You probably think North Korea is thousands of miles away. Actually, it is as close as your nearest university. By and large most of our universities and colleges have become little North Koreas—sealed enclaves of repressive ideology, stifled speech, and rigid thought control. Students enthuse to this jailed status through daily dosages of Huxleyan soma in the form of Dionysian license with a sprinkling of MeToo puritanism. Victor Hugo once cannily remarked, “A man can either make his soul a sanctuary or a sewer.” That can also be said of our universities and colleges. Once-proud sanctuaries of truth have become sewers of agitprop fueling a chaotic makeover of America. This baneful circumstance has reached such a nadir that even the hoi polloi recognize it. Lacerating scenes of looting, vandalism, and killing in our major cities these past few months bring the problem of higher education into stark relief. Half of the rioters are white children nursed on privilege and entitlement, raised in the cloistered islands of caste wealth. Whence these children’s ferocious antipathy toward America, indeed the very pillars of Western civilization? The evidence of decades leads directly to the American classroom. For more than a half-century a surreptitious and altogether committed penetration of the entire education system has been accomplished. Its reigning raison d’être has been anti-Western in every aspect: economic, philosophical, historical, literary, and artistic. It’s amazing that such a coup was effected with nary a whimper from ordinary Americans, as it was happily bankrolled by the very parents whose beloved beliefs it sought to plunder.
Only against the backdrop of burning cities, the desecration of cherished American monuments, and gratuitous violence has the country slightly awakened to its source in the rotted educational empire. Instances of this debasement could fill pages of old Manhattan telephone books. Just recently, California announced its mandate for K-12 students in a “model curriculum.” It aims to build “possibilities for post-imperial life that promotes collective narratives of transformative resistance.” Course outlines require “student political activities with approved topics on racism, LGBTQ rights, immigration rights, access to quality health care and income inequality.” There’s more. Students are assigned papers on U.S. events that “led to Jewish and Irish Americans gaining racial privilege.” Are you incredulous? Simply read the state of California’s Education Department web site. Even more shocking is the recent piece of news from, of all places, the terribly “woke” The Atlantic. John McWhorter reports “receiving missives since May almost daily from professors living in constant fear for their careers, because their opinions are incompatible with the current woke playbook.” He chillingly continues, “I found it alarming how many of the letters sound as if they were written from Stalinist Russia or Maoist China.” McWhorter then relates a typical episode in stomach-turning detail, “A professor who committed the sin of privileging the white male perspective in giving a lecture on the philosophy of the Founding Fathers, praised by Frederick Douglass, had to sit in a ‘listening circle’ in which his job was to remain silent while students explained how he hurt them.” The journalist concludes, “This is a 21st-century-American version of a struggle session straight out of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.” Such hair-raising accounts should be enough to rouse armed rebellion. Where is the outrage? Instead we have silence—a silence that should be deeply concerning.
In the middle of the fourth century, Saint Jerome famously remarked, “The world awoke and found itself Arian.” Similarly, America is slowly awakening and finding itself in the teeth of a Marxist/Maoist revolution. For decades its progress was furtive but now it crackles with boastful hubris. To America’s shock, our very primary and secondary schools, universities, colleges, and graduate schools have become the incubus for a New Bolshevism. Under this regime, children have become strangers to their parents and the nation’s true history. Salutes to the flag are replaced by raised fists of defiant insurrection. Yes, home schooling has become a desperate stop-gap measure, but it only educates 3.4 percent of the student population, which is hardly enough to stave off this national apocalypse. Yes, a handful of private colleges and universities have escaped the revolution’s long arm, but out of 5,300, a paltry 27 boast a traditional curriculum. Not much consolation.
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