Understanding that future generations are the key to building political power and lasting change, socialists and totalitarians of all varieties have gravitated toward government-controlled education since before the system was even founded.

The communist “Frankfurt School” was no exception in its affinity for “educating” the youth.

Almost 100 years ago, a group of socialist and communist “thinkers” led by Marxist law professor Carl Grünberg established the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. From there, they would move to the United States. And from their new home in New York City, the subversive ideas they espoused would eventually infect the entire planet like a deadly cancer—mostly through the education system.

A Cultural Revolution

The group actually had its genesis in Moscow before officially being founded in 1923. By the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks—as Antonio Gramsci would later conclude from his Italian prison cell—realized a change in tactics was needed. The much-anticipated violent revolution of the proletariat predicted by Karl Marx to bring about communism, it turned out, would be much more difficult in Western Europe and the United States than previously anticipated. In fact, it wouldn’t be possible at all without first breaking down the cultural barriers to collectivism, they reasoned.

As such, the Communist Internationale and mass-murdering Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin’s minion Karl Radek arranged a meeting at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. Among the participants, according to historical records, were Soviet secret police boss Felix Djerzhinski, Hungarian Bolshevik “cultural commissar” Gyorgy Lukacs, and Communist Internationale (Comintern) bigwig Willi Muenzenberg.

At the Moscow meeting, the conspirators decided that what was needed was a more gradual “cultural revolution,” or what eventually came to be known as “cultural Marxism,” in the West and beyond. To advance that program, the subversives agreed on a sinister but brilliant plan. This would involve the destruction of traditional religion and the Christian culture it produced, the collapse of sexual morality and the deliberate undermining of the family, and a wrecking ball to infiltrate and demolish the existing institutions.

Some of these men had experience. For instance, Lukacs, who served as “minister of education and culture” in the Bolshevik Hungarian regime of Bela Kun, had introduced all manner of perversion and grotesque “sex education” in public schools, starting in elementary school. It was part of a campaign to destroy “bourgeois” Christian morality and sexual ethics among the youth. The objective was to eventually de-Christianize Hungary, thereby facilitating a total communist restructuring of the human mind and all of society.

Moving to America

A key tool of these conspirators in Moscow would come to be known as the Frankfurt School. From the Institute in Frankfurt, and later in New York, these cultural revolutionaries would promote feminism, communism, atheism, mass migration, globalism, humanism, multiculturalism, nihilism, hedonism, environmentalism, and all sorts of other “isms” that tended to undermine individual liberty, traditional culture, and morality. Rampant morality-free sexuality and Freudian pseudo-psychology were central to the agenda.

To anyone who has studied America’s public education system today, which spends far more time peddling these “isms” to captive children than providing actual education, the stench of the Frankfurt School’s machinations is unmistakable. In fact, the whole system reeks.

Despite some differences, the group maintained close ties with the Soviet Union. Ironically, though, analysts have long argued that the work of the institute peddling Nietzsche and others helped lay the foundation for the National Socialist takeover of Germany. As the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler gradually parted ways with the more internationally minded socialist tyranny of the butchers in Moscow, the civilization destroyers at the ISR fled to the United States.

There, with crucial assistance from socialist and humanist “education reformer” John Dewey and his disciples, these characters attached themselves to Columbia University’s important Teachers College in 1934. Dewey had been a leading “philosopher” and “educator” at Columbia, retiring just a few years before the Frankfurt School influx was in full swing. Others settled at Berkeley, Princeton, and Brandeis.

With Rockefeller money, Dewey would play a key role in helping the Frankfurt School’s operatives put down roots in America. More on the role of the major foundations in subverting American education will be detailed in an upcoming piece of this series.

The importation of Frankfurt School luminaries was a match made in totalitarian heaven, as Dewey and his disciples had much in common with the cultural Marxist social revolutionaries.

