A not-insignificant number of Christians were martyred in ancient Rome because they refused to blaspheme Christ by doing something as simple and seemingly inconsequential as burning a pinch of incense in honor of the emperor. We can be tempted to think that these Christians foolishly made the wrong choice and threw their lives away for nothing. What harm could possibly come from mechanical acquiescence to such a banal ritual? And why should we worry about it, anyway; are not such barbarities relics of a bygone era? Are we not “enlightened” and “tolerant” nowadays?
Today we find ourselves confronted by an eerily similar situation. And it’s well past time to confront it with the seriousness it deserves.
Some big business is increasingly embracing the practice of sharing individual pronouns in the workplace as part of diversity initiatives to support co-workers who may be transgender, or nonbinary colleagues who identify as neither male nor female. A growing number of employees are adding their pronouns to everything from email signatures to Zoom profiles—often at their company’s urging.
* * *
Other companies also said they aren’t requiring people to share their pronouns. Even so, some professionals say that once they see others using pronouns in their email signatures and profiles, they feel social pressure to do the same.
America, this is our “pinch-of-incense” moment. We won’t be fed to lions if we refuse—at least not literally. But we very well might find ourselves out of a job, socially outcast, ostracized, vilified, and labeled a “bigot.”
Even so, you should consider carefully if “going along to get along,” “keeping a low profile,” and “not making waves” is worth your spiritual integrity. Every lie you endorse, even by omission, weakens you and stains your soul. Which is what you’re doing when you put your “preferred pronouns” in your email signature. Just as our Christian ancestors’ lives were not worth blaspheming against Christ, our sense of our own dignity should prevent us from groveling before the transgender madness, however minor those grovelings seem to be.
At least some admirably oppose the socially coercive practice of requiring everybody to list their all-too-obvious pronouns in their email signatures just so a few people won’t stand out. But they blunt their opposition in the same breath, in an attempt to be “tolerant” and “civil,” when they insist that we ought to call people by their preferred names and pronouns.
This rhetorical move is an attempt to do what chess players call “the exchange”—when one player sacrifices one of his less valuable pieces, like a knight or bishop, to capture his opponent’s rook. This in-principle acceptance of personal pronouns in email signatures as a valid choice for the willing, a “live-and-let-live” tolerance, is akin to capturing a knight. But, in truth, one who so advocates has lost his rook—a true and sound understanding of sex, gender, and their relationship.
In the attempt to be magnanimous, the real fight, over reality itself, is unwittingly surrendered.
A libertarian approach to this issue is impossible because it accepts the premises of transgender ideology, namely, that every person is, in principle, transgender.
Think about it: If we accept that a given person’s perceived sense of gender doesn’t line up with his sex, and need not necessarily align, then the fact that yours or mine does is merely an accident. According to the transgender worldview, the reason that I happen to be “cisgender” is not because that is what flows from nature and reality (even as deviations, which are regrettable, are to be amended). Rather, it’s a matter of chance that my sex aligns neatly with my perceived sense of “gender identity,” but it just as well might have been otherwise.
Putting your pronouns in your email signature, whether willingly or not, is an endorsement of a metaphysics and an anthropology, both of which are profoundly anti-human, not to mention anti-Christian. By doing so, you admit, whether you realize it or not, that nature is inherently anti-teleological—that man is not ordered to anything except his own willful self-creation (i.e., we’re ruled by blind chance at best, and biological caprice at worst).
Transgenderism is a Luciferian rejection of our nature—that we are made, limited, and contingent. Going along with its implementing rituals, like putting your “preferred pronouns” in your email signature, is a tacit endorsement of this entire worldview. It is a lie, and if you play along, you are complicit in it.
Without fail, lies great and small add up to destroy lives, communities, and nations. To refuse to play along is an act of heroism, recognized as such by the great Soviet-era Russian dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
Refuse to offer modern-day incense to the woke gods, no matter what’s offered to you in return—even if you should be promised “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” if you but “fall down and worship” them and their ways (Mk. 4:8-9).
French opinion polls are best taken with a generous bucket of sel de Guérande
but this evening’s drop of a Harris Interactive survey of intentions to
vote in the 2022 presidential election might genuinely be described as
explosive.
This
poll contains the crucial assumption that Xavier Bertrand will emerge
as the candidate of the centre-right Les Républicains, but it
nevertheless suggests that trends are moving in unpredicted directions.
