The educational gulag and the liberal - conservative divide

Conservatives form their views of the world by looking at the past, which is a record of what human beings are capable of, both good and bad. If you read about the founding of this country, that’s what they did. They studied societies, and they thought the democracy was a really bad system, but it was better than the others on practical grounds.

Leftists don’t look at the real world that way. They are always looking at an imaginary future. It used to be called communism, then it’s socialism, now it’s social justice, all the same thing. All ultimately the same thing, all headed in the same direction, to treat people as collectives, to erase their individuality, to judge them either on their class position or on their race or gender or sexual orientation, and always to see it in terms of oppressors and oppressed. That is what they are thinking, if you want to call it thinking.

And for them, it’s tremendous. They think of themselves - social justice warriors, we even use their language to describe them - they are heroic. They are living in a fantasy...

... The greatest American tragedy in my lifetime is the destruction of our educational system by progressives and its conversion into an indoctrination and recruitment center for the ideological left. This book that I’ve written, The Left and the University, is the sixth book that I’ve written about the universities and this problem, which has been 50 years in the making. And it has a special interest because it’s really dispatches from a warfront. It’s what I wrote engaging in a battle to restore academic freedom to the university, to restore the modern research university to basically our liberal arts colleges, the principles of it. ...

What’s actually happened over the last 50 years is that the political left - and I suspect a lot of my generation of radicals stayed in the universities and pursued academic careers to avoid the draft and to avoid fighting communism, which they sympathized with - what they’ve done is they’ve reverted the universities, the colleges - obviously not the physics departments and geology departments, but the citizen-training aspects of the university, all the social studies fields and the law and so forth - they’ve reverted them to their nineteenth century origins. In the nineteenth century, all of our colleges were doctrinal institutions, they were religious institutions, Harvard, Yale, and what they were there for was to instill the doctrines of the particular denomination because they were training ministers and priests and so forth. That’s what our universities have become today except that the religious doctrines that they teach and instill are the doctrines of Marxism, identity politics, which is cultural Marxism, which I will explain shortly....

If you want to understand why there’s this concerted effort to shut down the other side of the debate, it’s because these are religious institutions now, our liberal arts colleges, and they are not dealing with a divergent opinion, as one would in a democracy. They are dealing with a religious heresy, and what you do to heretics is you burn them at the stake if you have enough power to do that, or you just close them down...

What happened was, beginning in the 1970s, the left saw the universities as instruments of their revolutionary designs. So the first thing they did was begin a purge of conservatives from faculties by not hiring them, basically, so that today on most campuses, conservatives are as rare as unicorns. They then purged conservative books ...

The next thing they did was to purge conservative ideas from the curriculum, and they did that by inventing what they called “studies”: American studies, black studies, women’s studies. These are all political fields. They are not scholarly fields, but they are about learning left-wing politics...

Now, one of the consequences of this is the miseducation or lack of education of college graduates now...

So what is the religion that they teach? It’s very important. The religion is, as you all already know, is identity politics, which is really cultural Marxism which I’ll explain in a moment. Marxism is a view of the world in which society is divided into warring classes. Remember the Communist Manifesto: the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles, which is bunk, but that’s what Marxists believe.

Well, so what you have, there’s two ideas here. There are actually three. The first is that people’s class is the determinant factor... Our whole society is built on the idea of individual rights and individual accountability, but if you have a Marxist view, it’s about classes. This is classical Marxism... The second idea is that society is divided into oppressors and oppressed, so there’s the ruling class and then there was the working class. And the third idea is that there’s a civil war between these classes, and it’s a conflict that can only be resolved violently...

Why are we so divided? Because everybody on the left, everybody who’s a progressive, is seeing everything in racial, gender terms and lying about it...

[On the Mideast]

And the entire agenda of Students for Justice in Palestine is to spread genocidal lies about the State of Israel. The State of Israel doesn't occupy an inch, not an inch of Arab land. The land on which Israel was created belonged to the Turks for 400 years prior. The Turks are not Arabs, nor are they Palestinians. There never was a country called "Palestine." It’s a geographical term that the Romans imposed on the Jewish homeland. The Jews are the only indigenous people of the land around the Jordan because it’s derivation is Philistine, who are the enemies of the Jews.

Palestine is a geographical area. It’s like New England. New Englanders. They didn't exist, the Palestinian nationality or claim to a nationality, until 1964, 16 years after the creation of the State of Israel. Now, you can have all kinds of criticisms of the Israeli government, as you can of any government, but you can't be spreading genocidal lies that come right out of the Hamas playbook calling Israel an apartheid state. It’s the only state in the Middle East that isn't apartheid. And putting maps created by Hamas which show a country called Palestine existing in 1947, no such country ever existed, and then invaded by the Jews. ...

If Trump hadn't come in and demolished ISIS, something Obama didn't even try to do for eight years, who knows what the future would be? We could be back in the Dark Ages. ...

The Internet has greatly, greatly increased the power of conservatives. It’s broken the information monopoly the left used to have. A lot of things are happening. The Trump movement is the biggest ...