As previously recounted in this series on education, for instance, Dewey was a devoted fan of the Soviet model. In fact, he wrote glowing reports about the supposed successes of Soviet communism in the “New Republic” magazine. Dewey was especially infatuated with the indoctrination centers masquerading as schools—and particularly how they were instilling a “collectivistic mentality” in the children. Dewey’s collectivist, anti-Christian “religious humanism” also appealed to the Frankfurt operatives.

Once the institute’s minions set up shop at Columbia and other prestigious U.S. academic institutions, the Frankfurt School’s rhetoric had to change, at least superficially, as Americans were still ardently devoted to God, country, family, and individual liberty. And so, instead of speaking openly of Marxism and communism, Frankfurt School subversives spoke of “dialectical materialism.” Instead of attacking the family, they attacked “patriarchy.” But the agenda remained the same.

Fighting ‘Fascism’

Almost as soon as they arrived, they began plotting the destruction of America’s traditional values, religion, and form of government under the guise of fighting “fascism.”

Indeed, the luminaries of the Frankfurt School, who represented a wide variety of disciplines, used “education” as a crucial tool for advancing their totalitarian, civilization-destroying philosophies. But they infected much more than just the education system, with their sick ideas spreading out like a poison throughout the intellectual veins of America: the social sciences, entertainment, politics, and beyond.

One of the ways in which Frankfurt School operatives and academics advanced their desired social changes via education was through so-called critical theory. In his 1937 work “Traditional and Critical Theory,” ISR Director Max Horkheimer argued that critical theory—a neo-Marxist tool used to demonize the market system, Christianity, and Western civilization—was aimed at bringing about social change and exposing the alleged oppression of people by capitalism.

Another useful tool for undermining freedom and traditional society was the 1950 work by key Frankfurt School theorists known as “The Authoritarian Personality.” These social “researchers” claimed to discover that the traditional American male and father was actually “authoritarian” because, among other reasons, he held traditional values. Thus, the “patriarchy” and the traditional family—among the most important barriers to tyranny—came under relentless attack as a precursor to “fascism.” Public schools were viewed as tools to combat this alleged problem, and they did so vigorously.

Influence

To understand just how central Teachers College (infected by Frankfurt School and Dewey ideas) would become to the public education in the United States, consider that, by 1950, estimates suggest that a third of principals and superintendents of large school districts were being trained there. Many of these left the college with radical ideas about reality, government, society, family, and economy that came straight from Dewey and the Frankfurt School.

Of course, the damage to America from anti-God, anti-freedom German “intellectuals” began even before the Frankfurt School migrated to Columbia. In fact, Dewey was trained by G. Stanley Hall, who was among the many Americans to study under professor Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig University.

Among other notable highlights, Wundt pioneered the idea of the human being as a soulless animal. Essentially, he viewed people as biological stimulus-response mechanisms that could, and should, be trained in a manner similar to circus animals. This Darwinian, materialist view of the human being reigns supreme today in the education system but has been catastrophic.

Fringe left-wing extremists who support the Frankfurt School’s anti-American agenda have dishonestly attempted to paint criticism of the relevant institutions, academics, and their ideas as “anti-Semitic.” But in reality, the dangerous ideas pose a major threat to Judaism, too, and so countless patriotic and liberty-minded Jews have also joined the fight against the Frankfurt School’s poison.

The threat of these subversives and their cultural Marxism has been recognized at the highest levels of the U.S. government, even recently. Former National Security Council Director of Policy and Planning Richard Higgins, for instance, blasted it in his now-notorious 2017 “Higgins Memo” to President Donald Trump about the ongoing war against the administration and the United States.

The wars against Trump and America “cannot be separated from the cultural Marxist narratives that drive them,” warned Higgins, saying cultural Marxism was most directly tied to the Frankfurt School. “The Frankfurt strategy deconstructs societies through attacks on culture by imposing a dialectic that forces unresolvable contradictions under the rubric of critical theory,” he warned. Higgins then quotes Herbert Marcuse, a leading Frankfurt thinker, on how to crush the political and cultural right through persecution and phony “tolerance.”