Bertrand is currently only marginally ahead of Eric Zemmour, whose
insurgent campaign from the right is starting to profoundly unsettle the
conventional wisdom.
If
Zemmour, who still hasn’t officially announced his candidacy, continues
to climb and Marine Le Pen to decline, something extraordinary might
happen. Zemmour might even make it into the second round, besting
Bertrand and setting up a contest with Macron that nobody had predicted.
There are 195 days remaining until the first round of voting.
Efforts to cancel and demonise Zemmour are plainly failing. He’s sold
200,000 copies of his new book in a week, even after he was cancelled by
his traditional publisher Albin Michel.
He has been banned from appearing on his own nightly TV show by the
broadcasting regulator, which appears to have invented a new rule just
to silence him. And he’s been physically threatened. Yet he has
practically doubled his support in less than a month, from 7 per cent to
13 per cent.
Zemmour is loathed by the bien pensants
of Paris and condemned as a rabble-rousing rightist, although his
formidable intellect and powerful polemical talents are widely
acknowledged. An unashamed defender of French values against Islamic
ideology, this son of Algerian Jewish exiles has been convicted on
numerous occasions for his attacks on Islam.
He
says immigrants are responsible for up to 1,000 violent crimes a day in
France. A figure denied by Macron’s Interior Ministry.
I
hear that there are now as many as 200 ‘friends’ of Zemmour working for
his shadow campaign and this week they rented extensive office space in
central Paris. Fundraisers are active not just in France, but in
London, Brussels and Geneva.
Marine
Le Pen, who had been presumed the inevitable opponent of president
Emmanuel Macron, is in free fall. During June she was polling as high as
28 per cent. Her support has collapsed to 16 per cent – awful news for
Macron as she was always his preferred opponent. Zemmour is eating her
campaign alive.
Macron,
who has yet to declare officially that he’s a candidate for
re-election, although he’s campaigning the length and breadth of France
dispensing public funds like confetti, is stuck at 23 per cent – an
uncomfortable score should he have to face a more competent opponent
than Le Pen in the second round of voting.
Some
of the more excitable French commentators wonder whether the President
might fail to get to round two. I think this is probably overblown.
Anne
Hidalgo, presumed candidate of the socialist party, is stuck on 7 per
cent, well behind Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the hard-left France Insoumise.
The left is already demanding that she step aside, claiming Mélenchon
could even get to the second round with help from the socialists and
greens. Let me predict that this scenario is wildly improbable.
Where does that leave Macron? His opposition seems atomised. The polls,
especially those based on hypotheses, are of only limited value.
Abstentionism remains arguably the biggest party in France, which makes
all forecasts treacherous. The friends of Zemmour suspect however they
can mobilise hitherto ‘low-propensity voters’. If that’s true, Macron
could find himself with a real challenge from the right.
“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
—George Orwell, Animal Farm
What were we to make of multimillionaire Barack Obama’s 60th birthday bash at his Martha’s Vineyard estate, and the throng of the woke wealthy and their masked helot attendants?
Was socialist Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) suffering for the people when she wore a designer dress to the more than $30,000 a ticket Met gala? Her entourage needs were certainly well attended to by masked Morlock servants.
Did the leftist celebrities at the recent Emmy awards gather to discuss opening Malibu beaches to the homeless when the (unmasked) stars virtue-signaled their wokeness?
For answers about these hypocritical wokeists, always turn first to George Orwell. In his brief allegorical novella, Animal Farm, an array of animal characters—led by the thinking pigs of the farm—staged a revolution, driving out their human overseers.
The antihuman animal comrades started out sounding like zealous Russian Bolsheviks (“four legs good, two legs bad”). But soon they ended up conned by a murderous cult of pigs under a Joseph Stalin-like leader. And so, the revolution became what it once had opposed (“four legs good, two legs better”).
Our own woke, year-zero revolution is now in its second year. Yet last year’s four-legged piggish revolutionaries are already strutting on two legs. They are not just hobnobbing with the “white supremacists” and “capitalists,” but outdoing them in their revolutionary zeal for the rarified privileges of the material good life.
The Marxist co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, is now on her fourth woke home. She has moved on from the barricades to the security fences of her Topanga Canyon digs in a mostly all-white, all-rich rural paradise—the rewards for revolutionary service.
