(Article by Jim DeMint republished from RealClearPolitics.com)
Colleges and universities have been a bastion of liberalism and progressivism for so long it’s a cliché. But that cliché has led to complacency. Conservatives don’t like that college campuses have always been hotbeds of bad ideas – from communism to anti-Semitism to the so-called “critical theory” behind woke-ism. But the campus left has rarely been more than an irritant. Conservatives on the whole haven’t taken radical professors, brainwashed students and cowardly university administrators seriously because they were unserious people spouting unserious ideas.
Indeed, serious people on the left usually treated the academic left with the same kind of head-patting indulgence as everyone else. Since the 1960s, campus progressives had stopped bombing buildings, and instead spent their time making up words to show off their virtue, like “womyn,” “Latinx,” and “cis-gender.” The scholarship produced by woke academics in nonsense fields like anti-racism, critical gender theory, and ecofeminism never spilled out into broader political or cultural debates. Colleges were dismissed as sandboxes where children played and occasionally fought, but never did any real damage. The expectation was that, however outrageous college woke-ness was getting, no one would ever take it seriously in the real world, so there was no need to pay much attention.
That turned out to be a mistake.
Now we know that at least some of the children and adults steeped in the anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-truth narrative behind the “Awokening” do indeed take it seriously. Some have taken it so seriously they have launched a nationwide crime wave. After all, if everything they’ve been taught is true – that America is racist and evil, that the Constitution is a weapon of oppression, that conservative speech is violent while progressive violence is just speech – then it was only a matter of time before some Chads and Emilys broke out the Molotov cocktails.
The wanna-be woke media covers up both their thuggish violence and their historical illiteracy (because mainstream media elites are among the most privileged people on planet Earth and would never survive if the mob ever turned on them). Democratic Party leaders look the other way – while rising left-wing stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez praise the mob – for the same reason. If Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer stood up to the mob, they’d lose.
And so it’s up to Republican politicians to fight back. Luckily, for the first time in a long time, the Republican leader is a fighter. And the fight Donald Trump should pick is defunding colleges that promote this insanity.
President Trump could drive a stake through the heart of the woke mob in a single stroke, by disqualifying colleges and universities who stand with the mob from access to federal funding, which amounts to nearly $150 billion from taxpayers annually from federal loan programs and research grants. Schools around the country have been cracking down on religious and politically conservative, patriotic students and professors – policing speech and punishing “thought crime” as if in an Orwellian dystopia. They are joining campaigns against Israel. Male students accused of crimes are prosecuted without due process. Students and faculty are disciplined for, among other things, re-tweeting scientific facts inconvenient to the left. Radical trans activists are trying to force colleges to treat trans women as women, full stop – even in eligibility for women’s sports and access to women-only safe spaces.
Additionally, it’s time for patriotic alumni to stop giving to universities out of nostalgia and demand a return to classical academic focus instead of woke brainwashing of our children. Each year, colleges and universities receive over $40 billion in private donations. And parents should seek out schools that reject the forced leftist agenda. A recent survey of Harvard faculty revealed that 99% of professors self-identify as very liberal to moderate, and only 1% admitted to having conservative-leaning views.
These aren’t just toddlers squabbling in a sandbox. The campus-led assault on free speech and equal justice – to say nothing of objective truth – are a clear and present danger to freedom, justice, and our constitutional order. And they are inspiring a rising generation of pseudo-fascists whose tantrums, however ignorant, are quickly amassing a frightening criminal rap sheet.
Washington should cut these frauds and thugs off the federal gravy train, and make their access to taxpayer money contingent on them actually serving the taxpayers and the republic. Let’s force holier-than-thou woke professors and deans to decide which they care more about, their culture war or their cash.
I think I know how they’d answer.
Read more at: RealClearPolitics.com and CampusInsanity.com.
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