To this day, reflecting the ISR influx of the early 1930s, Teachers College remains a leading purveyor of socialist poison masquerading as “education.” Its recently released book list includes titles by Bill Ayers, the communist terrorist whose terror group Weather Underground, working with communist Cuban intelligence, bombed the State Department, the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, police stations, and more. The Teachers College Press fall selection also includes endless nonsense on “social justice,” racialism, multiculturalism, and other “isms” with roots in Marxism and Frankfurt School strategies.

With society and civilization becoming increasingly unstable as the final vestiges of traditional education are destroyed, the Frankfurt School and its American allies such as Dewey would be pleased with their handiwork. After all, cultural Marxists including Gramsci and ISR thinkers believed that once the old order was destroyed via a “long march” through society’s institutions, Marxism could eventually triumph. On the education front, they now appear largely victorious.

But their overall victory is hardly assured. What comes next depends on whether Americans can be roused from their slumber in time to restore civilization. As the socialists and totalitarians understood well, education will be the key either way.

This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

An important new book by historian Paul Kengor sheds considerable light on Karl Marx and by implication the madness and mob violence that has descended on the country.

The throngs setting fire to police stations, looting stores and tearing down America’s cultural history are acting in the name of Black Lives Matter, a Marxist group that our ruling elites have airbrushed and turned into a totem of worship.

The current conflict is not merely a political disagreement over rectifying racial disparities; it’s a clash of religions: atheistic Marxism versus Christianity and Judaism.

At issue is whether the mobs, allied with the Democratic Party and leftist groups, can overthrow America’s Christian-inspired self-governing republic, where our rights come from our Creator, not fickle men in power.

In “The Devil and Karl Marx,” Prof. Kengor explores not only the communist icon’s religious views but how they corrupted so many others over nearly two centuries.

Marx hated God and Christianity with a white-hot passion. His prose is packed with attacks on faith, and his youthful poetry bristles with malice:

Look now, my blood-dark sword shall stab

Unerringly within thy soul.

God neither knows nor honors art.

The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain

Till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed.

See the sword—the Prince of Darkness sold it to me.

For he beats the time and gives the signs.

Ever more boldly I play the dance of death.

Citing numerous biographies and Marx’s own writings, Prof. Kengor reveals a man whose own family and friends were frightened by his demonic fits of rage and dark babblings about violence.  His own father said he was “governed by a demon.”  A key biographer, Robert Payne, described Marx as having “the devil’s view of the world and the devil‘s malignity.”

In 1849, Marx wrote,

When our turn comes, we shall make no excuses for the terror. There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.

A direct line can be drawn from Marx to Adolph Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung, all of whom despised Christianity and embraced murderous forms of socialism.

Before Marx, violent socialism was unleashed in 1789, with the guillotining of 40,000 aristocrats and others.  The French Revolution was ultimately an atheist revolt against the church and the rule of law.  The Jacobins in revolutionary France sought to wipe out history in order to create a Godless utopia. A hint of their fanatical atheism can be seen today in the beheadings in America of statues of Jesus and Mary and the torching of churches.

Communist revolutions, beginning in Russia in 1917, have taken at least 140 million lives, enslaved literally billions of people and spread unspeakable horror everywhere Marxism has taken root, Dr. Kengor notes.

When Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullours boasted in 2015 that “myself” and BLM co-founder Alicia Garza “are trained Marxists,” was she aware of the poisonous pedigree of her stated worldview?  Perhaps it didn’t matter.

BLM’s website is packed with Marxist rhetoric and flat-out lies like this: “In 2014, Mike Brown was murdered by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.”  Mr. Wilson, who was acting in self-defense, was cleared during the Obama Administration.  Never get in the way of a useful narrative.

Among other things, BLM is using the LGBTQ movement as a blunt instrument:

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure… foster a queer-affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking.