Professor Ibram X. Kendi has evolved from the edgy revolutionary work of flying all over the country, hawking his Orwellian message of “All racism bad! But some racism good!” Now he has mastered the art of zooming the wannabe woke for his $20,000 an hour avant garde hectoring.
What of Colin Kaepernick, the mediocre second-string quarterback turned sudden firebrand? He refused to stand for the National Anthem and spread his “take a knee” kitsch throughout professional sports.
Kaepernick became a boutique revolutionary multimillionaire. For $12 million a year, he pitches Nike sneakers, often made in Chinese forced-labor camps.
Woke NBA star LeBron James, from his $23 million Brentwood mansion, blasts America for its endless unfairness—in service to his totalitarian Chinese paymasters who will ensure his good life with an eventual lifetime $1 billion payout for hawking their goods.
Our other elite wokeists navigating around the revolution are even more cynical. The corporate and Wall Street capitalists feel that a little virtue signaling, showy diversity coordinators, and woke advertising will more or less buy off the latest version of Al-Sharpton-like shake-down artists.
Then there are the trimmers and enablers. These are the wealthy, rich, and professional classes. They feel—in the abstract—absolutely terrible about inequality, but hardly enough in the concrete to mix with the unwashed.
For them, wokeism is like party membership in the late ethically bankrupt Soviet Union. It is necessary for peace of mind and good income, but otherwise not an obstacle for the continuance of the privileged, comfortable life.
The more TV news hosts rant about “systemic” this and “supremacy” that, and the more college presidents write stern penance memos to their faculty about “that’s not who we are,” and all the more they feel not just good about themselves, but relieved of any real obligation to live and socialize with the Other.
As for the self-declared non-white Other, wokeism is also a top-down revolution of celebrities, intellectuals, actors, activists, academics, grifters, lawyers, and the upper-middle-class and rich. And they are not calling for a Marshall Plan to bring classical education to the inner city. They themselves have little desire to move into the hood or spread their wealth. They rarely mentor others on their shrewd capitalist expertise that made themselves rich.
They are far more cynical than that. The regrettable violence of the street, the 120 days of 2020 looting, death, and arson are the levers of the woke professionals. They fight with the various tribes of the same class and mindset over the slices of the same coveted elite pies. But they bring to the scrap the unspoken cudgel that without greater non-white de facto quotas in comic books, TV commercials, Ivy-League faculties and students, symphonies, and sit-coms, then “systemic racism” could once again ignite downtown Portland or Seattle or Baltimore.
Orwell would say of the woke Obamas, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Bernie Sanders, LeBron James, or Ibram Kendi—and their supposedly unwoke, but similarly rich and privileged enemies, “It was impossible to say which was which.”
In the game of Capture the Flag, the winner is decided when the opposing side’s flag is taken. Joe Biden is not the flag.
We are living in remarkable times. The Biden regime has fostered a series of calamities that none of us could have foreseen this time even a couple of years ago. We have witnessed election fraud on an unprecedented scale, a catastrophe in Afghanistan, rising inflation, an uncontrolled border, illegitimate political appointees failing the American people, a corrupted DOJ, FBI, disruptions in critical supply chains, a flagging economy, massive censorship of truth- telling voices, growing social and political divisions, and an unrelenting fabricated pandemic bordering on the ridiculous in its duration and mismanagement. We have seen Biden’s reversal on just about every promise he made prior to the election, ignoring the needs of our citizens to bolster the needs of non-citizens. Now we have forced vaccine mandates running completely counter to science.
By any measure, Biden is an abysmal failure to the American people, and we are witnessing an unmitigated disaster, not just in the United States, but across the world. And as the fate of America goes, so goes the fate of the whole world. This is why over-reaching authoritarian policies such as those experienced in Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere are mere precursors for taking down the biggest prize: America … the capstone necessary to openly establish the globalists’ New World Order.
Fortunately, and unfortunately, more of us are slowly coming to the realization that all these problems are based on intentional and deliberate design, leaving us shaking our heads in disbelief because the realization defies rational and ethical human reasoning. However, considering the Left’s goals to achieve control, power, and literal world domination, their deliberately derived problems have clear purpose.
