Doomed?

This column will either dishearten you or elate you depending upon your ideological preferences. In my opinion it's very sad because it reflects a society that has grown coarser and more intolerant than that in which many of us grew up.

It's written by Wayne Rossiter, a biologist at Waynesburg University and is titled, Why Conservatism is Doomed to Extinction. Rossiter writes:

The future sits in our classrooms. This is not a novel observation. For decades, perhaps even centuries, the academies have slowly guided public consciousness. Generation by generation, our young people have been exposed and sensitized to the “issues” at play in their society. When the academic culture is dominated by one view for a sustained period of time, that view holds sway over the future. And so it is. But why is a graduate of the class of 2017 more likely to don a Che Guevera T-shirt than a Ronald Reagan one (knowing almost nothing about either)? As recently publicized by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times,

We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives. Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.

One might ask, to what social effect? The phenomenon is well known, and can be broadly explained by the words of Yuri Bezmenov (a KGB defector),

It takes from fifteen to twenty years to demoralize a nation. . . this is the minimum number of years which requires [sic] to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words Marxist-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counter-balanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism. . . For example, your Leftists in the United States, all these professors and all these beautiful civil rights defenders, they are instrumental in the process of subversion, only to destabilize the nation.

Bezmenov was of course talking about “ideological subversion.” But is it really so different than what takes place on our campuses each day?

Rossiter goes on to describe a letter he received from a student at a large state university which he chooses not to identify. After recounting several instances of uncomfortable interaction with fellow students his correspondent says this:

There was one major conservative who spoke during my freshman year . . . [he] was invited by my liberty-minded club to speak about the dangers of political correctness in academia . . . At the lecture, dozens of students shouted out and interrupted [him] to the point where he had to stop speaking in order for them to calm down. Eventually, a few students stood up and smeared fake blood on themselves, screaming that [he] represented hatred. The room fell to chaos for a solid five minutes and, while yelling expletives and making obscene hand gestures, the protesters left a beautiful mess of red paint for the custodial staff to clean up . . . We later discovered that one of the official school ‘diversity centers’ sent out a mass email encouraging protests.

Rossiter adds:

Those not nodding their heads in shared experience with this student might doubt the prevalence of this sort of thing. Consider that our public universities don’t mind inviting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak (Columbia University), but line up to sign petitions against Condoleezza Rice (Rutgers University). One was a former provost of Stanford, but served in the Bush administration, while the other vows to annihilate Israel and claims no homosexuals even exist in his country.

While attending one of our fine universities, a student might take courses like “Stupidity 101” (Occidental) or “Politicizing Beyoncé” (Rutgers); course work sure to impress employers. While there, they can hear why post-birth abortion should be permitted up to the toddler age (Peter Singer, Princeton), why we should hope for a mass pandemic or world war and that “everyone who gets to survive needs to bury nine” (Eric Pianka, Texas Tech), or perhaps why this “should be the last generation” of humans on planet earth (Steven Pinker, formerly at Harvard).

And let’s not forget institutionalized sexual deviance. Students attending Columbia University are able to go on a university website (www.goaskalice.columbia.edu/), which encourages and even offers locations for hook-ups, group sex, torture fetishes, and how to choose your favorite sex toy. Not to be out done, UCLA sponsored an on-campus showing of Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge, a high budget porn film. All you needed to get in was a student I.D. At Northwestern, an “explicit after-class demonstration” for a Human Sexuality course offered students a live public demonstration of “a naked non-student woman being repeatedly sexually stimulated to the point of orgasm by the sex toy.

It is astonishing that, despite the mountains of debt students accrue to attend university to prepare them for a career, they nevertheless waste their time and their money on classes like these that ultimately prepare them for nothing. As Rossiter puts it:

This is the story of the student attending modern American university, and it is precisely why your child should not. We no longer teach thoughtful disagreement, intelligent and respectful debate or love, compassion and tolerance. More disconcerting is the broad malaise Americans feel about the state of our universities. The shrug of the shoulders and lack of alarm is telling.

We are now three solid generations along in this indoctrination. Just the amount of time Bezmenov believed it would take to undo American values. In my estimation, we have already sped past the last exit on this highway to collapse, and it seems clear that the extermination of conservative thought in America is imminent. Hold on to your hats, it’s about to get fun!

I agree that conservatism is facing difficult challenges. An ideology that emphasizes hard work, self-reliance, self-discipline, and moral rectitude will always be at a disadvantage to one that offers the opposite of these virtues. An ideology which urges us to put the welfare of our country ahead of the welfare of our racial, gender, age, or economic group will always be less appealing than one that panders to our sense of tribal entitlement.

The task ahead for conservatives is difficult because it requires of us that we persuade people to think with their reason rather than their emotions. Sadly, those who find such a prospect attractive will always be substantially fewer than those who find it too daunting and therefore uncongenial.