Families produce independent-minded people, which is why socialists promote sexual anarchy.  Marx and his co-author Friedrich Engels denounced families, saying the state should seize and raise children.

The rapidity with which virtually every sizable institution in America has bent its knee to BLM is stunning.  To be fair, most probably think it’s just about racial remonstrance and reforming police procedure, and even love of neighbor and equality before God.

But the call for getting on one’s knees to this movement and parroting their Marxist slogans is anything but sacred. How do Christians, in particular, justify kneeling to anything other than God Almighty and His Son Jesus Christ? A few courageous athletes have refused to go along.

For many, fear of man has triumphed over devotion to God.  Aided by a relentless media, Democrats have embraced Marxist mob rule while few Republicans other than President Trump have found the courage to call it what it is: un-American and evil.

A final word on Marx. If he had had a glimpse into the murderous misery his philosophy would unleash, would he have shelved his books and spared the world?

Hardly likely. Prof. Kengor shares a line from the heroine in one of Marx’s poems:

Thus Heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it full well. My soul, once true to God, is chosen for Hell.

This article was originally published at Townhall.com.

Written by Walter E. Williams

Democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seeking to represent New York’s 14th Congressional District, has called for the abolition of the Electoral College. Her argument came on the heels of the Senate’s confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. She was lamenting the fact that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, nominated by George W. Bush, and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, nominated by Donald Trump, were court appointments made by presidents who lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College vote.

Hillary Clinton has long been a critic of the Electoral College. Just recently, she wrote in The Atlantic, “You won’t be surprised to hear that I passionately believe it’s time to abolish the Electoral College.”

Subjecting presidential elections to the popular vote sounds eminently fair to Americans who have been miseducated by public schools and universities. Worse yet, the call to eliminate the Electoral College reflects an underlying contempt for our Constitution and its protections for personal liberty. Regarding miseducation, the founder of the Russian Communist Party, Vladimir Lenin, said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” His immediate successor, Josef Stalin, added, “Education is a weapon whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

A large part of Americans’ miseducation is the often heard claim that we are a democracy. The word “democracy” appears nowhere in the two most fundamental documents of our nation — the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. In fact, our Constitution — in Article 4, Section 4 — guarantees “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” The Founding Fathers had utter contempt for democracy. James Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 10, said that in a pure democracy, “there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual.”

At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Virginia Gov. Edmund Randolph said that “in tracing these evils to their origin, every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.” John Adams wrote: “Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide.” At the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton said: “We are now forming a republican government. Real liberty” is found not in “the extremes of democracy but in moderate governments. … If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy.”

For those too dense to understand these arguments, ask yourselves: Does the Pledge of Allegiance say “to the democracy for which it stands” or “to the republic for which it stands”? Did Julia Ward Howe make a mistake in titling her Civil War song “Battle Hymn of the Republic”? Should she have titled it “Battle Hymn of the Democracy”?

The Founders saw our nation as being composed of sovereign states that voluntarily sought to join a union under the condition that each state admitted would be coequal with every other state. The Electoral College method of choosing the president and vice president guarantees that each state, whether large or small in area or population, has some voice in selecting the nation’s leaders. Were we to choose the president and vice president under a popular vote, the outcome of presidential races would always be decided by a few highly populated states. They would be states such as California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania, which contain 134.3 million people, or 41 percent of our population. Presidential candidates could safely ignore the interests of the citizens of Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Delaware. Why? They have only 5.58 million Americans, or 1.7 percent of the U.S. population. We would no longer be a government “of the people”; instead, our government would be put in power by and accountable to the leaders and citizens of a few highly populated states.

Political satirist H.L. Mencken said, “The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.”

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

This article was originally published at  the Creators Syndicate webpage.

Jesus once stated that “the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light” (Luke 16:8). Unfortunately, this has been proven all too true in recent generations when it comes to the battle for our culture. On the whole, it seems that those who oppose Christ have been far more successful in shaping society than have the followers of God.