It is common now to openly speak of Biden as an inept puppet. Increasingly so, we know who the puppeteers are: the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the CCP, Soros, Gates, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and a myriad of other globalists and corporatists. These individuals and groups are pulling the Biden, Clinton, Obama, and Bush strings, as well as those of the medical establishment and Federal and state governments. Yet, they remain free to operate with impunity and collude with little fear of repercussion. They are insulated by people in leadership positions within world governments, woke corporations, the media, academia, legal systems, law enforcement, NGOs, Big Pharma and Big Tech. And we know what they are up to and how they are using their great wealth to invoke a “Great Reset,” seize control of governments across the world, manipulate the markets, and systematically dispose of opposition groups via crackdowns, lockdowns, vaccination programs, all with the intent of gaining control over societies and their populations. Although the globalists are pulling the strings, they are not pulling all the strings, at least, not yet.
Unlike the usual hue and cry from the Left about made-up crises such as climate change or the latest woke-du-jour issue, we need to recognize that the day’s crisis at hand is never the real crisis. The ambitions and ruthlessness of these global elitists represents THE true crisis and real existential threat, not just to the US, but to the world. Stated differently, the fate of our country and the indeed the entire planet rests on the success or failure of these elitists and their plans impacting humanity.
To draw a parallel comparison to the seriousness of the dilemma in which we find ourselves today, recall the mid-point of WWII when the outcome was not assured. The world was still at risk of Hitler’s fascist war machine and Imperial Japan’s conquests throughout Asia. The fate of the world was at stake then, and there was no question that the US and western democracies would do literally anything to defeat the enemy, including fire-bombing German cities, attempting to take out Hitler himself, and dropping the first two nuclear bombs in human history to bring the war to an end.
Now the fate of the world is at stake again. However, we are not in a conventional shooting war; rather, we are engulfed in an unconventional, non-shooting, 5th Generation information, biological, economic, cyber war where any means short of nuclear strikes and kinetic confrontation are being employed.
Despite the recent embarrassment in Afghanistan, our adversaries have learned that it does not pay to engage the US in an all-out kinetic war because it will not end well for their team. In contrast, today’s form of warfare is harder to recognize, confront, and contend with.
Tremendous energy has been exerted by many to point out all the crazy and outrageous things being done by the Left, raising awareness for more and more people. Yet, here we are, allowing the threat to continue, essentially unabated, a threat that has the potential to have even more menacing and with more destructive lasting results than we would have experienced if we had lost WWII. Why? Because too many are still oblivious, do not know what to do, are willing to fall in line, and lack a uniting force to tap the power of the majority. It is astonishing that, since we openly acknowledge that Biden is a puppet being controlled by several tiers of puppeteers, given the stakes, we are allowing the global elitist cabal to continue to operate, let alone exist.
Conservatives rightly insist on following the Constitution and Federal and State laws, but conservatives are dealing with an enemy that is not playing by the same rules. In fact, the enemy is playing outside those rules and is making up the rules! Playing by the rules is a process-oriented strategy that conservatives tend to hold dear and believe they are compelled to play, hoping arguments and indictments will hold up in the courts because the conservative paradigm is that we live in a law-abiding nation. However, given the infiltration of our justice system, court outcomes are no longer assured to align with the Constitution or conservative principles. Also, a process-driven approach takes time, something we no longer have as a luxury.
The global elites comprising the cabal, in cooperation with the CCP, only succeed for three reasons: because of their wealth to fund their agenda, by corrupting officials and stealing elections to install their puppets, and freedom to operate. Without their wealth, patented election fraud, and freedom of movement, they would hold no sway and become powerless to purchase buy-in from the world’s decision-makers, nor be able to buy-off their witting and unwitting servants to push their despicable agenda, propaganda, and intentions.
It seems that we are capable of freezing the assets of entire nations, subverting leaders and regimes of governments we do not want and taking out key figures and public enemies such as Soleimani, bin Laden, Hussein and numerous others throughout history. Yet we cannot, do not, will not muster the will or fortitude to seize the elitists assets, or take down those that are inflicting the most heinous crimes against humanity since WWII.
The US is still, for now, the most potent nation on earth economically, technically, and militarily, but only if we choose to employ those great strengths to our advantage.
So, as we face a real existential threat and with the fate of the world and humanity hanging in the balance, if you want to win at capture the flag, you need to actually capture the flag. As we did in WWII, we did anything to capture the flag. As in WWII, all options were on the table. All options need to be on the table now. Those funding and giving orders to the world’s puppet government and corporatist leaders are the flag. We know who these people are and now the world is sufficiently awakened to understand what is happening. Why do these people have any freedom of movement or access to their agenda-enabling wealth?
