serious effort into a search for truth or understanding. They simply believe what they hear or read.

See

Thomas Sowell: This is why the left only focuses on race

Thomas Sowell to Levin on America today: 'Real danger'

I don’t think most people change much in their basic religious/ political/ philosophical beliefs after they have reached adulthood. I think their basic beliefs are pretty much set in youth. Once indoctrinated into certain beliefs, once programmed, they remain programmed — usually. I don’t think you can usually change a person’s basic beliefs by argument, debate, reason, etc. Once programmed they are usually quite impervious to reason and logic and very resistant to deprogramming. I think the mechanism by which some people do change in their most basic views is by thinking and questioning. A thoughtful person, a special person, may question his most basic assumptions and change at a basic level.

Once a person has embraced Atheism / Liberalism / Marxism, I don’t think the odds are high that he will ever change in his outlooks. That is why the programming of youth in our schools is such a very serious matter.

20 Sept 2023