One area of our culture where this appears to be particularly true is the realm of education. While the church has been surprisingly complacent on the question of who will educate our children, many in the world have keenly understood the value of capturing the minds of the next generation.

Consider a few quotes from some of the greatest villains of the twentieth century:

“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.” – Adolph Hitler

“Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.” – Joseph Stalin

“Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” – Vladimir Lenin

It’s All About Ideas

Why did these men place such emphasis on education? The answer isn’t complicated. Through education, we communicate and inculcate ideas, values, and beliefs. He who is most successful in communicating his value system and worldview to the next generation wins the culture.

Stalin expressed it this way: “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas[?]”

Stalin understood that whoever controls the flow of ideas controls the direction of culture. He understood that in a fight for physical superiority, it would be foolish to hand your opponent a gun. Similarly, in an intellectual battle, the one with no ideas and convictions is sure to lose. And so whether the goal is amassing political power or reconstructing society, gaining a monopoly on the flow of ideas is a powerful move.

NO NEUTRALITY

No education is neutral because education is about ideas and ideas aren’t neutral. Despite the popular notion that our public schools are neutral, the truth is that they’re nothing of the kind. Neutrality simply isn’t possible when we’re discussing such worldview-laden topics as history, science, ethics, and morality. And if we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit that the dominant worldviews in our public schools today are far from Christian.

This isn’t a wild-eyed conspiracy theory. It’s simply a fact. Our public schools aren’t making any attempt to educate our children from a Christian perspective. So is it really surprising—after decades of a near-monopoly on the part of secular education—that our culture is becoming more secular? What would actually be surprising is if our culture somehow weren’t becoming more secular!

REAPING WHAT WE SOW

This is a fundamental truth, yet one we often overlook when it comes to education. If we sow secularism in our children’s minds, the result will be a secular culture. But this goes back to the point I made at the beginning of this article, that the church has been surprisingly complacent on the topic of education. It’s as if we believe the principle of sowing and reaping applies to everything but our children’s minds. An honest look at what’s happening around us should convince us that this is faulty thinking.

WISING UP

It’s been said that politics is downstream of culture. While this may not be universally true (and policy certainly exerts an influence on our culture), we can’t deny that our politics often respond to the direction we’re moving as a society. If that’s true, and if we want to turn the tide in our culture, we need to direct our attention upstream. I’m not saying we should ignore politics (we shouldn’t). What I am saying is that if we fight only in the political sphere and leave the shaping of the hearts and minds of the next generation to our ideological opponents, any political victories we may win will be short-lived.

Education is certainly one of those areas that’s upstream of culture, and it’s time we wised up to its power. There’s a reason God commanded the Israelites in Deuteronomy 6 to teach their children diligently in His ways. Simply put, the formation of young hearts and minds is a big job, and the worldview we teach them matters.

CHANGE A MIND, CHANGE THE WORLD

When we instruct a young mind in God’s truth, we’re literally impacting the future. When we take the formation of the next generation seriously, we not only impact our children (which is, of course, significant on its own), we also reclaim the power to change our nation.

Imagine what would happen if every Christian family in America decided that we’ve been losing the next generation for too long. Imagine what would happen if every Christian family in America said no to secular education. Imagine what would happen if every Christian family in America decided to educate their children in a manner consistent with their faith. Would it make a difference? Absolutely. Because what we teach matters.

Education really is the not-so-secret weapon of the culture wars.

IFI Worldview Conference May 5th

We have rescheduled our annual Worldview Conference featuring well-know apologist John Stonestreet for Saturday, May 5th at Medinah Baptist Church. Mr. Stonestreet is s a dynamic speaker and the award-winning author of “Making Sense of Your World” and his newest offer: “A Practical Guide to Culture.”

Join us for a wonderful opportunity to take enhance your biblical worldview and equip you to more effectively engage the culture.

Click HERE to learn more or to register!