Here are some recommendations.
First, seize or freeze their treasure. Stop the bleeding.
Second, withhold debt and interest payments to any nation, entity, organization, or person cooperating with the global cabal.
Third, fix 2020. Short of violence, free and fair elections are the only way for citizens to peaceably express their will. If votes no longer matter, violence will ensue.
Fourth, shutdown every BSL4 laboratory worldwide, safely destroy the numerous stockpiles of recombinant viruses, and after taking down the cabal, outlaw all international biological warfare and gain-of-function R&D.
Fifth, flood the US and world courts with more class-action lawsuits than the globalists can possibly defend against. Enable any American injured or harmed by the pandemic, the lockdowns, or unconstitutional executive orders to participate as a party to the suits, thus putting the globalists on defense and wiping out their remaining wealth.
It is high time to put real fear in the global cabalists’ hearts for a change, as they have done to billions of innocents around the globe. We can no longer afford to sit around complaining, criticizing, talking and talking and talking about what is going wrong. We are living with and are expected to accept crimes perpetrated out in the open, accept the creation of arbitrary executive orders that hurt American citizens and their interests, accept the breakdown of law and order, accept the deaths and lasting injuries from vaccines-gone-awry to our unsuspecting, and accept policy decisions from unelected officials tantamount to and with weight as if law passed by legislatures.
Americans need immediate, daring, and unconventional action. The majority is faced off against a very small minority that is creating havoc and mayhem that the world’s people should not have to and can no longer endure. In simple cost versus benefit terms, strong decisive action to take down the source of our global problems, aka the global elite cabal, and despite the predictable backlash from the bought-offs and any financial ripple effects, we can certainly bear and weather the short-term costs to achieve the long-term benefits for billions of the world’s inhabitants.
Biden says his patience is wearing thin, but in truth, America’s and the world’s patience is wearing thin.
Let’s get ‘em in 2022 and 2024 is not a plan that will overcome fraudulent elections and the tyrannies and subversions suffered under the global elites. As 2020 election forensic audits proceed at a snail’s pace, changes to upcoming elections will not be implemented with enough rapidity to ensure the election integrity at the state and national levels.
In the meantime, the globalist puppeteers will continue to plan, give orders, implement, and operate freely as conservatives continue to rely on legal and legislative processes to play out; processes that have been corrupted and wrought with stonewalling and obstruction by the Left. A dubious and lengthy strategy at best.
Conservatives cannot maneuver fast enough to keep up with the Deep State by playing by the rules. The “trust the plan” mantra is beginning to ring hollow. If there is a plan to thwart the Deep State and the cabal, execute the plan. If not….
The publication of God and Man at Yalein 1951 announced an enduring theme of modern American conservatism. In his bestselling book, William F. Buckley, Jr. condemned universities for their failure to preserve traditions of learning in favor of godless preening. The villains of Buckley’s polemic were a callow faculty freeloading off the institutional capital the university had accrued over the centuries. Countless articles and books have made much the same argument ever since. Indeed, conservatism in America itself owed something to the universities and their leftward turn in the decades following World War II.
The social significance of universities changed during the same period, too. Rather than serving as a preserve of the elite, higher education became a middle-class entitlement. Increasing enrollment and growing government funding for large-scale research shifted the balance of power away from the university’s traditional mission with its old-fashioned scholars to a new class of administrators, who pursued institutional efficiency and satisfaction of a wide range of stakeholders.
This distaste for universities in American conservatism has deeper roots, however. Americans have always been puzzled by how to square academic hierarchy inherent in “higher” education with the democratic promise of equality. While intellectual conservatives often defended an elitist conception of the academy, the broader conservative movement was characterized by populist opposition to academic snobbery and suspicion of useless knowledge. These positions sometimes overlap in their opponents, but rarely in their goals. It does not help that so few conservatives, if any, are in the academic hierarchy. As progressives have pushed out conservatives in higher education, they have also undermined broad support for academic institutions. Since they do not have stakes in universities, conservatives have nothing to stop them from embracing populist, anti-intellectual leaders and policies.
The WASP University
Institutions like Harvard and Yale were the domain of the old WASP elite, and their curriculum reflected the traditional education of a gentleman of that class—Latin, Greek, literature, mathematics, religion, and the like. To that end, WASPs preserved their preeminence by accepting legacies and graduates of WASP feeder schools like Choate and Andover. To preserve the WASP cultural position, the schools admitted few outsiders into their ranks, having strict caps on the number of Jews, Catholics, and other minorities in college admissions.
All this changed following World War II. There are three reasons. First, the tenets of post-war liberalism prohibited the kind of rank discrimination of these schools; therefore, the students, faculty, alumni, and administrations simply lacked the motivation to preserve the old discriminatory admissions standards. The liberal idealism of John Dewey and the faith in enlightened public administration placed more faith in competency over one’s family history or traditional faith.
Second, the general expectations for higher education had changed. Gone with the days of producing educated, respectable gentlemen. Instead of the liberal arts, technical and vocational education was emphasized.
Third, the post-war university was a research university dedicated to scientific specialization. Such a transformation, in fact, had preceded World War II, but two major pieces of federal legislation expedited the process: the passage of the Higher Education Act and the G.I. Bill. Post-war veterans were highly subsidized, and that meant that the Ivy League enjoyed a larger, more talented pool from which to choose. As John R. Thelin says in A History of American Higher Education,
The shape of American higher education was simultaneously altered in two contrasting ways. On one front, its base was extended so as to move significantly closer to providing mass access to higher education. On another front, the tip of the pyramid was pushed upward as American colleges and universities showed increasing capacity to add advanced, academically selective programs…
Because of these changes, WASPs could no longer insist on the old way of doing things. That class proved unable to survive the postwar era. To sustain the preeminence of Harvard and Yale, they reconciled themselves to test-based admissions and a secularized curriculum and social life.
The academic upheavals of the 1960s were a struggle not between insiders and outsiders but between rival elites already coexisting within the same institutions. The WASPs lost—or more accurately, they surrendered. The meritocrats took over and redefined “elite” from merely the old New England families to student future earning potential, university selectivity, and faculty productivity.
Finally, the student radicals of the 1960s and 1970s demanded stripping out the old core curriculum in the Classics and Western civilization in favor identity-based disciplines like Women’s Studies. While this new curriculum seemed like a break from the traditional one, the radicals were, in fact, continuing a break that began with elite universities abandoning their missions to train WASPs for their natural place atop of American leadership.
The Conservative Counterattack
Conservatives have not taken these changes lying down. They deployed two strategies to regain a foothold in elite higher education. The first was a counterattack against weak-kneed liberals and so-called “tenured radicals”—former leftist students who had joined the faculty and upper administration. In addition to Buckley’s book, conservative scholars called for the defense of the Western tradition, such as in F. A. Hayek’s “Intellectuals and Socialism” and Wilhelm Röpke’s The Humane Economy.
Already evident in the 1970s, this strategy became most prominent in the “Canon Wars” of the 1980s and 1990s. The Canon Wars featured conservatives defending old courses on Western Civilization against their removal or reinvention. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, Christopher Lasch’s Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, and other such books provoked multiple elite conservative arguments in defense of a traditional, shared canon for students in higher education.
To train conscripts for this front, conservative institutions were mobilized, such as the National Association of Scholars (NAS), the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS), the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), the Earhart Foundation, Liberty Fund, and the Acton Institute. These furnished undergraduates, graduate students, and early career faculty with the support they needed to make their way into the academy. This led to a concentration on disputes about course requirements, reading assignments, and other pedagogical concerns.
The Marketplace Solution
The second approach was less intellectualized. Rather than trying to replace bad ideas with good ones, it proposed to treat higher education “like a business.” Advocates of this model hoped to expose ossified, feudal-era institutions to the rigors of the marketplace. They argued that new technologies and institutions promised competition that would undermine the old monopoly of “brick and mortar” schools. In these new schools, students could secure the skills and credentials they really needed, while avoiding excessive debt and the ideological brainwashing of universities.
The merits of each strategy can be debated on its own. Their coexistence within conservative higher education agenda, however, raises a different problem—they contradict each other.
The explosion of “contingent” faculty makes the first conservative strategy fruitless. This counterattack approach has educated scholars for fields that are in a steep decline, such
The attempt to turn the table on tenured radicals is premised on the elite character of higher education. It aims to identify the best students, shepherd them through undergraduate and graduate studies, and then support them as they return to take their rightful place on faculty. That requires years of support for the sort of expensive, painstaking research of dubious utility that has always aroused populist suspicions. Paying graduate students and young professors to study Milton, say, makes perfect sense for the aristocratic variety of European conservatism. But it is somewhat in tension with the more democratic American version that seeks swift and tangible effects.