Many years ago, I witnessed what happens when people who prevent others from speaking are not dealt with promptly.

During a “Firing Line” taping with William F. Buckley at Bard College in New York State on the topic of “Resolved: The ACLU is full of baloney” (the short answer is “yes”), two female activists stood up and started chanting “women of color have no voice.”

The moderator, a well-known liberal (well, okay, it was Michael Kinsley, who did an otherwise fine job), asked them politely to stop so the debate could continue, but the protesters refused.  At this point, he could have motioned to the campus cops to remove them, but instead let them go on ad nauseum.  I leaned over and whispered to then-ACLU President Nadine Strossen, “Nadine, do something. They’re your children.”  I meant her ideological offspring, of course.  And she did try to reason with them, to no avail.

Unlike some recent incidents, the debate finally went on after Mr. Kinsley gave in to the protesters’ tantrum, let them read a list of nonsensical leftwing ultimatums, and Bard’s president agreed to leave the team he was on in the debate.

I’m not sure how much of this made the eventual PBS broadcast, but it showed the folly of giving in to the heckler’s veto.  That’s when, in the name of free speech, someone silences someone else.  Courts have made it clear that the heckler’s veto is not protected speech under the First Amendment, no more than falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater.

Since President Trump’s election, the Left has been in full heckler’s veto mode, egged on by the same progressives who cheered the violent Occupy mobs in 2011 and 2012 and the goons disrupting the Trump rallies last year.

[Recently], protesters threated violence against Republican Party participants in the 82^nd Avenue of Roses Parade in Portland, Oregon, and managed to get the event canceled.   An anonymous email promised that “two hundred or more people” would “rush into the parade into the middle and drag and push those people out…. police cannot stop us from shutting down roads so please consider your decision wisely.”

Then, amid threats of violence, conservative author Ann Coulter was forced to cancel her speech at the University of California, Berkeley.  In February, the campus had suffered $100,000 in property damage when black-clad leftist rioters stopped iconoclast Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking.

In March, political scientist Charles Murray was forced to change venues at Middlebury College in Vermont during a mob attack in which a female professor was injured.  Middlebury itself may be failing to teach about constitutional rights, if a letter signed by 450 alumni prior to Murray’s appearance is any indication:  “This is not an issue of freedom of speech.  In this case we find the principle does not apply.”

Well, okay then. Disagree with us and you lose your rights.

In early April, hundreds of activists blocked an auditorium at Claremont McKenna College in California to prevent author Heather MacDonald from speaking.  Ms. MacDonald’s analysis of crime statistics blows away the media narrative about racist cops spun by the Black Lives Matter movement.  No wonder they wanted her silenced.

For the Left, the issues themselves matter less than a show of force.  As author Angelo M. Codevilla has observed, “The point of PC [political correctness] is not and has never been merely about any of the items that it imposes, but about the imposition itself.”

In “State and Revolution” (1918), Vladimir Lenin wrote:

“The replacement of the bourgeois (middle class) by the proletariat state is impossible without a violent revolution … it is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush its resistance.”

Even if none of this involves something you hold dear, the mobs will get around to you if you’re out of step.  A byproduct is the chilling effect it has had on discourse in general.

I recall when liberals and conservatives could agree to disagree during, say, a party, and leave as friends, or at least not as enemies.  But when’s the last time you went to an eclectic gathering and heard genuine views exchanged?  Nobody dares anymore.  The Left’s scorched-earth tactics have poisoned the well.

In Massachusetts, an editorial at The Wellesley News on April 12 openly advocated attacking anyone who fails to bow to leftwing orthodoxy.  Their definition of what will not be allowed includes “racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia or any other type of discriminatory speech.  Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech.”

The good little Maoists (who are punctuation-challenged) went on to declare, “if people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted.” Later, they denied that this meant engaging in violence.

Incidentally, Hillary Clinton’s alma mater charges about $63,300 annually for tuition, room and board.  Apparently, that buys the finest brainwashing against the bourgeoisie that a campus can conjure.