The demand for immediate results is the source of the intuitive appeal of the business model. The trouble here is that market logic does little to improve universities unless improvement takes the form of abandoning their traditional mission of liberal arts education. In practice, the business approach often rejected the very liberal arts that elite conservatives hoped to cultivate in higher education.
Advocates of the business model were also wrong to think that markets would encourage pragmatic conservatism. The logic of market pricing is that customers get what they want. And what they want, these days, is woke. Critics of the campus left often fail to understand that cancelling controversial speakers, censoring course materials, and offering boutique courses in social justice reflect the preferences of the students and families who pay the enormous bills in expectation to receive a “college experience” that reflects their cultural and political preferences.
Endangered Species
Given these conditions, conservatives need to drop the business model critique of higher education. The focus should be on the new opponents to liberal arts education, people who are not on the faculty. Some of these are found in administration, particularly the “student affairs” offices that increasingly influence campus life. Accreditation bodies and consulting firms are even more serious opponents, since they authorize and encourage the spurious reforms administrators impose on colleges and universities.
In truth, “tenured radicals” are an endangered species. That’s not because academics have become less radical, but because there are few tenure positions now available. The majority of teachers at all but the most elite institutions is composed of adjuncts and graduate students. According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), seventy percent of current faculty are “contingent,” meaning either graduate student or contracted faculty for individual courses. The result is, as the AAUP concludes, that “the insecure relationship between faculty members in contingent positions and their institutions can chill the climate for academic freedom, which is essential to the common good of a free society.” As one adjunct professor, MJ Sharp, said in a 2019 article for the Washington Post, “it keeps you nice and disposable.”
The explosion of “contingent” faculty makes the first conservative strategy fruitless. This counterattack approach has educated scholars for fields that are in a steep decline, such as political theory, even as the scholars have grown in number and remain as capable as ever. As fewer have become regular faculty, they have relied ever more on the array of well-supported conservative post-doctoral positions.
These positions are vital for preserving the traditional, scholarly work proper to university faculty; however, as vital as these post-docs have become, they have unintended consequences. First, the tighter job market is now even more competitive with post-docs, many of whom are well published. While there is little chance they can find a permanent position straight out of their graduate programs, the post-doc no longer looks like a reliable steppingstone into the professorate. Rather, it has become one more mountain to climb before these scholars can find a permanent position.
The addition of a postdoctoral stage to the standard academic trajectory might look insignificant, but young scholars have already spent years in graduate school and are in their prime years for starting families. Also, many young scholars drop out of the profession due to traveling all over the country for short-term and relatively poorly paid positions. These dropouts are a major loss of investment for the graduate and supporting programs that formed them. More important, post-docs have no lasting influence on the institutions that host them. They are vagabond scholars with no faculty voting power over curriculum and often subsidize the work of existing, usually left-wing, faculty. While post-docs offer great benefits to individual scholars, they do nothing to advance the counterattack.
A Third Option
I recommend a third option: conservatives should abandon reform and build new colleges. Blueprints to build entirely new institutions do exist. Conservatives should focus on this endeavor rather than supporting the hiring of the lonely conservative at one institution.
Last year, AEI scholars Frederick Hess and Brendan Bell published a proposal for an “ivory tower of our own.” They argue scholars of a politically conservative or intellectually traditional bent should simply opt out of the American college ecosystem. Instead, conservatives should build a comprehensive alternative which would replicate many of the features of existing institutions, but without the social and political entanglements that have made them so inhospitable.
One obstacle to this plan is cost. Hess and Bell calculated that the price tag for building a world-class conservative institution would be around $3 billion. That’s a lot of money. In our plutocratic age, though, it is not inconceivable that some mogul of finance or tech might be willing to devote his fortune to the academic enterprise. Such a commitment would be impressive but not unprecedented. Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and the University of Chicago were founded in the late 19th century with the support of business tycoons. For example, as Thelin shows, John D. Rockefeller gave the founding gift of $12 million “in cooperation with the American Baptist Education society to create an eminent Baptist institution in the Midwest,” that later became the University of Chicago.
Another challenge, which Hess and Bell do not discuss, is accreditation. One reason for the degradation of the American academy is accreditors’ imposition of burdensome, opaque, and “woke” criteria on the university. The university accepting these criteria would be expensive and possibly inconsistent with its mission, but rejecting accreditation would limit the university’s ability to compete for students and faculty.
With sufficient financial resources, accreditation might be a manageable difficulty. But there are also cheaper options. Building on arguments by historian Warren Treadgold, Jacob Howland argues that it should be possible to purchase and repurpose an existing campus at considerably lower cost than starting from scratch. For as little as $500 million, he calculates, one of the many small liberal arts colleges facing closure could be turned to a new purpose.
This strategy is less ambitious and more realistic than founding a challenger to Harvard or Berkeley. Establishing conservative research universities with science and engineering schools is an important goal, but the foundation of the university is the liberal arts curriculum. Moreover, as the late Peter A. Lawler liked to point out, the liberal arts and humanities are cheap, meaning that financing conservative higher education in these fields will require comparatively little fundraising.
A possible objection is that there are already several such institutions, mostly mission-driven religious liberal arts schools, including Yeshiva University, Ave Maria University, and Grove City College. Perhaps the most well-known is Hillsdale College. The very success of Hillsdale suggests that there is still unmet demand. Short of founding a new university or college, conservative philanthropy should support these institutions to the point where they can achieve financial independence from government interference.
At minimum, political conservatives and religious traditionalists should stop cutting checks for universities that directly repudiate what they stand for and instead send the money to universities that foster faith traditions and common commitment to forming people ready for republican citizenship. Moreover, these conservatives should send their children to these institutions rather than squeezing them through the vicious and ideological route of traditional elites. The Ivy League does not need a monopoly on prestige. Already Yeshiva, Ave Maria, and Grove City have produced students who have made their way onto Capitol Hill and the White House. With conservatives supporting conservative institutions, we will not only weather the coming storm but form students in the faith and the liberal arts tradition so badly needed today. Strategies of counterattack and corporate-style management have failed. But there are new opportunities for conservative higher education.
Today marks an new holiday for Canada called Truth & Reconciliation Day. As Canadians we are to use the day to listen to the stories of our First Nation's and reflect on our colloquial wrongdoings.
If you are an immigrant to Canada, as my family was, you too must accept the blame as you are "on territorial land" that is not yours. I say this because this was just said at the ceremony I am watching on CBC from Ottawa this morning in hopes to learn something new. So far, I enjoyed some beautiful throat singing but everything else as been information that I was already aware of.
The most interesting part was watching JustinE Trudeau speaking yesterday as he did not want to be present for today. His reasoning? I want to listen and learn. He gave a very dramatic calling to listen amid his tears and paused gasps to keep his emotions in check. Heck, he was a drama teacher so it was Oscar worthy. I will give him that. He ended his speech by saying "their stories and pain are our stories".
I also learned this morning that we will now be paying via tax dollars $15B in compensation for all FN children that were taken from their family. I understand this and am not disagreeing with but I its another amount of money that we continue to pay for and it makes me question a few things.
Once you turn 18, with status, you are given a treat annity payment. To date, the government has given over $200B and our healthcare system has given free services for them that has now grown to a bill to the tax payer $40B. All status FN can attend any post secondary institution for FREE. Trudeau now wants to give FN communites an extra $18B for covid relief and our FN was given vaccinations first before the rest of Canada. The Catholic Church, while they mismanaged the monies has given over $20M in compensation and in labour from paperwork to building actual buildings for the FN community.
Here's my question to everyone. There is NO disagreement to how the FN people have been treated but how much more money should be given? I know NO amount is ever right but at some point there has to be a cap. Yes? No?
Should peoples who immigrated to Canada be told, from our Nation's Capital, they are basically thieves who are living stolen land? Is this fair or right?
Given the billions upon billions these communities have been given, why are there folks up north in reserves with no clean drinking water in 2021? Who should pay for that? Who's fault is this?
For the americans......Your country has discussed the idea of reparations. Given the amount Canada has given, can you see your country doing the same? Would you agree to such amounts?
Neil Oliver gives a well considered perspective of how millions of people within each nation’s population are prone to being psychologically manipulated by fear. As a consequence, there is a general outlook of anxiety amid those ordinary people who are not internally strong, psychologically independent, or carrying a strong stable mind.
Good discussion. Many good points made about how multinational corporations and Big Tech are merged ideologically with government to create one big mess of anxious and panicked people.