This article was originally posted at Townhall.com

Written by Dennis Prager

There was rare good news this month. On August 4, The New York Times published a front-page article headlined, “College Students Protest, Alumni’s Fondness Fades and Checks Shrink.”

According to The Times, some college alumni are awakening to the fact that their beloved alma maters are nothing like the decent, open, tolerant, committed-to-learning places they remember. Rather, nearly every college and university in America has become the least open, the least tolerant, the most hate-filled and the most anti-American (and, of course, anti-Israel) mainstream institution in America.

As stated in the article: “Alumni from a range of generations say they are baffled by today’s college culture. Among their laments: Students are too wrapped up in racial and identity politics.”

Let’s put it more starkly. Colleges are America’s preeminent racist institutions. They encourage, for example, black dorms and black graduations; and they foment minority hatred of whites (through “white privilege” indoctrination seminars, ethnic studies courses, black studies courses, etc.).

Additionally, college students “are allowed to take too many frivolous courses.”

College students graduate without taking any courses that elevate their intellect or character — which was the original purpose of universities. You can get a bachelor’s degree in English from UCLA without reading a Shakespeare play.

These students have also “repudiated the heroes and traditions of the past by judging them by today’s standards rather than in the context of their times.”

Most college graduates are taught to see the great men who founded America not only as not great but also as bad. After all, they were white, male and affluent. And some were slaveholders.

“University administrations,” The Times says, “have been too meek in addressing protesters whose messages have seemed to fly in the face of free speech.”

Meek? College administrators give new meaning to the word. With precious few exceptions, they have no principle except keeping their job.

That it took these alumni so many years to realize how destructive their beloved colleges have become is as unpleasant a surprise as The New York Times publishing this piece was a pleasant surprise.

The Times quotes Scott MacConnell, an alumnus of Amherst College:

“‘As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,’ Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token $5.”

It also quotes a Yale University graduate named Scott C. Johnston, “who graduated from Yale in 1982 (and) said he was on campus last fall when activists tried to shut down a free speech conference, ‘because apparently they missed irony class that day.'”

Yale now competes with Brown University and similar left-wing institutions in embracing students who employ fascist tactics, such as taking over deans’ offices and shouting down conservative speakers.

But this reduction in giving probably won’t matter much. Yale has an endowment of over 25 billion dollars. It can easily afford to have contempt for alumni like Johnston, for it knows that most alumni would continue to give if the university announced that it would not admit anyone who believes that God created the universe.

Wealthy fools will continue to give money to Yale and all the other left-wing seminaries still known (inaccurately) as universities. There is no group that better embodies the famous statement attributed to Vladimir Lenin: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them.”

Can you name a more moronic group than wealthy capitalists who give tens of millions of dollars to universities so they can teach students that capitalism is evil?

It is, of course, understandable why leftists give so much money to universities. But why do non-leftists?

Here are two key reasons:

First, and most importantly, it makes them feel good about themselves. Universities are the world’s secular temples. Long ago, wealthy Americans gave to their churches, whereas they now give to universities.

Second, many of the very wealthy are savants — people who are brilliant at making a lot of money, but not at much else. And there is no connection between wealth and wisdom. There are Silicon Valley and Hollywood billionaires who have less wisdom than many seniors at Christian high schools.

So, here’s my advice to wealthy individuals who love America and do not wish to undermine the Judeo-Christian and classical liberal values on which it is built:

Give to medical research. And if you give to a college, give to one that actually venerates America and the life of the mind (Hillsdale College, for example). Or give to causes that are attempting to undo the damage of the universities. Examples include the Young America’s Foundation, YAF, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, ISI, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE, and Prager University (which has had over 100 million views just this year, the largest single group of viewers being young people under 35).

But if you love America, among the worst things you can do is contribute to 95 percent of the country’s universities. America would better off if you burned that money.

This article was originally published at Townhall.com.